Fortunately my bullet struck, for he stepped back, his revolver dropped from his fingers upon the stones, and, stumbling forward, he fell dead at her feet without a word. My shot had, I saw, hit him in the temple, and death had probably been instantaneous.
With a cry of joy at her sudden release, the girl rushed across to me, and raising my left hand to her lips, kissed it, at the same time thanking me.
Then, for the first time, I recognised how uncommonly pretty she was. Not more than eighteen, she was slim and petite, with a narrow waist and graceful figure—quite unlike in refinement and in dress the other women I had seen in Ostrog. Her dark hair had come unbound in her desperate struggle with the Cossack and hung about her shoulders, her bodice was torn and revealed a bare white neck, and her chest heaved and fell as in breathless, disjointed sentences she thanked me again and again.
There was not a second to lose, however. She was, I recognised, a Jewess, and Krasiloff's orders were not to spare them.
From the main street beyond rose the shouts and screams, the firing and wild triumphant yells as the terrible massacre progressed.
"Come with me!" she cried breathlessly. "Along here. I know of a place of safety!"
And she led the way, running swiftly for about two hundred yards, and then, turning into a narrow, dirty courtyard, passed through an evil, forbidding-looking house, where all was silent as the grave.
With a key she quickly opened the door of a poor, ill-furnished room, which she closed behind her, but did not lock. Then, opening a door on the opposite side, which had been papered over so as to escape observation, I saw there was a flight of damp stone stairs leading down to a cellar or some subterranean regions beneath the house.
"Down here!" she said, taking a candle, lighting it, and handing it to me. "Go—I will follow."
I descended cautiously into the cold, dank place, discovering it to be a kind of unlighted cellar hewn out of the rock. A table, a chair, a lamp, and some provisions showed that preparation had been made for concealment there, but ere I had entirely explored the place my pretty fellow-fugitive rejoined me.