This was all very well, but we knew no more than the dead how far from Bobr we then stood; nor did the young Jew who guided us. Indeed, it dawned upon me after a time that he himself was lost, and knew the way no better than we. This was a terrible reflection, and led me to the bitterest reproaches upon them both. I swore that they should be shot if they had played us false; to which the woman answered bravely enough, while the man whined an excuse which led me to doubt him more than ever. The road must be across the wide ravine which we were then entering, he declared. There was a bridle path through the thicket, and that would lead us out to the high road to Bobr. So much he said, and so little did the facts justify him.
We had now come to a wide pit, deep in snow and everywhere surrounded by the forest. Even the path by which we entered it was difficult to trace once we had been caught in the trap. And so we went, round and round, the horses often up to their girths and Isidore to his neck in the half-melted slush. Half an hour of it found the brutes exhausted and we at the end of our tether. The night had been lost, and, perhaps, the army with it. Never have I known a greater chagrin than overtook me at such an hour. To have been entrusted with so great a thing and to have failed! Good God! what a reckoning when next we came before His Majesty!
All this was black in the mind when the day began to dawn and a wan glimmer of chilly light to break above the white foreground of the frozen trees.
The young Jew, who had been weeping bitterly, recovered his composure when the day broke, and, seeming to recollect himself, he declared that a shrine in the wood was the landmark, and that if we could but detect it the road also would be regained. Perhaps he would have proved a false prophet after all, but for the distant blare of a bugle, and upon it the echo of rifle-shots far away down the valley. This immediately indicated to us that we looked towards the south, and another ten minutes had not passed when madame clapped her hands and declared that she espied the shrine in a clearing of the trees.
Rarely can a mistake have been redeemed with such tragic irony as upon this fatal morning. We had lost the way and had found it—alas, too late!
It was a safe passage thereafter, and one of which I remember little. The forest became less dense from league to league, and ultimately showed us the great white plains we knew so well. Even from afar the black bodies of our dead were to be discerned. We knew that this was the road to Bobr, and, as our guides declared, that we stood barely a league from the hamlet itself.
Of the Jews we had now no further need, and paying them the money we had promised, we set spurs to our jaded horses and rode on at a gallop. The last I saw of Isidore and the woman showed them quarrelling over the money at the wood's edge; and this was just what one would have expected them to be doing. We had almost forgotten their existence when, some half an hour later, we set eyes upon the whitened spires and low walls of the picturesque town of Bobr. The Emperor was there, and to him we must give an account of our stewardship.
God knows it was with no fair prospect that we entered the place at the moment when the army was waking to hear the fatal news.
VII
I say it was with no fair prospect, and yet there is an after-word. Hardly were we in the main street of the place when we heard the clatter of horses' hoofs ahead of us, and presently we perceived a young hussar coming down the street at a canter.