arricade the women were helping the men, loading their rifles for them,
shouting and encouraging them to fight gallantly for freedom. And
suddenly I caught sight of Hartmann's evil face. He was calmly talking
to a man who was no doubt also in the German employ. The rising was
their work!

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 every one 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 woman 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 co