Just at sunset one day in the last week of March, 1897, a caique set sail from the harbor of Piræus, ostensibly laden with cognac for Cairo, but in reality carrying a small revolving cannon and a large number of Gras rifles to the insurgents in Crete, who had risen for the hundredth time and were fighting desperately for liberty and the Christian faith. There were several large barrels, conspicuously marked "Koniak" in Greek characters, on the deck, and a number of boxes that bore the legend, "Two dozen bottles from Kambas, Athens." The legend was not untruthful, for one of the huge casks, at least, contained the fiery liquid attributed to it; numberless others, in the hold, were filled with guns, and the boxes below deck were packed with ammunition.

There were other things, too, in the caique's cargo intended for the Cretan heroes—articles of a seemingly pacific nature, such as hams, hardtack, flour, sausages, olives and beans. These had been declared contraband by the admirals of the great powers, and the whole cargo, should it be seized by any of the warships prowling about the ancient island, was doomed to confiscation. The captain, a thick-set, square-shouldered Greek, in greasy blue suit, soft woolen shirt and felt hat, held the long tiller in his left hand and made the sign of the cross repeatedly with his right.

"Holy Virgin be our helper," he muttered. "St. Nicholas protect and help us!"

A stiff breeze was blowing and the vessel leaned over, like a tall man shouldering his way through a storm. The three young men standing upon her deck maintained their equilibrium by shooting one leg out straight, as though it were the prop of a cabin built on the side of a hill; the other being shortened to half its length by bending at the hip and knee.

A strip of canvas stretched on ropes, to keep the waves from rushing over, ran the whole length of either side. Stern and prow were equally pointed, and the iron rings of the boom, that clutched the main masts like the fingers of a closed hand, creaked monotonously. Two jibs, fluttering full-breasted before, seemed to pull out for the open sea, as a pair of white doves might in old time have drawn the bark of Aphrodite. The waters of the bay, that lay like a rolling plain of green meadow grass and blood-red anemones in the dying sun, was shredded into lily-white foam by the ship's iron plowshare and hurled carelessly into the broad road that streamed out behind.

At their right a great fleet of old-time sailing ships, many of them painted green, lay rotting at their anchors. These had been gallant craft in the Viking days of Greece, faring to the coast of Russia, to England and Spain and convertible in a week's notice from peaceful merchants into blockade runners and ships of the line.

Two natty officers stepped to the prow of a Russian gunboat, that was white and trim as a bride, and fixed their glasses keenly on the caique.

"Curse you!" growled the captain, involuntarily opening his hand, the Greek sign of an imprecation.

"St. Nicholas strike you blind! Look all you will, and again I'll cheat you."

But the time had come to tack, and he shouted the order to the sailors. The convenient canvas was shifted, the helm was put over, and the caique bore straight for the narrow mouth of the harbor.

A great sail was thrown out on either side like a pair of wings. The vessel turned its beak to the south and swooped down the wind like a hawk. The three young men stood with their feet apart now, their legs of equal length.

"By Jove, that's glorious!" shouted one of them, his accent betraying the American—probably the Bostonian.

The sun stood on the tiptop of Salamis, saying good-night to the world. Athens was a pillar of purple dust, shot through and through with lances of flame. The stately columns of the Parthenon were of liquid amber. The church on the summit of Mount Lycabettus caught fire and blazed. The mountain itself was hidden in a column of dust and the church floated in mid-air. Then suddenly, as if by a stroke of some grand, celestial magic, the glow died from everything as the blood fades from a frightened face. The Parthenon was a pale, stately white, the ghost of the temple of a moment ago; the church on the hill had turned gray—ashes in place of fire. The sun had dropped behind Salamis. But now came a greater wonder: Hymettus and all the hills that surround the lovely plain of Attica took on a deep, quivering, unearthly tint of violet. This light was delicate, fluffy, spiritual. You fancied it was fragrant; you imagined that all the fresh spring violets of a hundred worlds had been plucked and poured sea deep over the hills.

A sudden lurch of the ship threw the American against the man at his side.

"I beg your pardon," he said, "or perhaps you do not speak English?"

"O, yes," replied the person addressed; "not perfectly, but sufficiently to make myself understood. Permit me to introduce myself."

Producing a large leathern pocketbook, he extracted from its recesses a card. The hand that presented the bit of pasteboard was large, pink and well groomed. The American read:

Peter Lindbohm,
Lieutenant de Cavalerie.

Lieutenant Lindbohm read on the card which he received in return,

Mr. John Curtis.

"I am happy to meet you, Mr. Curtis," said the Lieutenant, politely lifting his straw hat and then drawing it down over his ears with both hands. The hat was secured to the button-hole by means of a shoe string, and had a startling habit of leaping to the end of its tether every few moments.

"And I you, Lieutenant," replied Curtis heartily, extending his hand.

"You are going to Crete?"

"No, to Cairo," laughed the Lieutenant.

"O, we're all onto the secret, or we wouldn't be here. And I'm mighty glad there's somebody going along who can speak English. I hope we'll be good friends, and I don't see why we shouldn't be, I'm sure. I'm just out of college—Harvard, you know—and the governor told me to take a trip around the world. He believes in a year of travel to kind of complete and round out a man's education."

"I find it an excellent idea," said the Lieutenant, grabbing for his hat, that a sudden puff of wind had swept from his head.

"Isn't it? It's jolly. Well, I'm going to surprise the governor. I'm going to write a book—sort of prose 'Childe Harold.' I wish I had the knack to do it in verse. I thought this Cretan business would make a great chapter, so I went straight to the president of the committee and told him I would write the struggle up from a Christian standpoint. Nice old fellow. Said he would do anything for an American, and put me onto this snap. I ought to find some good material down there. I'm glad the governor can't hear of this thing till I get ready to tell him."

"That is, the governor of New York?" asked the Lieutenant.

"No. Ha, ha, ha! My governor—my old man—my father, you know."

"Ah, I beg pardon. You will see that I do not know the English so well."

The Lieutenant was forty years of age or thereabouts. His straw hat, extremely long gray Prince Albert coat and russet shoes combined to give a somewhat incongruous effect to his attire. He carried a slender rattan cane, that was faintly suggestive of a rapier, and which he had a habit of twirling. This was not theatrical. It was rather a betrayal than an exhibition. Blue, very light blue eyes, straw-colored hair, a horse-shoe mustache, six feet three of stature and a slight stoop in the shoulders—such was Lieutenant Peter Lindbohm of the Swedish or any other army, brave fighter in the Argentine, in China, in South Africa. He could smell burning powder half way around the globe, and was off at the first telegram announcing the declaration of a new war. He was brave as a lion, and seemingly immune from danger. He always offered his sword to the under dog first, and if it were refused, gave the other side second choice. He preferred to fight for liberty and right, but felt it a necessity to fight somehow. He looked at you with innocent, inquiring eyes; his manner was gentle as a woman's and his smile as sweet as a babe's.

"You have given me your confidence," he said. "I will give you mine, though there is not much to tell. I am a soldier by profession. I was down among the Boers when I heard of this trouble in Crete. I had hoped for war there. I was also at Majuba Hill, you see, and President Kruger knows me. But the English will not attack now, so I decided in a moment. I yust came right along, hence my straw hat."

Another leap into the air of the article in question had called the speaker's attention to it. Though he spoke grammatically correct English, he mispronounced his "j's" whenever taken off his guard.

"A soldier cannot draw his sword in a better cause than in behalf of these brave Cretans, who have won their liberty a dozen times over," he added, drawing his cane from his left thigh as though it were a sword.

"In the name of my country, thank you," said the third of the trio, a very young Greek, with a round face, a brilliantly tinted olive complexion and large, liquid, chestnut eyes. He was a small man and excitable in his actions. He wore a business suit, a heavy ulster and a flat derby hat.

"May I do myself the great honor to present myself?" He spoke stilted English, and evidently composed his sentences before uttering them. Curtis, fresh from Æschylus and Plato, and an excellent course of modern Greek, had no difficulty in translating the legend on the proffered card: "Michali Papadakes, Student in the National University of Greece."

"I am a Cretan, and I go to fight for my country. The Turks have burned my father's house and his three villages. They have cut down his olive trees, insulted my sister and murdered our tenants. My family are now in Athens, refugees. I go against my father's—what do you call it?—command. But had I remained at Athens I should have been a lâche—a—"

"Coward," interposed the Lieutenant, seizing the young man's hand. "It is you who do us the honor."

"By Jove, you're the right sort!" cried Curtis. "I'm glad to know you."

"I go to kill Turks," continued Papadakes, shaking both his clenched fists in the air. "They may kill me, but not till I have paid to them the debt which I owe. At least, I shall with my blood the tree of liberty water."

When John Curtis suddenly flew off on a tangent to Crete from the Puck-like circle that he was putting around the earth, he acted under the impulse of youth and its ever present enthusiasm. He arrived at Athens in the midst of tremendous popular excitement. Great throngs were gathering daily in front of the king's palace, waving banners and throwing their hats in the air. Curtis could see it all plainly from the balcony of his hotel on Constitution Square. Occasionally some member of the throng would mount the marble steps, and, throwing his arms wildly about, begin to speak; but the speech was always drowned in a hoarse roar.

Curtis at first could not understand a word that was said, but he felt himself seized with a growing excitement. If he started for the Acropolis or the Garden of Plato, he forgot his intention and found himself running, he knew not where, and longing to shout, he knew not what; for as his ears became accustomed to the sound, he observed that the whole city was shouting the same words, over and over again.

