Like a picture it stands before him.
The sputtering fire about which the half-frozen Jews are huddled together—women, children, grizzled old men. Here and there a sentinel to guard them. He, too, one of the guards.
IV—IN HIS BREAST HIS OWN BULLET
Like shadows they crouch about the fire, rub the freezing hands of the children between their own, weep, groan, pray softly. One has prayer boxes bound on his brow and on his arms and nods and bows unceasingly, so that his shadow dances like a curious grotesque against the light of the fire. The Cossacks laugh. He, too, has laughed, carelessly, unconcerned.
Laughed until he has suddenly noticed the woman at the side of the bearded Jew—with the slumbering child at her breast. Something in that sight appealed to him strangely. But then they had summoned him before the sotnik. And he had thought of it no more.
How sharply that whole picture stands before him now—and among the other details especially these three: The man in prayer, the shivering mother bent toward the fire, her head cloth like a veil drawn deep over the unconscious, slumbering child.
"Bethlehem," he murmurs reverently, and crosses himself.
And he is going to take part to-day in this infamy—he, a Christian!
Then it must be true what they believe back home. That the Pravoslavine is Anti-Christ. And he fights with him—for him—is part of his army. Have they then altered the text of the Holy Books? So that some day God's word of love will no longer be found in it—the Holy Word spoken by Him who lay in the womb of a daughter of the House of David?