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 muskets at the animal. “I will pitch you neck and crop into your fire, you blackguards!” cried Philip, springing in front of the mare. “There are dead horses lying up yonder; go and look for them!” “What a rum customer the officer is!--Once, twice, will you get out of the way?” returned a giant grenadier. “You won’t? All right then, just as you please.” A woman’s shriek rang out above the report. Luckily, none of the bullets hit Philip; but poor Bichette lay in the agony of death. Three of the men came up and put an end to her with thrusts of the bayonet. “Cannibals! leave me the rug and my pistols,” cried Philip in desperation. “Oh! the pistols if you like; but as for the rug, there is a fellow yonder who has had nothing to wet his whistle these two days, and is shivering in his coat of cobwebs, and that’s our General.” Philips looked up and saw a man with worn-out shoes and a dozen rents in his trousers; the only covering for his head was a ragged foraging cap, white with rime. He said no more after that, but snatched up his pistols.