Shandarovski sprang to his aid, and commanded: “Let him alone! He took it before my eyes; let him give it to Charnyetski himself.”
“Charnyetski is coming!” cried a number of voices.
In fact, from a distance trumpets were heard; and on the road from the side of the field appeared a whole squadron, galloping to the priest’s house. It was the Lauda squadron; and at the head of it rode Charnyetski himself. When the men had ridden up, seeing that all was over, they halted; and Shandarovski’s soldiers began to hurry toward them.
Shandarovski himself hastened with a report to the castellan; but he was so exhausted that at first he could not catch breath, for he trembled as in a fever, and the voice broke in his throat every moment.
“The king himself was here: I don’t know—whether he has escaped!”
“He has, he has!” answered those who had seen the pursuit.
“The standard is taken! There are many killed!”
Charnyetski, without saying a word, hurried to the scene of the struggle, where a cruel and woful sight presented itself. More than two hundred bodies of Swedes and Poles were lying like a pavement, one at the side of the other, and often one above the other. Sometimes one held another by the hair; some had died biting or tearing one another with their nails; and some again were closed as in a brotherly embrace, or they lay one with his head on the breast of his enemy. Many faces were so trampled that there remained nothing human in them; those not crushed by hoofs had their eyes open full of terror, the fierceness of battle, and rage. Blood spattered on the softened earth under the feet of Charnyetski’s horse, which were soon red above the fetlocks; the odor of blood and the sweat of horses irritated the nostrils and stopped breath in the breast.
The castellan looked on those corpses of men as the agriculturist looks on bound sheaves of wheat which are to fill out his stacks. Satisfaction was reflected on his face. He rode around the priest’s house in silence, looked at the bodies lying on the other side, beyond the garden; then returned slowly to the chief scene.
“I see genuine work here, and I am satisfied with you, gentlemen.”