"What is it they are yelling all the time?" Curtis asked himself repeatedly, "and what are they singing? Tra-la-la, tra-la-la la!" he was humming the tune himself. A certain pride prevented his seeking information from the hotel proprietor or of one of the officious couriers. He had been no mean Grecian at Harvard, and had read "Loukes Laras" in the modern vernacular. He could speak modern Greek fairly well with the fruit men of Boston. He would solve the mystery himself. And he did. It came to him like a revelation. Three words, scrawled or printed, began to appear on all the whitewashed fences and walls of the city. With some difficulty he found a copy sufficiently plain for a foreigner to read: "Zeto ho polemos"—"Hurrah for War!"

Then he listened again. Ten minutes later he was in the midst of a swaying, struggling throng before the palace shouting "Zeto ho polemos!"

At dinner he heard his waiter humming the tune that seemed on the lips and in the heart of the whole world, and he asked, "What are you singing?" The boy, with eyes blazing, recited in Greek two or three stanzas that sent a chill to the roots of Curtis' hair:

I know thee by the lightning
Of thy terrible swift brand;
I know thee by the brightening
When thy proud eyes sweep the land!

From the blood of the Greeks upspringing
Who died that we might be free,
And the strength of thy strong youth bringing—
Hail, Liberty, hail to thee!

It was the grand war hymn of Solomos, one of those songs that march down the years, fighting like a thousand men for liberty.

Curtis was twenty-two, and imagined himself an ancient Greek or a Lord Byron. He would get into this thing somehow. He went back to the hotel and thought it over, and then he discovered that he had been carried away by excitement.

"I'm crazy," he said; "I'd have gone anywhere with those chaps, and the fact of the matter is, I ought to be in Jerusalem at this minute. I've overstayed my time here four days now."

But his enthusiasm for the Greeks and their cause would not down. There had been another massacre of Christians in Crete and the king had sent Colonel Vassos with an army to seize the island in the cause of humanity. Prince George had followed soon after with the torpedo squadron.

"I'd be a chump to enlist as a common soldier," thought Curtis; "besides, I couldn't do much good that way, and the governor never would give me money enough to fit out a company with."

Then he thought of the book.

"I have it!" he cried. "I will show up this Cretan question to the whole civilized world. I'll get right out among the people. I'll describe them as they are—their manners and customs. I'll see some of these villages that the Turks have burned, and I'll get a lot of stories of outrages from the peasants themselves. I'll touch the thing up, too, with history and poetry."

John Curtis inherited from his father a strong will, and the sort of courage that grows with the danger which requires it. He had also inherited a regulating strain of Yankee caution. His mind was like a pendulum, caution taking the place of the attraction of gravity. Just at the moment when it reached the highest point of oscillation there was an ever present force waiting to pull it the other way. But at present he was only twenty-two, and the struggle between New England prudence and youthful enthusiasm had not yet been decided.

Besides, his mother had bestowed upon his nature a tinge of romanticism, and that impulsiveness which sometimes becomes rashness in a man. He was rather short in stature, with a thick neck, long arms and sinewy hands. His closely cropped hair was dark brown, and his mustache was more of a promise than a fulfillment. There was a healthy color in his boyish cheek, neither ruddy nor pale. The fact is that John Curtis had been an all-around athlete at college, whose fame will last for many a day.

As he stood now upon the deck of the caique, he looked every inch the thing that he was, a wholesome, healthy-minded American youth—clear grit, muscle and self-reliance. He wore an English yachting cap and a heavy new ulster. Suspended from his shoulder by a strap hung a camera.

Night came on, with a fresh breeze and a sea that rose and fell like a great carpet when wind comes in under the door. It melted the stars of the underworld and washed them into unstable and fantastic shapes. But overhead the constellations and the myriad suns bloomed with passionate, lyric splendor; Jehovah's garden where he walks in the cool of the day; God's swarm of golden bees, wind-drifted to their hive beyond the thymey hills.

The three comrades—for hearts strike hands in a moment on the sea or in the wilderness—sat silent upon the deck. A sailor approached on tiptoe and offered Curtis a guitar. Without a word the American passed it to the Greek.

"But perhaps you play and sing," said the latter, offering the instrument to the Swede.

"My friend is right," replied the latter. "Any language but Greek would be profanation here."

Without further protest Michali struck a few chords of a wild, sweet air, and commenced to sing in a low voice, a song that is known wherever the waves of Greece plash in the sun or her nightingales lift their voices by night in the lemon orchards. The sailors and the captain caught up the melody and assisted, for what Greek does not know:

NIGHT'S FIRST STAR.

The first of all the stars of night
In heaven is shyly beaming.
The waves play in their gowns of white
While mother sea lies dreaming.

Among the leaves on gentle wing
A balmy zephyr flutters,
The nightingale begins to sing
And all love's sorrow titters.

For you the zephyr sighs, my love,
In passion low and tender,
For you the little stars above
Dispense their yearning splendor.

For you the tiny waves, ashore
Their garnered foam are bringing;
For you his love song, o'er and o'er
The nightingale is singing.

For you from yonder mountain high
The moon pours out her measure,
For you all day I moan and sigh,
My little dear, my treasure!

A moment of silence, which is, after all, the best applause, followed the song. Then someone ejaculated a long-drawn-out "Ah!"—a mingled sigh of wonder, joy and admiration, followed by a chorus of "Ahs!" and a shout of "There she comes." Curtis and Lindbohm sprang to their feet and looked around. An uncouth sailor, with shaggy capote thrown over his left shoulder, was pointing with outstretched arm at the rising moon. The entire crew were gazing at a great golden disc that was slowly sliding into view from behind a mountain. A long trail of light fell athwart the caique, and seemed to pave the way to a group of shadowy islands, now dimly visible. They were sailing across a golden road, through a shower of impalpable gold dust. Higher and higher rose the glorious sphere, until merely its edge rested on the mountain top; there it clung for a moment and then swung loose into the starry sky. In the mystic, unearthly glow, the faces of the rough sailors were idealized. They looked at one another in silent wonder. Curtis partook of the awe, the joy. He felt as though he were in a grand temple and the goddess had revealed herself; and so did these poor descendants of ancient Greece, though they knew it not. The American had seen the moon rise before in Greece, but never on the sea and never in the society of genuine, unspoiled children of the country. It was a revelation, a birth of glory, a miracle.

For several days the "Holy Mary," as the caique was called, cruised among islands that seemed to float in an opal sea. Some of them were steep rocks, on which a single shepherd dwelt with his flocks. Often as they flitted through the shadow of a precipice that rose, high and stern as the walls of a medieval castle, which a few scattered pines were perilously scaling, a shaggy head would look down from the overhanging battlement and shout some salutation in Greek. At other times they skirted green valleys, guarded at the shore by a band of sentinel cypress trees, tall and straight; through these, tiny streams came leaping and laughing down to the sea. Arcadian villages, gleaming white in the sun, sat peacefully on distant cliffs, or straggled down through olive orchards toward a bit of whiter beach; old monasteries dreamed in green and lonely nooks.

On a cloudy afternoon, when the wind was blowing fresh and fair, and the waves that ran behind shivered blackly ere they broke into foam, the captain set all sail and headed straight for the northern shore of Crete. The caique plunged like a child's rocking horse. The three passengers went down into the little cabin, that smelled of bilgewater and stale goat's cheese. A smoky lantern, hanging from a hook in the roof, cast a flickering light on the rickety ladder, the four plank walls and the eikons of Mary and Nicholas, that peered from round holes cut in tawdry squares of silver. There were two bunks and a table that, when not in use, drew up its one leg and fell back against the wall. Curtis and his two companions rattled about in the narrow room like peas in a fool's gourd. Every few moments water slopped and sputtered on the deck and brine dripped down through the thin hatches. When Curtis heard the spray patter over the planks he thought of the rats that used to run over the garret floor of a farmhouse where he sometimes slept when in America. The Swede produced one of those ineffable cigars that one buys in Italy by the meter, broke off a couple of inches and offered the stick to his companions, who refused. Soon a smell resembling burning goat's hair filled the cabin.

"Ah," sighed Lindbohm, "what a comfort is tobacco!"

Poor Michali collapsed in a spasm of coughing seasickness.

Curtis, gnashing his teeth and declaring that he would not yield, scrambled up the ladder and butted the hatches open with his head. The most incongruous ideas kept running through his brain, sick as he was. As he sprawled out upon the deck and the two trapdoors fell behind him with a slam, he thought of a jack-in-the-box that had been given him on his fourth Christmas. Curtis rose cautiously erect, and threw himself at the nearest mast. It was not raining, but occasional faint electric flashes revealed a lurid world full of inky waves.

"There's no danger at all in this sort of thing," he muttered, "if these beggars understand their business."

The hatches came down again with a slam. Michali, kneeling upon the deck, gave vent to his sufferings in elliptical groans. At the point of greatest diameter they were suggestive of a strong man vainly striving to yield up the ghost.

"Come here, old man," shouted Curtis, "the fresh air will fix you all right in a minute."

"That tobacco," gasped Michali, "would have made me to be sick on land or sea."

"What's going on up there?" asked the American. The three sailors were gathered about the captain and all were talking excitedly. Michali listened. The stinging spray was whipping the sickness out of him.

"They see the signal," he replied. "Ah, there it is!"

High up and far away flickered a ruddy flame. No object was distinguishable near it or anywhere else. It simply glowed there alone in the darkness, like a witch's candle. Had there been any earth or sky it would have been half way between them.

