Then they caught hold of her clothes and called upon her as if she alone could seal their fate.
“Is there no one,” she asked, “who knows the psalm: ‘When I am borne through the Vale of Death’? Sing it, sing it!”
Some of the women struck up the psalm with choked and nearly whispering voices, but the others rushed down to the river, hunted out boats and wreckage from the bridges, and rowed themselves across. Each and every one who had a husband or a beloved in the army had hoped even at the last she would be taken along and hidden; but all the worst women of the rabble, who belonged neither to this man nor to that, stood with their rags or their tasteless, ridiculous gowns in a ring around Lina Andersdotter. Meanwhile swarms of Cossacks, who had crossed the river to snap up any straggling marauders, were sneaking up through the bushes on their hands and knees.
Then her heart failed her and she stepped down from the wagon.
“Poor children!” she said, and patted the hussies on the cheek. “Poor children, I will not desert you. But now,—devil take me!—do you pray to God that he will make your blood-red sins white, for I have nothing else to offer you than to shame the men and die a hero’s death.”
She opened the wagon-chest and hunted out from among her plunder some pikes and Polish sabres, which she put into the hands of the softly-singing women. Thereupon she herself grasped a musket without powder or shot and set herself among the others around the cart to wait. So they stood in the sunset light on the highest part of the shore.
Then the women on the river saw the Cossacks rush forward to the cart and cut down one after another of them with the idea that they were men in disguise. They wanted to turn their boats, and soldiers sprang down from their ranks to the water and opened fire.
“Hurrah for King Charles,” they cried with a thousand intermingled voices; “and hurrah—No, it’s too late. Look, look! There is Queen Caroline who in the midst of the harlots is dying a virgin with a musket in her hand!”
CAPTURED
FAR out in the wastes of Småland and Finnved wondrous prodigies appeared in the air and after that work lost all worth and the morrow all hope. People either went hungry or ate and drank with riot and revel amid half-stifled curses. At every farm sat a mother or a widow in mourning. During the day’s occupation she talked of the fallen or the captives, and at night she started from her sleep and thought she was still hearing the thunder of the hideous wagons on which teamsters in black oil-cloth cloaks carried away those who had died of the plague.