The beggar took the orders, ambled out of the inn quietly just as he had come in, and proceeded in like fashion until he was well along the street which skirts the market on the west. Then suddenly stepping behind a house buttress he tore the bandage from his face and ran with all speed for the gate on the Mogilev Road in order to get through unchallenged before the night watch came on duty. He passed through, sauntered down the road until he came to a small peasant cottage with a stable in the rear; here he found the horse which he had ridden to Krakow, and with a single word to the owner of the house, who seemed to understand his movements fully, galloped off to the distant bridge where ran the Tarnov Road.
The man at the inn continued to ruminate. “That stoop-shouldered misbegotten thing that calls himself Stas came to us like an angel from heaven. Often had I noticed him in here talking and making free with all the beggars, and even at first look of him, I thought to myself that here was such a man as might serve a purpose for me sometime. So I have the landlord bring him a friendly glass, and talking as he drinks it, he drops a word about the new trumpeter who never goes forth in the daytime!
“That is the boy as sure as man can be sure, despite his new trappings of velvet; and then the fact that there are three of them, and the date of their arrival. To-night when the trumpeter leaves by the door, Stas will hold the lantern to his face, and I hiding near by will see—but there is scarce need of that, it is as well as proved. My men will be here in a week or two, and it will be but short work after that.”
His face was working pale in his excitement—it was all white save the button mark which stood out on it like a clot of blood.
“What would the honorable Pan Andrew have said that day,” he chuckled, “had he known that Bogdan Grozny was before him? For he, and every man in the Ukraine, knows Peter of the Button Face. That was a good name I gave him—Ostrovski! Ostrovski of the proud family at Chelm that once called me slave.”
Peter of the Button Face was indeed a name feared everywhere in the Ukraine. It had been bestowed upon this man whose real name was Bogdan, chiefly by the Poles, for among the Cossacks he was known as Grozny or Terrible. A savage outcast, born of a Tartar mother and Cossack father, he had been involved in every dark plot on the border in the last ten years. Houses he had burned by the score and men and women he had put to death cruelly. Under his command was a band of ruffians who would rise up suddenly in the Ukraine, overnight almost, and set out upon any adventure of fire and sword that he suggested.
He was not despised by great folk either—Polish or Muscovite—when there was unlawful work to be done; nobles often employed him for unscrupulous tasks that they dared not perform themselves; the Great Khan of the Tartars even had dispatched him on a mission among the Golden Horde; his name was a power on both sides of the boundary, for in Poland also he had confederates who served him.
And at the present time the great country of the Ukraine which had come to Poland through the marriage of Jagiello of Lithuania with Jadviga of Poland about one hundred years previous—this huge land was full of plots and counterplots in the struggle for mastery between Muscovy and Poland. Ivan of Moscow had already begun to turn envious eyes upon this territory which had been the heart of the old Byzantine Russia with Kiev as its capital, and was making plans to wrest it from Poland at the first opportunity. And in such fashion many a dweller such as Pan Andrew Charnetski found himself bereft of property and fields in a single night. For there were many such as Bogdan the Terrible, or as the Poles knew him, Peter of the Button Face, who were ready at a minute’s notice to engage in some such fearful task with rewards of plunder and captives for their work.
However, little realizing what savage forces had been let loose against them, the family of Pan Andrew sat down to a quiet supper.