"It is our beacon," exclaimed the Greek, "we shall sail straight for that and we come to the part of the shore where we the landing make. They have light it far up in the mountain, that all who see may think it a shepherd's camp."

Curtis was seized with uncontrollable excitement. Crawling to the cabin, he shouted down to the Swede, "Come up, Lieutenant, we're nearing land!"

The box again flew open and this time Lindbohm was the jack that bobbed out.

"Why, it's dark as a pocket," he said, "how can any one see whether land is near or not?"

Curtis seized the Lieutenant's head gently with both hands and turned it toward the signal. The Swede whistled softly.

"Yust so," he said.

After another twenty minutes a sailor brought a lantern from the cabin and hung it to a hook on the forward mast. For over an hour there had been no lightning, and now a sudden flash hissed and died as though one had attempted to light a match in a gusty room. There was but a moment of light, but that was enough. There, a quarter of a mile distant, extended beckoningly and invitingly toward the little vessel, were the arms of a narrow bay; and down the shore, perhaps a mile away, a gunboat stole stealthily and slowly along.

To the left a stretch of coast, perhaps two miles in length, ended suddenly in a towering cliff. By turning they would have the wind square in the sails and would be making straight for the promontory. This expedient evidently occurred to the captain, who knew every inch of the Cretan coast as well as he knew the deck of his own caique, for he instantly gave the necessary orders.

"It would never have done to put into the bay," observed Lindbohm, "they would have us like rats in a trap. That's one of the blockading squadron. They're looking for yust such people as we are."

"They haven't seen us, glory to God!" cried Michali.

The three passengers had crowded about the captain, who stood at the tiller. The caique was now skipping from crest to crest like a flying fish.

"To St. Nicholas and the Virgin I give equal praise," devoutly responded the captain.

The words were hardly out of his mouth before the gunboat began to whip the sea with her search light. Up into the clouds shot the spreading lash, as though spitefully wielded by a giant arm, and then, "whiz," it struck the waters where the caique had been five minutes before.

"Katarra!" cried the crew in chorus, rolling the "r's." Katarra is the best substitute in the world for a good English "damn," which is exactly what it means.

"What orders is he giving?" asked Curtis.

"To put on all sail," replied Michali. "I hope he don't tip us over."

"With the wind squarely behind us there's no danger," said the Swede, who, having Viking blood in his veins knew a sailing boat by instinct. "If the masts and the canvas hold, we are all right, and the devil himself can't catch us."

Again the whip fell, again and yet again. At last it struck fairly upon the little ship with blinding radiance. Curtis gave vent to a surprised "Ah!" as he had sometimes done in a theater, when the electricity had been unexpectedly turned on after twenty minutes of midnight murder or burglary on the stage. A sailor was luridly sprawling in the air, half way up the foremast, and the two others were pulling at a rope. The faces of the little group at the tiller looked ghastly in the unnatural light. The caique rose and fell with the long striding motion of a fleet horse running close to the ground. At regular intervals a discharge of fine spray swept length-wise of the deck and stung the face like handfuls of rice, flung at a wedding.

The light was now a great triangle, lying on the sea, and the caique was flying toward its base. The promontory seemed to slide rapidly toward them along one of its sides.

A gun boomed in the triangle's apex. Curtis and Michali ducked their heads and closed their eyes tight. The captain and crew again cried "Katarra" in chorus, and Lindbohm laughed.

"Blank," he said sententiously; "that means 'lay to.'"

The promontory slid nearer. Another gun, this time with a sharp, coughing sound, followed by a crescendo-diminuendo scream, like the demoniac wail of winter wind.

"A shell," explained the Swede. "That means business. If they're Russians, they can't hit us. If French, they probably won't, in this sea. If English, they probably will. We must yust take our chances. What does the captain say?"

"Here's the point," translated Michali, "once around that they will never find us."

Curtis looked. The steep cliff photographed itself indelibly upon his mind. It towered high above their heads, rude, grim, and perpendicular, but at its base a spur of land sloped into the water, like the foot to a mighty leg. And as he looked, a crashing sound was heard, and the little vessel shivered and lurched, wounded to death.

"English, by damn!" cried Lindbohm. "Can you swim?"

CHAPTER II
ON FRIENDLY SHORES

"How shall I ever thank you for saving my life?"

"Very easily. If you know anything about this part of the island you can yust lead us out of here. If we don't find something to eat to-day we shall be sorry we didn't drown. I'd rather drown than starve any time. It don't last so long, and isn't so painful."

The two speakers were Michali and the Lieutenant. They were standing, together with the American, beside a fire of driftwood which the vestas in Curtis' metal matchbox had enabled them to light. A bit of sand, sheltered from the waves by a projecting rock, had made it easy for them to land. It is true that Michali's strength had soon given out, but his friends, both being powerful swimmers, had brought him to the shore in safety. After scrambling for a way blindly up the side of a hill, actuated by an instinctive, though perhaps groundless, fear of capture, they had paused and looked down upon the sea. There were two of the sailors hanging to the arm of a gallows frame planted in the sea. The torn canvas fluttered helpless in the wind. The captain clung to the arm of another gallows a few feet distant, and the third sailor was floating about over the submerged caique on the cabin roof. The gunboat shied out into deeper water, and brought the filibusters in. Then the three comrades crouched behind a rock, while the Cyclopean eye of the monster that hurls deadlier missiles than old Homer ever dreamed of searched hill and shore.

"They'll never try to catch us," said Lindbohm, as the gunboat sailed away. "They couldn't if they wanted to, and they've no particular business with us anyhow."

So they built a fire and kept themselves warm as much by the exercise of bringing and breaking up wood as by the flames themselves. When morning finally peeped at the pallid sea and kissed its face to ruddy life and laughter, the Cretan, the Swede and the American looked one another over and took an inventory of their condition. They were dry, but hungry. Curtis and Michali had lost their hats. Michali had tied a handkerchief about his own head in peasant fashion, and had performed the same office for Curtis. Lindbohm's straw had not escaped from the tether, and he still wore it, glistening with salt and hanging down on one side like the wing of a wounded duck. His long coat had shrunk until the tails parted in the middle of his back as though the space between them had been cut out with a triangular stamp. He alone of the three had removed his shoes after reaching the shore. Not being able to put them on again, he cut away the uppers, and tied the remnant on with strings, which he passed through the holes slashed in the sides. A resourceful and courageous man was the Lieutenant.

"Now, we are ready," he said, to Michali; "lead on to breakfast."

"I think," replied Michali, "that we must to the sea go down, and pass around the shore to where the caique wished to come up. There we shall find Greeks waiting. Embros!" (forward.)

But, alas, when they arrived at the beach again they found that the little stretch of sand which had been their salvation ended against an abrupt wall of rock.

"We must go around the hill the other way," said Curtis.

"We may happen on a shepherd or see a village," suggested Michali, cheerfully. "Many people live along this northern coast of the island."

So they returned again to the bit of sandy beach where they had landed. By this time it was ten o'clock.

"Hello! What's this?" cried Curtis, who was walking nearer the sea than the others. They looked. He was holding between his finger and thumb a small, spherical object, that looked like a bluish-black apple, stuck full of pins of the same color.

"Bravo!" shouted Michali. "Bravo! I think it will be our breakfast. It is an achinoos."

"Eat that?" asked Lindbohm, regarding the object doubtfully. "I would yust as soon bite into a live hedgehog."

Michali produced a large pocket knife and cut the creature in two. It contained about a spoonful of yellow eggs and a quantity of dark, muddy substance. Carefully collecting the contents upon the point of his knife, he offered the dainty morsel to Lindbohm and Curtis, who each took a little on the tip of his finger and tasted.

"Tastes like salt mud," said the Swede.

"Nevertheless, if it will sustain life, and if more of them can be found"—suggested the American.

Removing their shoes and arming themselves with sticks, the three adventurers waded out a little way from shore and began to poke among the rocks for sea urchins.

In a short time a pile of living pincushions rewarded their efforts. The spines moved continually, as though rooted in loose skin, and occasionally one of the queer creatures rolled slowly seaward, walking on the tips.

"Kind of a globular centipede, with the legs sticking in all directions, isn't he?" observed Curtis, regarding one in motion.

"You would have thought so had you on one stepped!" replied Michali; "the spines are sometimes—what you call him, poisonous. You would not have put on your boot for many days."

"They are slow eating," said the Swede, sucking the contents from the half of one noisily, as though it were a teacup.

"Nevertheless, with bread they are delicious," persisted Michali.

"Anything would be delicious with bread yust now," observed the Lieutenant.

At the end of the sandy beach a steep, rocky hill uprose. By the time the three comrades reached the top of this, the sun was pouring down his fiercest rays upon them, and the echini were tormenting their vitals with an avenging thirst. At their right soared the majestic and inaccessible mountains of Crete, at the left and far below stretched the winsome sea, strewn with islands and flecked with flitting sails. They walked for half an hour over volcanic rock, through spiteful, thorny shrubs that clutched at their ankles and tore their clothing, and came at last to the brink of a ravine whose walls were as perpendicular as though they had been cut with a giant saw. In the bed, far below, a mountain torrent dashed eagerly to sea, making sheer leaps over smoothly worn rocks or swirling about in hollow basins.

The three looked down on it and their thirst grew.

"I could drink it all," said Curtis.

A swallow drifted by on slanting wings, darted to the brim of the water-fall and leaped again skyward.

"How is a bird superior to a man!" exclaimed Michali.

