"Help, help!" called Stephania into the telephone. "They have fired the thatch. For Heaven's sake, send me help. But a few minutes and the rafters, I fear, will catch fire. Are you still there, Shavli? Oh, speak—speak!"
An exclamation, mingled sorrow and anger, came from the telephonist at Shavli.
"Oh, the ruffians, the abominable assassins!" he cried. "I beseech you to have courage. Help is surely on the way."
"I will try to be brave and do my duty to the end, as Michael told me," replied Stephania, as though to herself. "But unless they come soon, it will be too late. The thatch has burnt like tinder. I can hear the flames roaring like a furnace underneath the rafters. There! One of them has given way and fallen on to the joists of my room. Already the heat is suffocating, the smoke almost unbearable. Holy Virgin! What a death."
"Alas, what more can we do than beg you to bear up?" returned the voice at Shavli, in an agonized tone. "We have just been informed that a party of Cossacks left twenty minutes ago to rescue you. Once more, courage! And may Our Lady of Vilna indeed protect you."
When Stephania Ychas next spoke through the telephone the roof fell in with a crash and pierced a hole, through which the burning embers fell, in the ceiling of her room. At the same time communication with Shavli was suddenly interrupted, either through the Uhlans having discovered and cut the wire, or, as is more probable, owing to the fire having fused the terminals. She could not, however, have sustained her appeals for help much longer. Indeed, it was not many minutes afterwards that, stupefied and blinded by the smoke, as she groped her way to the door in an instinctive movement towards the open air, she sank to the floor unconscious.
It is a characteristic of the Cossacks, many times admitted even by German military critics, and those who have been describing the operations in Lithuania for the enemy Press, that they rarely if ever waste a shot. Unlike the French cavalry, they do not fire from a distance, but fearlessly swoop down upon their adversaries and seek to bring them down, one by one, at a range of but a few yards. And that was the fate of the Uhlans, who, hungering to feast their eyes and ears on the suffering of a defenceless woman, lingered a little too long around the burning cottage of Stephania Ychas. Not one escaped.
Stephania Ychas did not lose her life after all. The brave Cossacks broke in the already half-consumed window and dragged her forth. She was badly burnt, but lived to tell this tale to a nurse in a Russian hospital, whither the railway officials of Shavli transported her, almost immediately after her rescue, in one of their motor-cars.