More definite tidings were not long in coming. Messengers from St. George arrived breathless with the report that Diurbanu's troops were rapidly approaching. But no one was disconcerted by the news; all were ready for the enemy. Throwing scythes and pitchforks aside, they snatched up their firearms. Each battalion of the national guard had its assigned position. The streets were barricaded with wagons, and the road toward Borev was laid under water by damming the brook, to prevent a surprise from that direction. Aaron, with forty other men, clambered up the steep slope of the Szekler Stone to repulse the enemy from this commanding height,--forty men against as many hundred. They would have laughed at their own folly had they but stopped to think.
Toward noon the sturdy little band of defenders was increased by the coming of fugitives from St. George. For these, too, there were arms enough in Toroczko. The effective force now in the village amounted to nearly four hundred.
Manasseh was at home with the women of the family. They had declined Aaron's offer to conceal them in Csegez Cave, preferring to remain under the family roof and there await what God had appointed them. Manasseh now embraced Blanka and Anna and bade them farewell.
"Where are you going?" asked Blanka, in alarm. Jonathan's pale face seemed at that moment to float before her vision, and she feared to part with her husband, lest he should not return.
"No, not alone. I am well attended: Uriel goes before me, Raphael is on my right hand, Gabriel on my left, behind me Michael, and over my head Israel."
"No, I am armed with the peace treaty which our foes concluded with me, swearing not to attack Toroczko. That is my weapon, and with it I will win a bloodless victory."
Blanka looked sorrowfully into her husband's face, and in that look was expressed all that her tongue was powerless to utter,--her infinite love for the man and her deep despair at the thought of perhaps never again meeting those eyes so full of love and tenderness for her.
"I tried it once before, you know," he reminded her, "and you know how well I succeeded then. The leader of the Wallachians is an old acquaintance of mine." But this last was true in a sense that the speaker little dreamed--as he was to learn later.