"The wings of a man are his mind," replied the Swede. "The hedgehogs are on fire inside of me. We must reach that water to quench them. It would take the whole stream to put out the ones that I ate."

After another hour they came upon a goat trail that, leading from above, ended abruptly and zigzagged from ledge to ledge down the side of the cliff into the stream. Michali's delight was unbounded.

"Follow this trail," he cried, "and we shall a shepherd find with water, or may be a village, who knows?"

"How far is it?" asked Lindbohm.

"How do I know? Perhaps one mile—perhaps ten."

"If it is two, the hedgehogs will burn through before I get there," replied Curtis. "I'm going down."

"It is very dangerous," replied Michali.

"We must yust take our chances," asserted Lindbohm.

The descent was not so difficult as it appeared. Within twelve feet of the bottom they found themselves on the edge of a rock. Below them the stream gurgled enticingly between banks of snowy sand.

"And now?" asked Curtis.

"We must yust yump and take our chances," replied Lindbohm. Instinctively seizing the tails of his coat he held them out like wings and sprang into the air.

"Hurrah!" he cried, looking up. "It's all right," and throwing himself flat on his stomach, he sucked up long drafts of the cool, refreshing water. In a moment Michali and Curtis were lying beside him.

"How do the goats get out of here?" asked Curtis, looking at the face of the rock down which he had just made a flying leap.

"O, a goat is like a fly; he can skip up a pane of glass," replied Lindbohm.

"We must now follow the stream up," said Michali. "We shall surely find somebody. In Greece, where there is water, men are not far away."

"But we are not in Greece," objected Lindbohm. The Cretan's eyes blazed.

"Do not say that when you are among my countrymen—it would not be safe."

Lindbohm seized him by the hand.

"I beg your pardon," he cried. "You are right. We are in the very heart of Greece, and we are here to shoot down anybody who says the contrary."

For some distance up the ravine the path was over fine sand and easy. Then they came to a long stretch tumbled full of round, smooth bowlders. Twice they were obliged to climb steep rocks that extended from one wall to the other like the face of a dam. They pulled themselves up the end of these by means of the vines growing in the ravine, whose sides still rose sheer above them to such a height that they seemed almost to meet at the top. Finally, when Michali had clambered before the others to the top of a rocky dam, higher and steeper than usual, he gave a loud shout of joy and pointed dramatically upstream. Lindbohm followed agilely, and Curtis with more difficulty. There, perhaps a mile away, was a white village, sitting in an amphitheater, like an audience of an ancient stadium. Behind and at either side, patches of terraced vineyards lay smiling in the sun, and a flock of goats was grazing on a mountain side, at the edge of a pine forest. The mountain stream, broken into half a dozen rivulets, wandered through the streets, and then slid and leaped, like a bevy of children, down a tremendous, steeply slanting ledge, on the edge of which the hither houses perilously stood.

"How do you know it's not Turkish?" asked Lindbohm.

"There are no minarets," replied Michali.

"Why, of course! Any one can tell a Greek from a Turkish village as soon as he sees it. Come on, then!"

Michali and the Lieutenant sprang gayly forward, but soon they stopped and looked around.

"Are you not coming?" asked Michali.

Curtis arose and sank down again. His companions ran back.

"What's the matter?" they asked in chorus.

"I can go no farther," replied Curtis. "I scratched my foot on a stone when we were gathering those sea urchins, and it's swelling up in my shoe."

"Why didn't you say something?" asked Lindbohm.

"A man doesn't like to squeal about a scratch, you know," replied the American. "Pull the blamed shoe off for me, will you? Hold on! hold on, I tell you! Holy Moses, how that hurts!"

"You'll just have to cut the shoe off," suggested the Lieutenant.

"I don't like to do that. What'll I do without shoes?"

"Ah, you will wear the beautiful Cretan boots!" cried Michali enthusiastically. "The yellow, soft, strong boots. There is no such leather in the world. Do you not know how Crete is famous for the boots?"

"That settles it, then," exclaimed Curtis. "I won't stand this torture any longer. Here, Lindbohm, old man, just slit that shoe right open, will you?"

The foot was badly swollen, and, being released from the confining shoe, it straightway puffed up to double the normal size. Lindbohm and Michali each took one of the lame man's arms, and thus they proceeded quite rapidly. Curtis held tightly to the shoe.

"They cost me eight dollars," he said, "and it's a shame to throw it away."

CHAPTER III
A COMIC OPERA TOWN

It was about one o'clock in the afternoon when they arrived at the foot of the tremendous rocky dam which they must scale to reach the village. The sun was shining brilliantly, and the dozen or more rivulets that were racing and leaping downward glittered like molten silver. From the bed of the ravine not a house was visible. Lindbohm made a trumpet of his hands, and, looking upward, shouted lustily, drawing out the last syllable of the word as though it were a vocal telescope.

"Hillo! Hillo! Hillo!"

A girl came to the edge. She appeared to be standing on the top of a wall. She was floating in sunlight; she was glorified. Tall, straight, deep-bosomed, she wore a skirt of blue home-spun and a short jacket of the same material, with sleeves that were white from the elbows down. Her hair, that was in reality a soft brown, seemed of gold; one massive strand fell over her bosom quite to her knees. Her face was oval, the features as clearly cut as those of a goddess. Her large brown eyes, wide apart beneath a low, broad forehead, beamed with fearless innocence and wonder. On her left shoulder rested a huge earthen water jug, two-handled, bulging near the top and dwindling at each end. Her right hand held this in place, and her left rested on her hip.

"What is it, strangers?" she called down, in a winning voice.

"Sphakiote," said Michali.

"What's sphakiote?" asked Lindbohm; "Greek for goddess?"

The Cretan shouted back a few words of explanation, and the maiden disappeared. Ten minutes later the edge was lined with the citizens of Ambellaki; tow-headed children, women, old and young, tall pallikaria, boys and maidens. All the males, of whatever age, wore high yellow boots, voluminous blue trousers and soft red fezzes, that broke across the crown and fell backward, ending in a long black tassel. The women and girls were for the most part attired like the maiden who had first appeared, though several of them wore handkerchiefs tied about their heads.

"Here's the demarch," shouted a chorus.

"And Papa-Maleko," cried the rest, as though in response.

A majestic old Cretan, with two silver-mounted pistols and a long pearl-handled knife in his belt, took his place in the middle of the line. He was soon joined by a priest in venerable robes and tall hat. Curtis imagined that the inhabitants of some comic opera town had come out on the walls to hold parley with himself and his two friends. He wondered what character he was, but his foot hurt so that he was unable to make up his mind.

... imagined that the inhabitants of some comic opera town
had come out on the walls to hold parley

"What is your business with us?" asked the demarch, pompously, remembering that he was acting in official capacity in the presence of his entire constituency.

Michali explained at length. His story threw the listening Cretans into a state of great excitement. Several of them had lighted the beacon for the guidance of the Holy Mary. Two or three youngsters, letting themselves down from the edge of the natural battlement, descended by means of shrubbery and jutting stones, sprawling in midair like huge spiders. On reaching the bottom, they commenced an animated conversation with Michali, the upshot of which was that they must all go up as the youngsters had just come down, and that it was very easy if you had courage. In proof of which, a boy of fifteen sprawled skyward again, looking back every moment to laugh and shout "Enibros!"

"I can do it easily," said Michali, with pride. "All Cretans can climb, if some of them cannot swim. Can you follow me?"

"I can certainly try," replied the Lieutenant.

Finally Michali and Lindbohm concluded to mount, and consult with the citizens as to the best means of assisting Curtis to the top.

"There's some other way to get up," suggested the Cretan, "only they are suspicious of us as yet, and will not tell."

Michali, true to his boast, climbed the face of the terrace with the greatest ease. Lindbohm reminded Curtis of the frog and the well in the mental arithmetic.

"How long will it take him to reach the top," he mused, "if he stops to rest during every seventh minute?"

He was a genius at mental arithmetic and had nearly figured out the proposition to submit it to Lindbohm, when he heard people shouting above. Looking up, he perceived that they were letting down a long rope, and that several young Cretans, accompanied by Michali, were coming with it.

"Put it around your waist," explained the latter, "they will pull on the other end, and so you will go up, slowly, slowly. You can use your hands and the good foot to help and to keep yourself away from the stones and bushes."

Several pairs of strong hands pulled Curtis safely up the wall, and he found himself in the public square of a picturesque little village. White, two-story houses surrounded an open space, in the midst of which stood an immense platane tree. Under this latter were four rickety tables and a dozen or so of chairs, for the accommodation of those who chose to enjoy the beauties of nature in the open air and partake of the mayor's coffee or masticha. The mayor, be it observed, was proprietor of the only refectory the town was large enough to support. The influence of the saloon in politics is felt even in the mountains of Crete.

Lindbohm and the priest rushed forward and assisted the American to one of the chairs. The mayor brought another and tenderly placed the lame foot upon it, shouting, meanwhile, a storm of voluble orders, in a good-natured, blustering voice. Michali arrived and interpreted, for which Curtis was thankful, as he did not understand the mayor's guttural, rapid Greek.

"He bids you welcome in the name of all Ambellaki! He has ordered you a glass of masticha. Ah! Here it comes now. You are to stay in the priest's house, who will say a prayer over your foot as soon as he gets you home."

The group was by this time surrounded by the entire population of the town, or as much of it as was not out in the vineyards, or on the hills with the sheep and the goats. Curtis rose on one leg.

