"Sit down, fool," Sylvia commanded. "What good will your protesting do?"
But as she spoke she gave a shuddering shriek and held her hands up to her eyes: they had thrown a writhing, mutilated shape into the fire.
"The brutes! The filthy brutes!" Michael shouted, and, jumping upon the seat of the compartment, he kicked at the window-panes until there was not a fragment of glass left. "Shout, Sylvia, shout! Oh, hell! I can't remember a word of their bloody language. We must stop them. Stop, I tell you. Stop!"
One of the prisoners had broken away from his tormentors and was running along the permanent way, but the blood from a gash in the forehead blinded him and he fell on his face just outside the compartment. Two comitadjis banged out his brains on the railway line; with clasp-knives they hacked the head from the corpse and merrily tossed it in at the window, where it fell on the floor between Sylvia and Michael.
"My God!" Michael muttered. "It's better to be killed ourselves than to stay here and endure this."
He began to scramble out of the window, and she, seeing that he was nearly mad with horror at his powerlessness, followed him in the hope of deflecting any rash action. Strangely enough, nobody interfered with their antics, and they had run nearly the whole length of the train, in order to find the officers in charge, before a tall man descending from one of the carriages barred their progress.
"Why, it's you!" Sylvia laughed, hysterically. "It's my rose-grower! Michael, do you hear? My rose-grower."
It really was Rakoff, decked out with barbaric trappings of silver and bristling with weapons, but his manners had not changed with his profession, and as soon as he recognized her he bowed politely and asked if he could be of any help.
"Can't you stop this massacre?" she begged. "Keep quiet, Michael; it's no good talking about the Red Cross."
"It was the fault of the Serbians," Rakoff explained. "They insulted my men. But what are you doing here?"