ide-de-camp
kept moving for fear of being frost-bitten. Silence soon prevailed,
scarcely broken by the groans of the wounded in the barn, or the stifled
sounds made by M. de Sucy's horse crunching on the frozen bark with
famished eagerness. Philip thrust his sabre into the sheath, caught at
the bridle of the precious animal that he had managed to keep for so
long, and drew her away from the miserable fodder that she was bolting
with apparent relish.

"Come along, Bichette! come along! It lies with you now, my beauty, to
save Stephanie's life. There, wait a little longer, and they will let us
lie down and die, no doubt;" and Philip, wrapped in a pelisse, to which
doubtless he owed his life and energies, began to run, stamping his feet
on the frozen snow to keep them warm. He was scarce five hundred paces
away before he saw a great fire blazing on the spot where he had left
his carriage that morning with an old soldier to guard it. A dreadful
misgiving seized upon him. Many a man under the influence of a powerful
feeling during the Retreat summoned up energy for his friend's sake when
he would not have exerted himself to save his own life; so it was with
Philip. He soon neared a hollow, where he had left a carriage sheltered
from the cannonade, a carriage that held a young woman, his playmate in
childhood, dearer to him than any one else on earth.

Some thirty stragglers were sitting round a tremendous blaze, which
they kept up with logs of wood, planks wrenched from the floors of the
caissons, and wheels, and panels from carriage bodies. These had been,
doubtless, among the last to join the sea of fires, huts, and human
faces that filled the great furrow in the land between Studzianka and
the fatal river, a restless living sea of almost imperceptibly moving
figures, that sent up a smothered hum of sound blended with frightful
shrieks. It seemed that hunger and despair had driven these forlorn
creatures to take forcible possession of the carriage, for the old
General and his young wife, whom they had found warmly wrapped in
pelisses and traveling cloaks, were now crouching on the earth beside
the fire, and one of the carriage doors was broken.

As soon as the group of stragglers round the fire heard the footfall
of the Major's horse, a frenzied yell of hunger went up from them. "A
horse!" they cried. "A horse!"

All the voices went up as one voice.

"Back! back! Look out!" shouted two or three of them, leveling their