"Behold the human stork," he exclaimed in English, because he did not know the Greek for "stork."

"What does he say?" asked the demarch. Michali explained the joke at length. "He compares himself to a stork, because a stork usually stands on one leg. He, being lame, and unable to stand on both legs, rests his entire weight on one, like a stork."

"But he does not at all resemble a stork," objected several voices.

"They say you do not resemble a stork," explained the interpreter.

"O, thanks! But I was joking. Don't you Cretans understand a joke?"

"He says he is joking, and he fears we do not understand a joke."

"It is a joke, my children," cried the demarch, "an American joke, and it is the part of hospitality and politeness to laugh," whereupon he smote the table with his mighty palm and burst into a roar of Olympian laughter. The constituency looked on in silent amazement.

"Laugh, you donkeys!" cried the demarch. "Laugh, I command you. Are we uncivilized like the Turks?" And he strode threateningly toward the group, which broke in all directions and darted for cover. They laughed, however, long and conscientiously at first, but, ere they had ceased, a genuine ring crept into their mirth. The priest and the demarch assisted Curtis to his temporary residence. On the way shockheaded boys looked out at him from over ruined walls of adobe and cobblestones, and, pointing their fingers, cried, "There goes the stork!" and girls peeping from behind doors or pushing their blooming faces through screens of trellised vine, giggled, "How are you, Mr. Stork?"

Curtis' name was seldom asked in the mountains of Crete. He was known and is to this day, as Kyrios Pelargos—Mr. Stork. As soon as opportunity presented he made a new head in his note book and entered the following observation:

"Character of the modern Cretans. First: Extraordinary sense of humor."

CHAPTER IV
A DINNER OF HERBS

The house of Papa-Maleko Nicolaides consisted of three rooms, two downstairs and one above. Curtis was given a seat upon an antique couch with a wooden frame, upon whose high back was carved the date, 1855. Papa-Maleko's father-in-law had received it in that year as part of his wife's dowry, and had given it in turn to his own daughter. It was a highly prized possession.

A trunk studded with brass-headed nails, several low wooden stools and a bureau completed the furniture of the apartment.

The priest brought a stool for Curtis' foot, and lifted the wounded member tenderly thereon. The windows and doors were darkened by the wondering population. Two or three leading citizens pushed through into the room and commenced talking in chorus. All gesticulated wildly. Lindbohm knelt down and began to remove the stocking.

"I know something of medicine," he said. "Do I hurt you?"

"Go on," replied Curtis; "that's a mere detail."

Lindbohm poked the puffy sole here and there until his patient gave a jump, as when the dentist finds a nerve.

"There it is," cried Curtis. "There's something in it."

Further examination discovered the head of a black sliver, which, after several attempts with a penknife blade and his thumbnail, the Lieutenant succeeded in extracting. The curiosity of the throng, that now packed the room almost to suffocation, found expression in a storm of volubility. The sliver was passed from hand to hand. Curtis thought he detected again and again the syllables, "many, many." He forgot they were speaking Greek.

"Do they say there are others?" he asked.

"No," replied Michali; "they say 'kaiemene,' which means poor fellow!"

"O, tell 'em it's nothing. Just a sliver in my foot. I'll be all right in an hour."

"On the contrary, I regret to say that you a sore foot may have during two or three weeks. It is a spine of the achinoos."

"O, the sea hedgehog. Is it poisonous?"

"Not exactly poisonous, but it will make much irritation. You should have spoken of him immediately, then it would not have been so bad. Did it not hurt very bad?"

"Why, it hurt some, of course, but I thought I had scratched my foot on a stone. I wasn't going to delay the game for a little scratch."

"Well, by Jupiter!" cried Lindbohm, "you Americans have plenty of gravel."

"Plenty of what?"

"Plenty of gravel. Isn't that what you say? I heard the expression once."

"Perhaps you mean sand?"

"Maybe it is. At any rate, you've got it."

At this moment a tremendous hubbub arose. The demarch lunged through the crowd, and, throwing his constituents to right and left, made way for the entry of an old woman, who stabbed the ground at every step with a long, quivering staff. She was bent like the new moon, and her wrinkled skin was the color of a mild cigar. In her left hand she held, a wisp of dried herbs. The cries of relief and joy which her presence evoked reminded Curtis of the arrival of a tardy fire engine.

"Who's this?" he asked.

"She is the wise woman," replied Michali. "She will put something on the foot that will cure him very quick."

Her orders, delivered in a shrill voice, resulted in the immediate production of warm water, a towel and a basin. The old woman made the sign of the cross over the foot. She then washed it, applied the leaves and bound them on with rags.

"That does feel nice," said Curtis. "How much ought I to offer her?"

"Money?" asked Michali.

"Yes, of course."

"Nothing, nothing. She would be—what you call him? She would suffer in her feelings. You are the guest of the village. Bid me to thank her for you."

"Sure. Tell her she's a regular old brick. Tell her my own mother couldn't have done it better."

"Ah, that, yes. I do not know what is that brick, but the mother will make her very glad."

Michali evidently knew what to say, for she patted Curtis' head affectionately, and tears ran down her cheeks.

"She says she had three boys, all big, strong fellows like you, and the Turks have kill them all," explained Michali.

"Yes," replied Curtis. "I understood the most of that myself. She speaks very plain."

The demarch now made a brief speech, which resulted in clearing the house. As the Ambellakians retired, a merry voice shouted:

"Perastika, Kyrie Pelarge!" (May you recover soon, Mr. Stork) and all took up the refrain, shouting the syllables over and over, amid great laughter. To Michali's unbounded delight, Curtis cried "Eucharisto!" (Thanks.)

"That was splendid," said Michali, when all had left except himself, Lindbohm, the demarch and Papa-Maleko. "How did you understand what they have said?"

"I studied modern Greek in college and used to practice on the Greeks in Boston. But I understand hardly anything. I'm disgusted with myself. I said "Eucharisto" because it was the only word I could think of."

"O, you are too modest. You answered exactly right. They said, 'May you get well soon, Mr. Stork,' and you answered, Thank you, thank you."

Curtis took from his pocket a book, badly damaged by the bath which it had received when he had jumped for his life from the ill-fated "Holy Mary," but still serviceable.

"This is a new method, just out," he explained, holding it up to view. "O, I shall be talking in a day or two—I lose confidence when there are so many people together. They all jabber at once, and I can't understand a word."

The demarch and the priest examined with great reverence the copy of Rangave's excellent method.

Their ideas of books were chiefly associated with the Holy Scriptures and the "Lives of the Saints." The mayor crossed himself devoutly, but the priest refrained. He had heard that there were profane books.

Evening was now at hand, and a girl came in, bringing two lighted candles in tall brass candlesticks. She was the maiden whom the shipwrecked strangers had first seen, standing on the edge of the precipice, with the water jug on her shoulder. Her height was rather greater than that of the ordinary woman, her figure was both slender and athletic. There was something antique and statuesque in her attitude now, as she advanced, holding the two tall candlesticks. Papa-Maleko introduced her as his daughter and Michali explained. She smiled sweetly and replied with charming graciousness of manner that the strangers were welcome. There was no simpering nor coyness. She bore herself with the modest courage of innate nobility and innocence. The false standards of so-called civilization were unknown to her. She was a daughter of the democracy of the mountains. In her theory of the world all women were virtuous, and all men, except Turks, were gentlemen and heroes. When Curtis heard her speak Greek, he redoubled his resolve to perfect himself in the language without delay. He even framed a sentence with which to address her, but a certain shyness, the fear of exciting laughter in those beautiful eyes through some mistake in accent or grammar, deterred him.

Lindbohm, as soon as he comprehended that he was being presented to the mistress of the house, brought his heels together, and, bowing low, lifted her hand to his lips. It was a knightly and courtier-like act, that clothed him in dignity despite the shrunken and salt incrusted Prince Albert and the grotesque remnants of shoes. Panayota flushed like a peony and looked inquiringly at Michali.

"It is the custom among the gentlemen in his country," replied the young patriot, who had read of similar scenes in foreign romances. "He salutes you as though you were a queen."

"It is a beautiful custom," said the demarch. "But is not the American also a gentleman?" for Curtis, rising with difficulty on one leg, had shaken Panayota cordially by the hand.

"O, the Americans are great democrats," replied Michali. "This is a royal salute, you know, and they know nothing about such things."

The beautiful young girl brought in a tablecloth and spread it on the floor. The demarch stepped to the door, and, calling a young boy from the street, said something to him in a low tone.

A noisy but good-natured discussion immediately arose between the mayor on the one hand and Papa-Maleko and his daughter on the other. The priest, darting from the door, called the boy back; the mayor, seizing Lindbohm's cane, threatened the boy with it, and pushed the priest back into the house.

Panayota protested laughingly, calling upon the Virgin and crossing herself.

"What's the row, anyway?" asked Curtis, to his great disgust not being able to catch enough words from the rapidly-spoken sentences to be quite sure of their meaning. Panayota's enunciation was more clear cut and distinct than that of the others, and from what she said, he concluded that the mayor was ordering food from his café, a proceeding which the priest and his daughter good-naturedly resented, as a reflection on their own hospitality.

"Seems like a quarrel between Church and State," observed Curtis.

Michali explained the remark, easily understood in Greek, and the mayor, shouting great thunder claps of laughter, patted Curtis on the back and cried, "Bravo! bravo!"

