They rode into a forest, slowly, filing among the silver birches, then trotting out amid the pines.
The Swedish girl towered in her saddle, dwarfing the shaggy pony. She wore her grey wool cap, overcoat, and boots. Pistols bulged in the saddle holsters; sacks of grain and a bag of camp tins lay across pommel and cantle.
Beside her rode the novice, swathed to the eyes in a sheepskin greatcoat, and a fur cap sheltering her shorn head.
Her lethargy––a week’s reaction from the horrors of the convent––had vanished; and a feverish, restless alertness had taken its place.
Nothing of the still, white novice was visible now in her brilliant eyes and flushed cheeks.
Her tragic silence had given place to an unnatural loquacity; her grief to easily aroused mirth; and the dark sorrow in her haunted eyes was gone, and they grew brown and sunny and vivacious.
She talked freely with her comrade, Ilse Westgard; she exchanged gossip and banter with the Cossacks, argued with them, laughed with them, sang with them.
At night she slept in her sheepskin in Ilse Westgard’s vigorous arms; morning, noon and evening she filled the samovar with snow beside Cossack fires, or in the rare cantonments afforded in wretched villages, where whiskered and filthy mujiks cringed to the Cossacks, whispering to one another: “There is no end xxxv to death; there is no end to the fighting and the dying, God bless us all. There is no end.”
In the glare of great fires in muddy streets she stood, swathed in her greatcoat, her cap pushed back, looking like some beautiful, impudent boy, while the Cossacks sang “Lada oy Lada!”––and let their slanting eyes wander sideways toward her, till her frank laughter set the singers grinning and the gusli was laid aside.