76 BY ORDER OF THE CZAR.
sterner stuff than the other, and it had the additional pro- tection of an iron bar.
" Don't be a fool, Andrea," Ferrari said to himself, almost hissing the words, as if he were addressing some second person. " Don't be a fool ; would you let them catch you and skin you alive? Don't be a fool, I tell you ! "
His hand sought his hip pocket and then withdrew.
" No, not yet," he said ; " you will empty your pistol at the last stand."
The door was thick, but he thought, between the blows upon it, he could hear the ruffians dragging away the Grunstein bales ; he saw them indeed as much as heard them, in his imagination, gloating and yelling over their spoil, and maddened with the drink they must have found in the first room of the strange old house. The door cracked. He tightened his belt, examined his knife, gavt his shirt sleeves another roll above the elbow, that snarling curl of the upper lip showed one of his teeth, the one called the canine tooth, and his delicate nostrils dilated. How curiously the daintily-modelled nose seemed to contradict the sensuous and somewhat cruel mouth.
A piece of the door flew past him in splinters followed by a shout of triumph, but no venturesome arm was thrust through the ragged aperture. Ferrari thought he recog- nized the voice of the man who had been a ringleader in the first rush upon the Jews near the scaffold one of the strangers who had come into the town from Elizabethgrad. It was different from the voices and accent of the Czarovna men.
Another aperture in the door was made, and it was as if the assailants had kept silence as a signal for their leader to speak. " Now, you rat, we've got you ; say your prayers, you filthy Jew."
Yes, it was the voice of the ruffian who had come into Czarovna with the false ukase and the pistol and dagger.
