"God!" The man sneered. "There is no God, or if there is He has forgotten Hungary. Who are you to talk to me of God? Have you had a son butchered to death before your very eyes? Have you heard your son crying for death, shrieking with pain?--God, the murderous hounds! The devils!" "You mean--Szamuelly?" For a moment Wenzel regretted mentioning the name, for suddenly the man's expression changed. Sadness and heartache dissolved from his face. Instead, his features became distorted by a spasm of unrelenting hatred. His eyes gleamed wickedly, his lips drew back in a snarl, exposing his coarse and rotted teeth, while his breath hissed in the intensity of his feelings. "Szamuelly! Szamuelly!" He choked. "May his entrails rot in Hell! May the vampires suck his blood! May God blast his soul! I curse him, he and all of his, his sons and his sons' sons; his daughters, his daughters' daughters, and all who may speak to them in friendship! Curse him, I say! Curse him!" With a sobbing cry the man's head fell on to his crooked arms. Wenzel neither spoke nor moved. Gradually the paroxysm passed, then the man looked up again, tears frankly falling from his eyes, and dropping, with dismal splashes, upon the rough wooden table. "The only son left to me here in the village. Pity the grief of an old man, friend, an old man who, five years ago, had a house full of healthy sons around him. Six there were--from twelve years of age to thirty. They were not a marrying sort, so remained with their old father. "Six of them, five years ago. Two killed in 1915, one in 1916, and another in 1917--blast the War! Four sons out of five--and all for nothing. Have we not lost after all? Is not Hungary beaten, conquered, ground down? Only one came back to me; he, together with the youngest and me--we were going to start life anew, but, my God! the eldest was forced to stop in Budapest and join the railway, to sweat and toil for Bela Kun. "I wish to Heaven both he and the youngest had been killed in the War! Better to die fighting, say I, battling against enemies, than to--to be tortured to death in front of the eyes of your father by your own countrymen. Yes, comrade, that is what happened to my youngest. Just seventeen years of age, and Szamuelly--Szamuelly had him hanged because he wouldn't wear the Red cockade. He would have killed me, because I too wouldn't have worn the cursed colour, but the swine was in a hurry. "'Tell what I have done to all would-be Whites,' he said, with a laugh. That's what he said to me, the father of the poor butchered boy. Oh, Jesus Christ, why have You deserted us in our hour of need? Why do You not smite these heretics who spit on Your Cross? ... And now, comrade, what do you want?" It was as though the old man suddenly recollected that there was another man present, for he ended with a snarl. "I want--the help of you and your remaining son, comrade--I am the White Knight."