Other ears had heard the shout of the sentinel; for now a man, who in a boat had been fishing near the fortress, suddenly shipped a pair of sculls, and pulled away towards the town with an air of alarm that seemed equalled only by his dexterity. This fisher had been hovering about the fortress all day. "Can he be the gipsy—the half-breed?" thought Charlie: "ah! the dispatch is out of my hands now."
Lieutenant Tschekin now approached with an invitation from Bernikoff to join him at dinner, adding, "remember that with the Colonel, eating is indeed a science, and temperance he views as mere want of spirit."
As they proceeded together through various archways and gates, the shrieks and entreaties of a man apparently in mortal agony rang through the echoing prisons with a horrible cadence, that chilled the free blood in Balgonie's veins.
A court through which they had to pass was crowded by soldiers, formed in hollow square, and Balgonie was compelled to linger and look on with Tschekin, who seemed rather to enjoy the spectacle.
"Hah," said he, "the punishment is nearly ended—let us wait and see the batogg!"
It was a soldier being knouted, which is simply the Russian word for "whipped."
Stripped to the loins, he was strapped to an erect board, formed like an inverted cone, and having three notches at the upper end, one to receive his chin, and the other two his wrists, while the torturer wielded a knout, the handle of which is usually eighteen inches long with a thong of thirty-six inches. This is always boiled in milk, by which process it swells and the edges become sharp, hard, and more destructive.
The whipper was skilful: he laid on his lashes from the neck to the loins, so as to deal them at intervals of one inch artistically apart, leaving a stripe of flesh between each; but these regulated and omitted stripes, after receiving a fresh knout, he proceeded to take off in succession, with wonderful and terrible precision, till the man's entire back was a mass of blood, and he hung, fainting and well-nigh speechless, by the wrists.
"Oh, Excellency," he said, in an imploring voice, "remember that my brother, Alexis Jagouski, aided you in escaping from the battle of Zorndorff!"
This was most true, but the story was a terrible one. At Zorndorff, where the Russians were defeated with such slaughter and driven towards the frontiers of Poland, the horse of Bernikoff was shot under him, and he was in danger of being cut down by the Prussian Hussars. In this sore extremity a Cossack named Alexis Jagouski took his leader behind him on his crupper; but that personage, finding that the double weight impeded the horse's speed, and that the Hussars were close behind, shortened his sabre in his hand, and plunging the blade into the body of his preserver, flung the corpse from the saddle, and escaped alone.