"That same night," continued he, "I went to the hetman, for he gave command to call me. I thought to myself, 'I will renounce his service, break my oath, suffocate him, choke him with these hands, blow up Kyedani with powder, and then let happen what may.' He knew too that was ready for anything, knew what I was; I saw well that he was fingering a box in which there were pistols. 'That is nothing,' thought I to myself; 'either he will miss me or he will kill me.' But he began to reason, to speak, to show such a prospect to me, simpleton, and put himself forward as such a savior, that your highness knows what happened." "He convinced the young man," said Boguslav. "So that I fell at his feet," cried Kmita, "and saw in him the father, the one savior, of the country; so that I gave myself to him soul and body as to a devil. For him, for his honesty I was ready to hurl myself headlong from the tower of Kyedani." "I thought such would be the end," said Boguslav. "What I lost in his cause I will not say, but I rendered him important services. I held in obedience my squadron, which is in Kyedani now,--God grant to his ruin! Others, who mutinied, I cut up badly. I stained my hands in brothers' blood, believing that a stern necessity for the country. Often my soul was pained at giving command to shoot honest soldiers; often the nature of a noble rebelled against him, when one time and another he promised something and did not keep his word. But I thought: 'I am simple, he is wise!--it must be done so.' But to-day, when I learned for the first time from those letters of the poisons, the marrow stiffened in my bones. How? Is this the kind of war? You wish to poison soldiers? And that is to be in hetman fashion? That is to be the Radzivill method, and am I to carry such letters?" "You know nothing of politics, Cavalier," interrupted Boguslav. "May the thunders crush it! Let the criminal Italians practise it, not a noble whom God has adorned with more honorable blood than others, but at the same time obliged him to war with a sabre and not with a drug-shop." "These letters, then, so astonished you that you determined to leave the Radzivills?" "It was not the letters,--I might have thrown them to the hangman, or tossed them into the fire, for they refer not to my duties; it was not the letters. I might have refused the mission without leaving the cause. Do I know what I might have done? I might have joined the dragoons, or collected a party again, and harried Hovanski as before. But straightway a suspicion came to me: 'But do they not wish to poison the country as well as those soldiers?' God granted me not to break out, though my head was burning like a grenade, to remember myself, to have the power to think: 'Draw him by the tongue, and discover the whole truth; betray not what you have at heart, give yourself out as worse than the Radzivills themselves, and draw him by the tongue.'" "Whom,--me?"