A yellow-haired young woman, not more than twenty, emerged from a house close by where I stood, and ran past me to the barricade. As she passed I saw that she carried something in her hand. It looked like a small cylinder of metal.
Shouting to a man who was firing through a loophole near the top of the barricade, she handed it up to him. Taking it carefully, he scrambled up higher, waited for a few moments, and then raising himself, he hurled it far into the air, into the midst of an advancing troop of Cossacks.
There was a red flash, a terrific explosion which shook the whole town, wrecking the houses in the immediate vicinity, and blowing to atoms dozens of the Czar’s soldiers.
A wild shout of victory went up from the revolutionists when they saw the havoc caused by the awful bomb. The yellow-haired girl returned again, and brought another, which, after some ten minutes or so, was similarly hurled against the troops, with equally disastrous effect.
The roadway was strewn with the bodies of those Cossacks which General Kinski, the governor of the town, had telegraphed for, and whom Krasiloff had ordered to give no quarter to the revolutionists. In Western Russia the name of Krasiloff was synonymous with all that was cruel and brutal. It was he who ordered the flogging of the five young women at Minsk, those poor unfortunate creatures who were knouted by Cossacks, who laid their backs bare to the bone. As everyone in Russia knows, two of them, both members of good families, died within a few hours, and yet no reprimand did he receive from Petersburg. By the Czar, and at the Ministry of the Interior, he was known to be a hard man, and for that reason certain towns where the revolutionary spirit was strongest had been given into his hands.
At Kiev he had executed without trial dozens of men and women arrested for revolutionary acts. A common grave was dug in the prison-yard, and the victims, four at a time, were led forward to the edge of the pit and shot, each batch being compelled to witness the execution of the four prisoners preceding them. With a refinement of cruelty that was only equalled by the Inquisition, he had wrung confessions from women and afterwards had them shot and buried. At Petersburg they knew these things, but he had actually been commended for his loyalty to the Czar!
And now that he had been hurriedly moved to Ostrog the people knew that his order to the Cossacks was to massacre the people, and more especially the Jewish portion of the population, without mercy.
Where was Bindo? I wondered.
“Krasiloff is here!” said a man whose face was smeared with blood, as he stood by me. “He intends that we shall all die, but we will fight for it. The Revolution has only just commenced. Soon the peasants will rise, and we will sweep the country clean of the vermin the Czar has placed upon us. To-day Kinski, the Governor, has been fired at twice, but unsuccessfully. He wants a bomb, and he shall have it,” he added meaningly. “Olga—the girl yonder with the yellow hair—has one for him!” and he laughed grimly.
I recognised my own deadly peril. I stood revolver in hand, though I had not fired a shot, for I was no revolutionist. I was only awaiting the inevitable breaking down of the barricade—and the awful catastrophe that must befall the town when those Cossacks, drunk with the lust for blood, swept into the streets.