"Be quiet, will you?"

"Let that woman go!" I commanded in the best Russian I could.

In an instant, with a glare in his fiery eyes, for the blood-lust was
within him, he turned upon me and sneeringly asked who I was to give him
orders, while the poor girl reeled, half stunned by his blow.

"Let her go I say!" I shouted, advancing quickly towards him.

But in a moment he had drawn his big army revolver, and, ere I became
aware of his dastardly intention, he raised it to a few inches from her
face.

Quick as thought I raised my own weapon, which I had held behind me,
and, being accredited a fairly good shot, I fired in an endeavour to
save the poor girl.

Fortunately my bullet struck, for he stepped back, his revolver dropped
from his fingers upon the stones, and, stumbling forward, he fell dead
at her feet without a word. My shot had, I saw, hit him in the temple,
and death had probably been instantaneous.

With a cry of joy at her sudden release, the girl rushed across to me,
and raising my left hand to her lips, kissed it, at the same time
thanking me.

Then, for the first time, I recognised how uncommonly pretty she was.
Not more than eighteen, she was slim and petite, with a narrow waist and
graceful figure--quite unlike in refinement and in dress the other
women I had seen in Ostrog. Her dark hair had come unbound in her
desperate struggle with the Cossack and hung about her shoulders, her
bodice was torn and revealed a bare white neck, and her chest heaved and
fell as in breathless, disjointed sentences she thanked me again and
again.

There was not a second to lose, however. She was, I recognised, a
Jewess, and Krasiloff's orders were not to spare them.

From the main street beyond rose the shouts and screams, the firing and
wild triumphant yells as the terrible massacre progressed.

"Come with me!" she cried breathlessly. "Along here. I know of a place
of safety!"

And she led the way, running swiftly for about two hundred yards, and
then, turning into a narrow, dirty courtyard, passed through an evil,
forbidding-looking house, where all was silent as the grave.

With a key she quickly opened the door of a poor, ill-furnished room,
which she closed behind her, but did not lock. Then, opening a door on
the opposite side, which had been papered over so as to escape
observation, I saw there was a flight of damp stone stairs leading down
to a cellar or some subterranean regions beneath the house.