rode:

"Stars in your courses,
This is our answer;
Women and horses,
Singer and dancer
Fall to the lancer!
That is your answer!

"Though the Dark Raider
Rob us of joy----
Death, the Invader,
Come to destroy----
_Nichevo! Stoi!_"

They rode into a forest, slowly, filing among the silver birches, then
trotting out amid the pines.

The Swedish girl towered in her saddle, dwarfing the shaggy pony. She
wore her grey wool cap, overcoat, and boots. Pistols bulged in the
saddle holsters; sacks of grain and a bag of camp tins lay across
pommel and cantle.

Beside her rode the novice, swathed to the eyes in a sheepskin
greatcoat, and a fur cap sheltering her shorn head.

Her lethargy--a week's reaction from the horrors of the convent--had
vanished; and a feverish, restless alertness had taken its place.

Nothing of the still, white novice was visible now in her brilliant
eyes and flushed cheeks.

Her tragic silence had given place to an unnatural loquacity; her
grief to easily aroused mirth; and the dark sorrow in her haunted eyes
was gone, and they grew brown and sunny and vivacious.

She talked freely with her comrade, Ilse Westgard; she exchanged
gossip and banter with the Cossacks, argued with them, laughed with
them, sang with them.

At night she slept in her sheepskin in Ilse Westgard's vigorous arms;
morning, noon and evening she filled the samovar with snow beside
Cossack fires, or in the rare cantonments afforded in wretched
villages, where whiskered and filthy mujiks cringed to the Cossacks,
whispering to one another: "There is no end to death; there is no end
to the fighting and the dying, God bless us all. There is no end."

In the glare of great fires in muddy streets she stood, swathed in her
greatcoat, her cap pushed back, looking like some beautiful, impudent
boy, while the Cossacks sang "Lada oy Lada!"--and let their slanting
eyes wander sideways toward her, till her frank laughter set the
singers grinning and the _gusli_ was laid aside.

And once, after a swift gallop to cross a railroad and an exchange of
shots with the Red guards at long range, the sotnia of the Wild
Division rode at evening into a little hamlet of one short, miserable
street, and shouted fo