“From Babinich! Prisoners! A whole band! He seized a crowd of men!”
Indeed the hetman saw a number of tens of men on poor, ragged horses. Babinich’s Tartars drove nearly three hundred men with bound hands, beating them with bullock-skin whips. The prisoners presented a terrible sight. They were rather shadows than men. With torn clothing, half naked, so poor that the bones were pushing through their skin, bloody, they marched half alive, indifferent to all things, even to the whistle of the whips which cut them, and to the wild shouts of the Tartars.
“What kind of men are they?” asked the hetman.
“Boguslav’s troops!” answered one of Kmita’s volunteers who had brought the prisoners together with the Tartars.
“But where did you get so many?”
“Nearly half as many more fell on the road, from exhaustion.”
With this an old Tartar, a sergeant in the horde, approached, and beating with the forehead, gave a letter from Kmita to Sapyeha.
The hetman, without delay, broke the seal and began to read aloud:—
“Serene great mighty hetman! If I have sent neither news nor informants with news hitherto, it is because I went in front, and not in the rear of Prince Boguslav’s army, and I wished to learn the most possible.”
The hetman stopped reading.