Panayota placed on the cloth a huge loaf of brown bread, a plate of black olives and a jug of water. The Sphakiotes do not take kindly to wine. But the feast was not yet complete; a young man entered, bearing a large bowl of brown earthenware, filled with something that emitted a cloud of fragrant steam; and a plate containing a large chunk of white halva. These he deposited upon the tablecloth, and Panayota, with a graceful wave of the hand and a dazzling smile that flashed from her white teeth and beamed in her great brown eyes, cried "Oreeste." The demarch sat down on the floor, crossing his legs under him. The priest laid his hand upon Lindbohm's shoulder, and pointed to the feast. The Swede sat down as awkwardly and as many jointedly as a camel. The floor seemed far away to him, and when he had finally reached it, do what he could with his legs, his knees persisted in rising on a level with his ears. Curtis slid his lame foot along until he was sitting on the floor with his back against the sofa. The Cretans made the sign of the cross, which corresponds with our blessing, and Panayota, who was standing meekly by as serving maid, distributed four forks among the five diners. There not being enough to go around, the demarch unsheathed a long knife whose silver-mounted handle ended broadly, with two flaring ears, not unlike the butt of an Arab's gun. Cutting the bread with this, he impaled a bounteous portion and offered it to Curtis, who took it from the point, saying "Eucharisto, polu, Demarche." (Many thanks, Mr. Mayor.)

"Bravo, bravo!" cried Michali, "you're getting on. At this rate you will speak Greek by to-morrow better than I do!"

"This is truly wonderful," observed the priest, and asked Curtis, slowly and distinctly, "How many years have you been in Greece?"

"He says—" began Michali.

"Hold on, old man, I understand him," interrupted Curtis, and he replied, slowly but correctly, in Greek:

"I have been here only two weeks."

"This is a miracle," roared the demarch. "We shall make a Cretan of you; but let us begin eating," and, spearing a piece of bread with his knife, he dipped it into the soup.

"You must do as I do," said Michali, dipping his own chunk and eating it from his fork. "This is lenten soup—black-eyed beans cooked with oil. Over this was the contest between Church and State. The mayor's cook makes famous lenten soup and Kyr' Nikolaki wished to send for some, but Papa-Maleko desired the dinner himself to furnish."

"Kalo?" asked the mayor, holding a huge chunk of dripping bread suspended in midair over the bowl.

"He asks you is it good?" explained Michali to Lindbohm.

"Kalo? kalo?" repeated Kyr' Nikolaki.

"Kalo," replied Lindbohm.

A medium of general communication was now established. Papa-Maleko and Kyr' Nikolaki with nearly every bite smiled upon Curtis and Lindbohm and asked "Kalo?" and they both replied, "Kalo, kalo."

After dinner the demarch departed, taking Michali with him, and Panayota, made up the bed on the floor for Curtis and Lindbohm. She brought in a mattress from outdoors, which somewhat mystified Curtis until he remembered that the stone stairway to the upper regions was built on the outside of the house. She laid a sheet on the mattress and over that a quilt with a sheet sewed to it in such a manner that the end was doubled over and bore the initials, beautifully embroidered, of Panayota Nicolaides.

CHAPTER V
SOME PICTURES AND A RECITATION

Curtis was confined to his room four days with the foot, which time he devoted assiduously to the method.

On the fifth day he was able, with the aid of a rustic crutch, to get down to the demarch's café. Michali assisted him as he hobbled down the stony street, his lame foot clumsily bundled in rags and swinging in the air. Lindbohm strode on ahead, instinctively making sword-like passes with the rattan cane. The latter's appearance had been much dignified by the assumption of a swashbuckling pair of yellow boots. He had been repeatedly offered a Cretan fez, but he clung with inexplicable affection to the shapeless and uneasy straw, still tethered to his buttonhole.

"Behold!" cried Michali, as they reached a turn in the street whence the view was unobstructed over the tops of the houses. "Yonder is the ravine where we came up, and there is the sea. You will hardly find a village in all Greece from which the sea is not visible."

The village, on this fragrant and dewy spring morning, was peaceful and idyllic. Curtis drew a long breath, and, closing his eyes, imagined himself in ancient Arkadia. On the balconies of the neatly whitewashed houses pots of basil and begonia had been set out, and formed green patches against the white. Here and there an almond tree in full bloom dispensed wide sweetness, or shook its snowy petals to the breeze. The site of the town was so uneven that it seemed possible to step from the threshold of some of the dwellings on to the red-tiled roofs of others. There was water everywhere. Sometimes it ran through wooden troughs and sometimes it darted down clear byways worn in the blue rock. They walked beside a wall, on which was an aqueduct, and they heard the water gurgling above their heads.

The wall was overgrown with vines and a long line of poppies had leaped atop. Slightly bowed by the wind they seemed stooping to drink. At the end of the wall the rivulet poured into a round stone basin, sunk into the ground for the convenience of animals. A plane tree waited patiently at the basin that the sheep and goats might drink in the shade. A wandering peddler with his donkey came down a tributary street. The animal was sandwiched between two boxes, each as large as himself. The street was so steep that he seemed to be walking on his front legs.

The demarch was standing in the door of his café. A single grape vine, spreading out on a frame, supported by two posts and the wall, made a canopy above his head. The leaves were new, and were as pale green as young frogs. Kyrios Nikolaki was an imposing figure, and doubtless felt his position in the community, combining as he did in one person the important functions of mayor, grocer, saloon keeper and banker. He stood now, with his hairy hands crossed over his semi-spherical stomach, watching the advent of his guests and smiling benignly. As Curtis glanced at the tall yellow boots, the voluminous breeches, the double-breasted vest with woolen balls for buttons, and the rakish fez, he thought for the first time since landing in Crete of his camera. That had gone down with the "Holy Mary." The demarch was clean-shaven, with the exception of his gray mustache, and his shirtsleeves were fresh from the iron. His cheeks were florid with good living, and he would have been a comely man save for the fact that his lower lids had fallen a little, disclosing a red and raw looking spot under each eye.

"Welcome! welcome!" he cried, as the party arrived. "How is Mr. Stork and the Lieutenant? And Kyr' Michali? And where is the Church this morning? Why did you not bring him along, that he might take a drink of cognac with the State?"

"I am very well," replied Curtis in Greek. "We did not bring the Church, because we did not see him."

Curtis had made great progress in Panayota's language. He had found the girl very willing to talk with him and not a little interested in his efforts to acquire fluency in her native tongue. He had also made this discovery, which pleased him greatly, that the Greek of these sturdy mountaineers was easier for him than that of Athens, as it possessed a more archaic flavor.

"Marvelous! marvelous!" shouted the demarch. "Your progress is wonderful. I observe it every day."

"Ah, this is comfortable," said Curtis, sitting on a bench with his back against the plane tree. "Are all the Cretan villages as pretty as this?"

"Some are much more beautiful," cried Michali. "That is, those which the Turks have not destroyed. But this village is not so easy for them to reach. You see how hard it is from the sea to come. And behold, we have all around us a circle of mountains."

"An enemy couldn't get in at all," said Lindbohm, casting an experienced eye about. He was striding nervously to and fro, fencing with an imaginary opponent.

"Yes, one way. There is, what you call it—a cut in the hill—"

"A ravine," suggested Curtis.

"Yes, I think so. A ravine, very deep and very crooked. But the shepherds watch him all the time."

The conversation did not progress rapidly, because Greek politeness demanded that Michali translate every word for the demarch, whose own remarks, moreover, it was necessary to turn into English.

"Would you like to see the inside of my store?" asked the latter, a lull in the conversation making him feel that he must do something for the entertainment of his guests. Michali had again described the shipwreck, the English had been denounced as barbarians, worse than the Turks, and the demarch had told a story of a famous battle in which thirty Cretans slew two hundred Mohammedans, on which occasion he himself had led the victorious party. There seemed to be nothing more to talk about.

"I have some very fine pictures inside," said the mayor. "Come, Lieutenant, Mr. Stork, Michali."

"Where are the pictures?" asked Curtis, when they had entered, hoping that his host possessed a collection of Byzantine, or perhaps Venetian, works of art. Kyr' Nikolaki glanced about the room and waved his hand majestically.

"They are hanging on the walls," he replied.

Borrowing Lindbohm's cane, he made the circuit of the room, pointing to the wretched prints that were hung high up, close to the ceiling.

"This," he explained, "is Marko Botsares, a famous Greek patriot of the war of independence. Have you ever heard of him?"

"Heard of him!" cried Curtis.

"At midnight in his guarded tent
The Turk lay dreaming of the hour,
When Greece, her knee in suppliance bent
Should tremble at his power!"

"And this is Ali Pasha, with his head in the lap of his favorite wife," continued the mayor. "He lived at Janina. He was finally killed, as he deserved to be. He terrified Albania, Epirus and a part of Macedonia, but the Suliotes he could not terrify. Their women preferred to die rather than submit to Turks." Kyr' Nikolaki was reciting, after the manner of a lecturer, one of those glorious incidents in modern Greek history which all Greeks know by heart.

"Why do you go to Suli for an example of heroism?" cried Michali, springing to his feet, his eyes blazing with excitement. "He will tell you of the deeds of the brave Suliote women, and how they blew themselves up with their own powder, or danced, singing, over the edge of one cliff, to save their honor. Why shall he not tell rather of the convent of Arkadia?"

"Ah, certainly, certainly, tell them of Arkadia," cried the demarch, catching the name.

"It was Mustapha Pasha," continued Michali, speaking rapidly despite his unfamiliarity with English. His fists were clenched, and he jerked out the words by nervously smiting the air, as though beating on an invisible table.

