elped us, praying all the time to every saint in the
calendar, you may imagine! But still their numbers were increasing; and
as a pause came in the fearful din, we plainly heard through the still
air the boom of our own great bell, ringing for the midnight mass. At
that sound, Father Cassimer's countenance fell for the first time. He
knew the bellman was a poor half-witted fellow, who would not be
sensible of his absence; and then he turned to have another shot at the
wolves.

Shots were by this time getting scarce among us. There was not a man
that had a charge left but old Wenzel, who had supplied us as long as he
could; but at length, loading his own gun with his last charge, he laid
it quietly in the corner, saying one didn't know what use might be for
it, and he never liked an empty gun.

Wenzel was the son of a small innkeeper at Grodno, but after his
father's decease, which occurred when he was a child, his mother had
married a Russian trader, who, when she died, carried the boy to Moscow.
There Wenzel bade fair to be brought up a Russian; but when a stepmother
came home, which took place while he was still a youth, he had returned
to his native country, built himself a hut in the woods of Lithuania,
and lived a lonely hunter till the time of my story, when he was still a
robust, though gray-haired man. Some said his Muscovite parents had not
been to his liking; some that he had found cause to shoot a master to
whom they apprenticed him at Moscow; but be that as it might, Wenzel
hated the Russians with all his heart, and never scrupled to say that
the gun which had served him so long would serve the country too if it
ever came to a rising. So much for Wenzel's story, by way of explaining
what followed; but as I stood beside him that night at the hut's single
crevice of a window, I could have given Poland itself for ammunition
enough to do service on the wolves. They had now left nothing but the
bones of our horses, which they dragged round and round the cottage,
with a din of howlings that almost drowned our voices within. Then they
seized on the bodies of their own slain companions, which were devoured
to the very skins; and still the gathering was going on. We could see
them coming in troops through the open glades of the forest, as if aware
that some human prey was in reserve. The hut was strongly built of great
pine-logs, but it was fearful to bear them tearing at the door and
scratching up the foundations.