"Help! help!" he shrieked. His clothes were torn, and he looked white as death.
"What is it?" repeated Taras, seizing him by the arm.
"Help!" groaned the poor fellow. "They have just killed my brother Dimitri!"
"Where? Who?"
"The mandatar ... on the parish field!" said Wassilj; continuing brokenly: "We had gone there early this morning, my brother and I, together with the two sons of Dubko, to work on the field as you told us. We had taken our guns with us, intending to have a shot in the afternoon. We had just put the oxen to the ploughs when the mandatar arrived with a number of men, all armed. 'Get ye gone,' he cried; 'you are trespassing on the Count's property.'"
"'Begone yourselves!' returned my brother Dimitri, seizing hold of his gun, which he had laid down, we doing likewise. 'This field has been parish ground time out of mind; I shall shoot any one that says the contrary.'
"The mandatar at this fell back, but urged on his men from behind, and they attacked us with guns and scythes. We sent our bullets amongst them, and the foremost of the party, Red Hritzko, turned a somersault and lay still on his face. One of us had hit him. But they also fired their guns, and my brother fell, shot through the heart!... They were too many for us, and they turned upon as with their butt ends. But we got away!..."
The poor youth told his tale amid gasps and sobs, and before he had finished a crowd of villagers had gathered. From their houses, from their fields round about, the men came running, gathering about their judge. Most were fully armed, and all were wildly excited; for the parish field is sacred ground with every Slavonic community; he who dares touch it is not merely an offender against their property, but against their very affections; it is all but sacrilege in the eyes of these men.
Taras also felt his soul upheave, but he conquered his wrath, knowing the people. "If I lose self-possession," he said to himself, "blood will flow in streams to-day!" So he faced the men, who were for pressing on to the scene of the outrage. "Stop!" he cried, "we shall go in a body! Call the elders and the rest of the men."
The command was scarcely needed, for they were coming, every man of them, and the wives and the children. Wrathful cries filled the air, the women wailed, and children shrieked with an unknown fear. The mother of the young man who had been shot, a widow named Xenia, came rushing along; she had torn the kerchief from her head, and her grey hair fell in tangled masses round her grief-filled face. "Avenge my child!" she implored the judge, clasping his knees.