The mob of poor desperate creatures turned aside from the road; the waggons, greatly to the damage of the horses, plunged along over the fields where there was no sign of a track. Nobody sang any more now, whether songs or hymns, but a pious soul here and there sighed in secret as she looked behind her, first into the formidable distance, and then up into the familiar sky. "Thou, O Almighty," they whispered, "Thou who in Thy heaven hath marvellously revealed to us the lying-in-wait of our evil foes, defend us, Thy poor weak servants, from our evil pursuers, who have none to trust in save Thee alone, O God of heaven!"
And, indeed, the Lord was to work yet other marvels that day.
As the flying women were still looking timorously behind them, the sportive phenomena suddenly disappeared from earth and sky; on the break-up of the Fata Morgana the horizon became sharply visible again, and the birch forests of Hadház loomed forth faintly blue in the distance. Clouds with sharply defined silver linings arose in the sky from that direction as if the tempest were puffing gigantic frothy bubbles before it; gradually the horizon grew darker and darker, dark-blue clouds came crowding up one on the top of another; it was as though a deep voice in the distance were roaring: "Fly, fly!"
And the waggons went jingling and clattering along towards the confines of Szörmeny.
Badrul Beg had now been lying in ambush in the forest of Hadház for two days. He had performed everything which Kuczuk Pasha had commanded him in his own way. Every one from whom he had inquired the way he had cut down immediately after he had done him that service, so that he should not betray him. Every one of his band was forced to remain on the spot where he stood, nobody was allowed to quit the forest, and every inhabitant of the environs who happened to stray thither accidentally died before he could betray what he had seen. They were all shot down by arrows, arrows which utter no sound, and never brag of their heroic deeds as the big-mouthed guns do.
Nobody should betray them, nobody should carry tidings concerning them to the women and girls of Debreczen. And God?—Ah! He sees these women thus hastening to destruction, He looks at them through the mirror of the Fata Morgana, and hides from them the crafty snare laid for them in the very nick of time. Blessed be the name of the Lord!
On the evening of the third day the sentinels stationed on the border of the forest informed Badrul Beg that far off in the puszta a long line of dust could be seen, as if hundreds and hundreds of waggons were coming along one after another.
"It is they!"
Badrul Beg mounted to the top of a hillock, that he might see for himself—perchance he was the enormous giant whose misty form had first appeared in the sky, with the quiver on his shoulder and the peaked turban on his head.