"Halt! look around! stand in amaze, thou who mak'st war
With arrows, bows, powder, and ball, with the sharp-cutting sword!
For knights, too, and horsemen, before thee were many,
Who fought with such weapons and fell by the sword.
Halt! look around! stand in amaze, forget thou thy pride!
Thou who from Potok to Slavuta farest, turn then this way.
Innocent men thou tak'st by the ears and stripp'st them of will;
Thou heedest no king, thou knowest no Diet, art thy own single law;
Hei! be amazed, grow not enraged! thou in thy power,
With thy baton alone, as thou lustest, thou turnest the whole Polish land."
The "grandfather" stopped again, and at that time a pebble slipped from under the arm of one of the Cossacks, which had been resting on it, and began to roll down, rattling as it fell. A number of peasants shaded their eyes with their hands, and looked up quickly into the tree; then Skshetuski saw that the time had come, and fired his pistol into the middle of the crowd.
"Kill! slash!" cried he. Thirty Cossacks fired as it were straight into the faces of the crowd, and after the firing slipped like lightning down the steep walls of the ravine, among the terrified and confused peasants.
"Kill! slay!" was thundered at one end of the ravine.
"Kill! slay!" was repeated by furious voices at the other end.
"Yeremi! Yeremi!"
The attack was so unexpected, the terror so great, that the peasants, though armed, offered no resistance. It had been related in the camp of the rebellious mob that Yeremi, by the aid of the evil spirit, was able to be present and to fight at the same time in a number of places. This time, his name falling upon men who expected nothing and felt safe--really like the name of an evil spirit--snatched the weapons from their hands. Besides, the pikes and scythes could not be used in the narrow place; so that, driven like a flock of sheep to the opposite wall of the ravine, hewn down with sabres through the foreheads and faces, beaten, cut up, trampled under foot, in the madness of fear they stretched out their hands, and seizing the merciless steel, perished. The still forest was filled with the ominous uproar of the fight. Some tried to escape over the steep wall of the ravine, and wounding their hands with climbing, fell back on the sabre's edge. Some died calmly, others cried for mercy; some covered their faces with their hands, not wishing to see the moment of death; others threw themselves on the ground, face downward; but above the whistling of sabres, the groans of the dying, rose the shout of the assailants, "Yeremi! Yeremi!"--a shout which made the hair stand erect on the heads of the peasants, and death seem more terrible.
The minstrel gave a blow on the forehead to one of the Cossacks, and knocked him down; seized another by the hand, to stop the blow of the sabre, and bellowed from fear like a buffalo. Others, seeing him, ran up to cut him to pieces; but Skshetuski interfered.
"Take him alive!" shouted he.
"Stop!" roared the minstrel. "I am a noble. Loquor latine! I am no minstrel. Stop, I tell you! Robbers, bullock-drivers, sons of--"