Antek and Hanka decide to await the trial after a patrol’s arrival turns Antek’s unspoken distress into a household crisis. When he proposes selling up and fleeing to America, Hanka refuses to leave the children and farm behind; her vow to hold on to every strip of land shifts the decision from escape to endurance. Antek accepts that they must wait for the case to be heard, and the blacksmith’s effort to shape the family’s course comes to nothing.

The patrol arrives

The immediate disturbance begins during a meal in the cottage. After sunset, as the wind rises, a pack of dogs starts barking by the pond. Rocho listens, identifies the arrival as a stranger, and goes out to investigate. He returns almost at once, pale and urgent, reporting the sound of broadswords on the road. If the visitors ask after him, he says, Antek should tell them he is in the village; then Rocho leaps into the orchard and disappears.

Antek turns deathly pale and jumps to his feet. The dogs have run into the farmyard, and heavy footsteps sound on the porch. The sudden flight makes clear that the visit threatens more than a quiet evening: Rocho is avoiding the patrol, and Antek is caught between the visitor at his door and the person who has just escaped into the orchard. The account does not establish every purpose of the search, but the patrol’s arrival is plainly the scene’s trigger.

The sergeant says he is there on duty and speaks threateningly. Antek retorts that he cannot hide Rocho in his pocket. The confrontation does not lead to a reported arrest. Instead, the sergeant is partly appeased by eggs and a substantial pat of fresh butter. Witek follows the patrol step by step and later recounts that the men also called at the Soltys’s place and tried to peer through several lit windows. The barking dogs thwart their attempts to look in covertly, and they leave without finding anyone.

Antek voices the crisis

The patrol’s departure does not settle Antek. Once alone with Hanka, he begins to confess his troubles. Hanka listens closely, her heart thumping, and allows him to speak without interrupting. His distress has reached a point where flight appears to him as the only remaining option: he says they must sell up and run away, even to America.

That proposal is the turning point of the event. Leaving would mean giving up the household’s place and land as well as escaping the immediate danger. Hanka’s answer is not hesitant. She stands pale as a wall and refuses to go or permit the children to go to perdition. In her panic, she threatens that, if forced to leave, she will kill the children with an axe and throw herself into the well. She then kneels before the holy pictures as though sealing her refusal with a solemn vow. Her threat expresses desperation, not a course of action that the narrative says she carries out; its force lies in how completely she rejects the proposed flight.

Hanka’s counterdecision

Antek tells her to hush and explains that he is only talking. Hanka’s breathing eases, but she is barely holding back tears. She answers his imagined escape with a different plan: he will serve his time and return, while she manages the farm. She promises not to lose a single strip and insists that he does not yet know what she can do. Her resolve joins practical stewardship to faith: if the Lord Jesus helps her, she says, she will bear even this scourge.

The land is therefore not incidental to the argument. Antek’s suggestion begins with selling up; Hanka’s response makes keeping the property the condition around which the family can endure his expected punishment. She does not claim that the danger will vanish or that the case will be won. Instead, she accepts the prospect of his absence and declares that she will keep the farm intact until he can return. Her pledge converts a moment of fear into a division of responsibility: Antek must face the case, while Hanka holds the household and its land together.

Waiting for the case

After pondering for a long time, Antek accepts that matters will be as God wills and that they must wait for the case. The decision is not a resolution of the legal danger: the trial has not occurred, and the narrative gives no outcome here. It is a decision not to sell the farm and flee in advance of that reckoning. The household chooses uncertainty over abandonment, with Hanka’s determination to preserve the land shaping Antek’s final response.

The episode also marks the failure of the blacksmith’s cunning wiles. Whatever plan he has been pursuing, it comes to nothing in the face of Hanka’s refusal and Antek’s acceptance of waiting. The patrol scene thus opens onto a private decision with material stakes: the threatened search passes without a reported capture, but its arrival brings Antek’s troubles into the open, forces the question of flight, and leaves Hanka charged with protecting the family’s holdings. Their choice is provisional rather than triumphant. They remain under the shadow of the case, but they will meet it without surrendering the farm first.