by strangers and posterity. It was long
before they lay down to sleep; and longer still before old Taras,
meditating what it might signify that Andrii was not among the foe,
lay down. Had the Judas been ashamed to come forth against his own
countrymen? or had the Jew been deceiving him, and had he simply gone
into the city against his will? But then he recollected that there were
no bounds to a woman's influence upon Andrii's heart; he felt ashamed,
and swore a mighty oath to himself against the fair Pole who had
bewitched his son. And he would have kept his oath. He would not have
looked at her beauty; he would have dragged her forth by her thick and
splendid hair; he would have trailed her after him over all the plain,
among all the Cossacks. Her beautiful shoulders and bosom, white as
fresh-fallen snow upon the mountain-tops, would have been crushed to
earth and covered with blood and dust. Her lovely body would have been
torn to pieces. But Taras, who did not foresee what God prepares for
man on the morrow, began to grow drowsy, and finally fell asleep. The
Cossacks still talked among themselves; and the sober sentinel stood all
night long beside the fire without blinking and keeping a good look out
on all sides.

CHAPTER VIII

The sun had not ascended midway in the heavens when all the army
assembled in a group. News had come from the Setch that during the
Cossacks' absence the Tatars had plundered it completely, unearthed the
treasures which were kept concealed in the ground, killed or carried
into captivity all who had remained behind, and straightway set out,
with all the flocks and droves of horses they had collected, for
Perekop. One Cossack only, Maksin Galodukha, had broken loose from the
Tatars' hands, stabbed the Mirza, seized his bag of sequins, and on
a Tatar horse, in Tatar garments, had fled from his pursuers for
two nights and a day and a half, ridden his horse to death, obtained
another, killed that one too, and arrived at the Zaporozhian camp upon
a third, having learned upon the road that the Zaporozhtzi were before
Dubno. He could only manage to tell them that this misfortune had taken
place; but as to how it happened--whether the remaining Zaporozhtzi had
been carousing after Cossack fashion, and had been carried drunk into
captivity, and how the Tatars were aware of the spot where the treasures
of the army were concealed--he was too exhausted to say. Extremely
fatigued, his body swollen,