He made straight for Gulyai-Polye.
In his native village he collected five or six reliable lads.
With axes, knives and sawed-off rifles, they entrenched themselves in a gorge near the landowner Reznikov's estate, crept up to the house under cover of night, and quietly cut the throats of the proprietor and his three brothers, officials of the local police, and set fire to the house.
By this means he laid hands on seven rifles, a revolver, horses, saddles, and a few police uniforms.
Now well-armed and on horseback, he and his little band fell upon the farmsteads without the loss of a moment, and burned them from all four sides.
Increasing the number of his followers, Makhno galloped from one end of the district to the other, till he had cleared it of landowners.
And then he embarked upon an adventure which spread his fame far and wide.
It was Whitsuntide.
The landowner Mirgorodsky, a magnate of the steppe, was marrying his daughter to one of the hetman's colonels.
The wedding was attended by the bolder spirits among neighbouring landowners, not afraid, even in such perilous times, to gallop over the steppe highway.
There were also guests from further away in the district, and from Kiev.
The Mirgorodsky estate was strongly guarded by gendarmes.
A machine gun was posted in the attic of the owner's house, and the bridegroom himself was escorted by his brother officers, tall fellows in flowing blue Turkish trousers, long enough, following an ancient custom, to sweep the ground, tunics of crimson cloth, and astrakhan caps with a golden tassel reaching almost to the waist.
The curved swords at their sides knocked against their broad-cuffed goatskin boots.
The bride was not long from England, where she had had the finishing touches put to her education in a boarding school for young ladies, but she could already speak Ukrainian tolerably, and wore embroidered blouses, bead necklaces, ribbons and high red boots.
Her noble parent had just received from Kiev a velvet robe, made to order, and trimmed with fur, an exact copy of that worn by the Hetman Mazeppa in the well-known portrait.
Every effort was made to celebrate the wedding in the old fashion, and though century-old mead was hard to obtain in the troublous Ukraine, there was an abundance of all that was required for a sumptuous feast.
After mass had been said, the bride was led across the park to the new stone church.
Her divinely beautiful bridesmaids accompanied her, singing, and she herself seemed to have come out of an old Cossack song.
"Ha-ha!", said the friends of the groom to the girls, as they stood by the fence, "it looks as if the good old times had come back to the Ukraine!" Handfuls of oats were scattered over the young couple as they came out into the church porch after the marriage ceremony.
The bride's father, in his robe of Mazeppa, blessed them with an ancient ikon from Mezhigorye in his hands.
Champagne was drunk, to the accompaniment of hilarious toasts, the wineglasses were broken, and the young couple left for the station in a motorcar, the guests remaining to feast and drink.
Night fell over the great courtyard in front of the mansion, where the servants and gendarmes passed the time in the mazes of the dance.
All the windows in the house shone merrily.
The Jewish orchestra from Alexandrovsk sawed and tootled with all their might.
The bride's father had already performed a fantastic hopak, and was drinking soda water.
The girls and older ladies were cooling themselves at the open windows, and the bridegroom's friends, all Cossack officers, were returning to the supper table, their swords rattling, boasting they would go right to Moscow and kill the accursed Muscovites.
Just then there appeared amidst the merrymakers a little officer in the uniform of the hetman's gendarmes.
There was nothing surprising in the police turning up on the estate on such a day.
He came in modestly, bowing silently, and casting sideways glances at the musicians.
Somebody may have noted that his uniform seemed to be rather big for him, and one lady said to another in a frightened voice:
"Who's that?
Isn't he terrible?"
Although the unknown officer kept his eyes lowered as much as possible, they seemed to glow diabolically, in spite of himself. But when one has been drinking, all sorts of wild suspicions come into one's mind....
After the mazurkas and waltzes the orchestra struck up a tango.
Two or three dancers in red tunics, still firm on their legs, seized their partners.
Somebody gave orders for the overhead lights to be extinguished.
In the half-dark, to the tender strains which seemed to be coming out of the depths of years long past, the couples languished, almost swooning as if in the throes of an ecstatic death.
Then it was that the shots rang out.
The crowd of guests stood as if petrified.
The music broke off.
Makhno, in the uniform of a police officer, stood at the supper table near the half-open window, a revolver in each hand, shooting at the red tunics.
A tall, crimson-faced colonel, one of the bridegroom's friends, throwing out his arms, fell heavily against the table, which overturned under the weight of his body.
The women gave piercing shrieks.
Another of the male guests tried to draw his sword, but fell face down on the carpet before he could do so.... Three rushed at Makhno with drawn swords, of whom two fell instantly, while the third fled to the window, squealing like a rabbit.
Two more men in police uniforms, ferocious-looking, with forelocks struggling from beneath their caps, appeared in the doorway opposite, and opened fire on the guests.
Women darted hither and thither in distraction.
Bodies were falling.
The bride's father could not rise from his chair, and Makhno, approaching him, sent a bullet right into his throat.
In the courtyard and the park, too, there were loud reports, as the guests rushed to the windows and leaped out.