“Kindle fires on the ramparts! We will not hide ourselves; let them see us, we are ready! Kindle fires!”
Straightway they brought wood, and a quarter of an hour later the whole camp was flaming, till the heavens grew red as if from daybreak. The soldiers, turning away from the light, looked into the darkness in the direction of Bobrovniki. Some of them cried that they heard a clatter and the stamp of horses.
Just then in the darkness musket-shots were heard from afar. Zagloba pulled Pan Yan by the skirts.
“They are beginning to fire!” said he, disquieted.
“Salutes!” answered Pan Yan.
After the shots shouts of joy were heard. There was no reason for further doubt; a moment later a number of riders rushed in on foaming horses, crying,—
“Pan Sapyeha! the voevoda of Vityebsk!”
Barely had the soldiers heard this, when they rushed forth from the walls, like an overflowed river, and ran forward, roaring so that any one hearing their voices from afar might think them cries from a town in which victors were putting all to the sword.
Zagloba, wearing all the insignia of his office, with a baton in his hand and a heron’s feather in his cap, rode out under his horse-tail standard, at the head of the colonels, to the front of the fortifications.
After a while the voevoda of Vityebsk at the head of his officers, and with Volodyovski at his side, rode into the lighted circle. He was a man already in respectable years, of medium weight, with a face not beautiful, but wise and kindly. His mustaches, cut evenly over his upper lip, were iron-gray, as was also a small beard, which made him resemble a foreigner, though he dressed in Polish fashion. Though famous for many military exploits he looked more like a civilian than a soldier; those who knew him more intimately said that in the countenance of the voevoda Minerva was greater than Mars. But, besides Minerva and Mars, there was in that face a gem rarer in those times; that is honesty, which flowing forth from his soul was reflected in his eyes as the light of the sun is in water. At the first glance people recognized that he was a just and honorable man.