"He had come with very many Turks to Retimo. He kills, he burns. The women, and the small children, they cannot climb over the hills and sleep on the rocks. They take asylum in the monastery of Arkadia, on south side of Mt. Ida. The old men go, too. Mustapha, he puts cannon on mountains, all around and fires down from above. By and by, he beats down the walls, and his army rush into the court. He say 'Yield.' The women, the old men, the friars, they say 'No, we die!' and they shoot from the windows. O, they kill very many Turks. Then Mustapha bring in his cannon, and he commence shoot at walls of building. Pretty soon he will make a hole. Father Gabriel, the Hegoumenos, he see this. He shout through the roar of the cannon: 'Shall we die, my children, or shall we yield?' They say all together 'We shall die!'"

Lindbohm was striding up and down before the speaker. The demarch still held the rattan cane, but the Lieutenant was making home thrusts with his closed fist.

"Father Gabriel he stretch out his arms. They all fall on their knees, the women, the children, the old men. The Hegoumenos blesses them; he say, 'Father, into thy hands I commit these souls!' Then he goes down cellar. They know where he gone. The women hug their babies tight and begin to sing the hymn of liberty, and the men join in. They are all looking to the sky and chanting—" and Michali sang:

"From the bones of the Greeks upspringing,
Who died that we might be free,
And the strength of thy strong youth bringing—
Hail, Liberty, Hail to thee!

"Every moment a bullet comes through and kills somebody, but they know nothing, now, except the song 'Hail, Liberty.' Then the wall falls and in rush the Turks and begin to kill, when 'boom' the powder magazine roars like one gun, and all are dead—Greeks, Turks, all dead—ah! all dead together!—two hundred Turks!"

But the demarch, not understanding all this, was unable to enter fully into the enthusiasm of the others. He was anxious to continue with his picture gallery.

"This," he said, "is the Lordos Beeron, who, being descended from the ancient Greeks, came over to this country to fight for his native land."

Curtis, despite his enthusiasm for Byron, did not rise. He had seen that woodcut before, in Athens. It represented the youthful poet wearing a brass cavalry helmet with a sublime plume. This is the Byron honored among the uneducated classes in Greece, who know him as soldier and not as poet. With nodding plume and warlike eye he frowns terribly down from the dingy walls of a thousand khans and wayside inns. In this apotheosis he no longer holds high converse with Shelley and Tom Moore; he hobnobs with Ypsilanti, Botsares and Admiral Miaoules.

"This," continued Kyr' Nikolaki, "is the most beautiful woman in the world. I have never found any one who knew her name, but all agree that she is a Greek—probably a Sphakiote."

Lindbohm and Michali gazed earnestly at the cheap engraving, but no name was visible. Curtis arose, and, placing his hand on the mayor's shoulder, hopped across the room.

"An American actress, by Jove!" he exclaimed. "She's a beauty, indeed, but she's an American, old man." And in Greek to the mayor: "She's an American—ah—I can't think of the word for 'actor.' Michali, tell him her picture is to be found in every nook and cranny of the civilized globe. I can't say 'nook' and 'cranny' in Greek."

CHAPTER VI
THE FIRST OF MAY

All the morning of April thirtieth Curtis saw nothing of Panayota. She was gone into the fields and upon the hillsides with the other women and the children of the village to gather flowers for the May-day festival. Late in the afternoon the whole town set out for Hepta-Miloi, or Seven-Mills, the place in the mountains where, year after year, they were accustomed to hold this innocent and beautiful celebration, one of the most fragrant and lovely of all the inheritances from the days of the aesthetic old gods. Laughing, singing, shouting merry sallies and replies, the procession scrambled up the stony, winding street of the village, laden with baskets and gayly colored bags filled with provisions. Everybody, too, carried flowers—flowers in baskets, in aprons, in the hands. There were donkeys and dogs innumerable. Some of the donkeys carried tables strapped to their backs, with the four legs sticking up into the air, and giving the impression that, if one of the animals should keel a somerset into a ravine, he would be sure to light upon one or the other of his two sets of feet. Upon others of these nodding, shambling little animals rode such of the villagers as could not make so arduous a journey on foot: a picturesque old man in holiday costume, resplendent in bright, new fez, ruffled shirt and gaudy sash; here and there an old woman who had made the same journey every year for the last forty years; and several strings of small children, four and five on a donkey's backbone, like monkeys on a limb or kidneys on a spit. The demarch, in accordance with the dignity of his office, rode at the head of the procession, side by side, when the road was not too narrow, with Papa-Maleko, whose animal was nearly covered by his flowing black robe, and who held an umbrella over his tall hat. Lindbohm had refused the luxury of a mount and strode sturdily along with his hand upon Curtis' saddle. Up and up they climbed beyond the last plumed outposts of olive groves into the kingdom of the pines. At times they walked by the side of a deep chasm at whose bottom swirled, darted and leapt a stream of molten silver or of ink, according as it flashed in the setting sun or crept beneath the shadow of dank ferns or deep green trees. At such times Curtis' moth-eaten, blue-gray beast walked upon the ticklish, imminent edge of destruction, loosening rocks and bits of earth that went scurrying into the waters far below. Entreaty, threats, blows upon the side of the head with the rope that did service as a bridle, were of no effect to make him walk elsewhere.

"Look here, Lindbohm," cried Curtis, "I've told you my address. If I plunge down yonder giddy height, write to my governor, will you? And don't trouble to pick up the pieces."

"What's the matter?" shouted the demarch, looking back.

"This donkey will surely fall with me."

"Bah! Let him have his head. He knows his business. No donkey ever falls."

"What if he does? Cannot a stork fly?" asked a black-eyed, roguish maiden, who possibly thought that the American could learn good Greek from more than one pair of lips. This sally evoked such an inordinate peal of good-natured laughter that Curtis was unable to think of an appropriate reply, and contented himself with pulling a rose from the basket hanging at his saddle and throwing it at the saucy girl.

In the purple twilight they came in sight of the first of the seven mills. A tall, slanting barrel of masonry received the water that turned the stone wheel that lay upon its face in a small building covered with reddish brown tiles. The miller and his wife, dusty as moths, came out to greet the merry throng that poured into his little plateau with much shouting and singing and strumming of guitars. Two or three shock-headed youngsters peeped from behind the building, and a girl, probably three years old, clothed only in a flour sack that reached to the middle of her stomach, ran, like a frightened chicken, to cover in the folds of her mother's dress. The child was glowing with health and beautiful as an infant Dionysus from the broken arm of a Hermes carved by Praxiteles himself. And now they were come into a region of rank, water-loving trees, great ferns and streams of water that slipped smoothly and silently through square sluices of white masonry. The mills were close together. At the fourth in number they stopped and found that brave preparation had already been made. The plateau before the mill-house was here larger than ordinary and in its midst grew a wide-spreading oak from a lower branch of which hung a powerful lamp, protected from the wind by a glass cage. At the foot of a shielding wall of rock, several lambs were fragrantly roasting upon long wooden spits, and by each an old man squatted, so intent upon turning the carcass that he scarcely looked up to welcome the gay and noisy villagers.

"How go the lambs, Barba Yanne?"

"Is it tender, think you, Barba Spiro?"

"Are they nearly done, Kosta? Holy Virgin, what an appetite I've got!"

"And I!"

With a perfect babble of such exclamations, mingled with much laughter, and many shouted orders and directions, Ambellaki took possession of the place where it had elected to outwear the night with song and feasting and to welcome the First of May. The tables were unstrapped from the backs of the donkeys and set in line. Cloths were spread and candles were lighted in candlesticks surmounted by protecting glass globes. Chairs were taken down from others of the donkeys, and two or three long benches were produced by the miller. A dozen pairs of strong hands were extended to Curtis and he was assisted from the back of his wilful beast to a comfortable seat.

"Whew! I'm glad to get down from there," he exclaimed to Lindbohm. "I think I'll stay here till my foot gets well and walk back. Looks jolly, doesn't it? And how good those lambs smell! I believe I could eat one all by myself."

Plates, bottles containing oil floating upon vinegar, decanters of wine, great piles of crisp salad, loaves of brown bread, sardellas arranged upon plates like the spokes of a wheel, tiny snow drifts of country cheese—began to appear upon the table. Lindbohm entered into the spirit of the occasion with genial enthusiasm. Although he could not speak a word of Greek, he blundered everywhere, eager to assist. He lifted the children from the donkeys, pulled plates and provisions from the baskets, and washed the long tender lettuce at a place where the water leapt from one conduit to another. All this time the old men were patiently turning the lambs. Every now and then one of them would dip half a lemon into a plate of melted butter and rub it over the brown, sizzling flesh. Beneath each of the lambs was a shallow bed of ashes. The coals that glowed there were not visible, for, in roasting meat à la palikari, the best effects are obtained if it be slowly done. The proper roasting of a lamb is a matter of supreme importance. Reputations are won thereby in a single day, and as easily lost. The meat must be done clear through, evenly and just to a turn—not one turn of the spit too many nor too few; it must be so tender that it is just ready to drop from the bone, and have that delicious flavor which is imparted from the coals of the fragrant wild thyme, but it must not taste smoky. Verily a great art this, and the old men who sat squat at the cranks of the spits had no time for social distractions. Everything was ready now except the lambs, and a great silence fell upon the company. One young fellow, who offered to lay a small wager that Barba Yanne would be the first man ready, was sternly rebuked by the priest:

"Silence! do you not know that this is the critical moment, and you may spoil everything by distracting their attention?"

So they waited for a seeming eternity, sniffing the delicious aroma and watching the appetizing contest with hungry eyes. At last the young man of the wager broke the spell by crying:

"Na! I should have won." For Barba Yanne was indeed rising slowly to his feet, painfully straightening out the hinges of his aged knees.

"Praise God!" shouted a chorus of voices.

"Do you not see that it is ready?" asked Barba Yanne reproachfully.

"O, yes!" exclaimed the demarch, "we must take it up. If it stays one instant over time on the fire the delicate flavor will be ruined."

Half a dozen men sprang towards the fire, but Lindbohm, comprehending the action, was before them all. Lifting the lamb by one end of the spit, he advanced towards the tables, and looked inquiringly about.

"What shall I do with it?" he asked Michali. "There is no plate big enough, and if I lay it on the table it will spoil the cloth."

Shouts of laughter greeted the Swede's evident perplexity, and even the bare teeth of the spitted animal seemed grinning at him in derision.

"But you do not put it on the table," cried Michali running to his assistance. "You stick the sharp end of the spit in the ground and stand it up by the side of the tree. So—that's right. Head up."

The demarch now approached Lindbohm and laughingly offered him a Cretan knife and a huge fork.

"He wants you to carve," explained Michali. "It is a great honor."

"No! no!" cried the Swede, pushing the demarch playfully back. "I do not know how. Besides, I am too weak from hunger. Moreover, I haven't the time." And he seated himself resolutely at the table. The demarch therefore carved, and piled the meat upon plates which the girls held for him. Before he had finished, Barba Spiro brought his lamb and solemnly stuck it up by its partly carved mate.

"Shall I cut up this one, too?" asked Kyr' Nikolaki; he had finished with number one. "Or shall we eat what we have first?"

"We will begin on this one," said the priest, "and I will carve the second." After a playful struggle he dispossessed the mayor of the knife and fork and led him to the head of the table. Then the good priest reverently bent his head and made the sign of the cross, and all of his flock followed his example. Even Lindbohm and Curtis, watching carefully, did as the others. And now the feast was on in earnest, silently at first, till the sharpest pangs of hunger were appeased, with song and laughter later in its course. The three guests and the older members of the community sat at the table. The others and the children found seats upon the ground, in the doorway of the mill-house, on the water troughs. Conversation began in full-mouthed remarks as to the quality of the lamb.

"This is marvellous!"

"A masterpiece."

"Tasty."

"A miracle. Done just to a turn. Neither too much nor too little."

"Bravo, Barba Yanne," said the mayor, in judicial tones, raising his glass meanwhile.

"Barba Yanne! Barba Yanne!" shouted the entire board, and there was a great clinking of glasses. The old man swelled and flushed with pleasure.

"I ought to know how to roast a lamb," he said. "I have done it this thirty years."

A girl brought the head of Barba Spiro's lamb and laid it before the demarch, who plucked out one of the eyes with a fork and passed the morsel to Curtis, who took it and looked inquiringly at Michali.

"What am I to do with it?" he asked.

"Eat it. It is the most delicate tid-bit of the whole lamb—sweet, juicy, delicious."

"I've no doubt it's juicy," replied Curtis, "but I couldn't eat it to save my life. It looks as though it could see. Excuse me, Kyr' Demarche," he continued in Greek, "I do not care for the eye. If you will give me a little more of the meat, please—" and he passed his plate.

"Not like the eye!" shouted everybody in astonishment. Lindbohm took the succulent morsel from Curtis' hand, and swallowed it with a loud sipping sound, as though it were an oyster.

"Kalo! kalo!" he exclaimed, smacking his lips.

And so the feast wore on. When it was not possible for anybody to eat another mouthful, Turkish coffee was prepared over the miller's foufous, two or three little portable stoves, circular and made of sheet iron; and cigarettes were lighted. Under the soothing influence of the mild Cretan tobacco silence fell again, disturbed only by the soft splashing of waters. Through a rift in the branches of the giant oak Curtis could see the bright, silver bow of the new moon, and, far below, a glittering star, like the tip of an arrow shot athwart the night. The girls were tumbling the flowers into a pile beneath the lamp: bright red geraniums, clusters of the fragrant heliotrope, April roses, small, red and very sweet; aromatic basil, myrtle with its bridal green. Then they sat down about the heap and began to weave garlands, using the myrtle as a background for the pied coloring of the blossoms. A nightingale sang somewhere among the trees behind the old mill, the waters never ceased to murmur and gurgle in the moonlight, and a faint breeze from the far sea brought a message of cherry trees in bloom. A young man sitting on the ground with his back against the tree played a few chords upon a guitar, and sang, with much feeling, one line of a couplet:

"My little angel, sugar sweet, angelic honey maiden"—

That he was not improvising was evident from the fact that all the Greeks present joined him in the second line:

"Oh sweeter than cold water is, that angels drink in Eden!"

For several moments he strummed the strings softly and then sang:

"If I should die at last of love, my grave with basil
cover;"—

and again came the response,

"And when you water it perchance you'll weep for
your poor lover!"

The words even in Greek did not mean much, but they sounded very beautiful to those simple peasants, for they were associated with many such scenes as this; they carried the memories of some back to childhood, of others perhaps to their wedding day. They made Panayota think of the little cottage among the Sphakiote mountains, and of her mother singing as she paddled the white clothes at the brook. The words contained the untranslatable spirit of poetry, the power to move the heart by association rather than by their meaning.

Some one proposed a dance; one by one the sturdy mountaineers took their places in a line and soon, hands linked, they were bounding beneath the flickering lamp in the wild Pyrrhic. Loud calls were made for different members of the company, famous as leaders, and these led the line in turn, vying with one another in difficulty of steps executed. When Lindbohm arose from his seat and took his place at the tail of the line, he was welcomed with shouts of "Bravo! bravo!" He had observed the simpler steps of the minor performers carefully, and acquitted himself with so much credit, that the girls, their hands full of flowers and half-finished wreaths, arose and came forward, clapping their palms and shrieking with delight. And when the handkerchief was handed to him and he was motioned to the head of the line, he did not refuse, but leapt into the air, whirled about under the arm of his nearest neighbor, snapped his fingers in time to the music and cut other terpsichorean pranks, to everybody's intense delight.

But dancing is hard work, and even youth will tire. The last capable leader had done his part, and even the girls, with much laughter and many feminine shrieks and protests, had been pulled to their feet and given a turn, when Michali was asked to tell again the story of the shipwreck, as many there present had only heard it at second hand. He complied, and his vivid and picturesque narrative held his audience in rapt attention. When he had finished many were fairly carried away with excitement, and a loud-voiced and indignant clamor arose concerning the state of Crete, the action of the powers and matters of like import.

"Silence! silence!" cried the mayor, rising to his feet and hammering on the table. "These are not matters for the May festival. Our village, moreover, is in no danger from the Turks. We have always dwelt quietly and peacefully behind our mountains, making our cheese, harming no one, suffering no harm. However that may be, this is not a suitable occasion to discuss war and politics."

"True! true!" shouted his faithful constituency.

"I am to blame," said Michali, "for the manner in which I told the story. I will, therefore, make amends by singing a song, quite suitable, I think, to the occasion. Spiro, play me the accompaniment."

After the applause had died, revived, and died away several times like flames that are brought to life by vagrant gusts of wind, Spiro, the owner of the guitar, offered to sing.

"Mind that it's perfectly proper for the ears of the ladies," cautioned Papa-Maleko, as the young man seated himself in a chair and prepared to play.

"He has a fine voice," said Curtis in Greek, when Spiro had finished.

"O, Spiro is one of our most famous singers," replied the demarch. "And now, Kyr' Yanne, it's your turn."

"He means you," said Michali in English. "Yanne is the Greek for John. He means to be very friendly, to show that you are one of us."

"I will sing you," replied Curtis, without the least hesitation, "a Greek song that I have myself written," and turning to Michali, "I can't quite explain that in Greek: it is an American college song that I have translated into Greek. I have read it over two or three times to Panayota and she says she understands it. Indeed, she has changed it a little." And he sang in a baritone voice of indifferent timbre, but with great spirit, the following words to the tune of "The Man Who Drinks His Whiskey Clear":

Greek song

"Tell them," said Lindbohm to Michali, "that I cannot sing in Greek, but that I desire to do my share and, with their permission, I will sing a little song in my own language, appropriate, I assure you, to the occasion." Michali translated and there was no doubt as to the reception of the proposition. Lindbohm had not gone farther than the first line before smothered "Ahs!" of admiration were heard. He was a singer. His voice was mellow, pleading, tender, rich. The song was evidently something pathetic, for it brought tears to the eyes of the impressionable Greeks. The last, deep, vibrating note died upon a couch of silence. A long interval ensued, for to the Cretans it seemed profane to reward such beautiful sound with a rude clatter of hands. At length Panayota rose from her place, and walking straight up to Lindbohm, laid a wreath of red roses and myrtle upon his brow.

They packed the mules and started home long before daylight. The procession wound down a rocky path and into the gray town in the silver dawn, with a chill breeze blowing from the sea, and one great, white star glowing in the heavens like a drop of dew. The wreaths had been threaded upon the roasting-spits, and the girls, two and two, carried them. Before sunrise a fresh wreath was hanging over the door of every house in Ambellaki.

CHAPTER VII
A DEMAND, AND A COWARD

"Hello!" cried Lindbohm, "what's the hubbub?"

It was the morning of the second of May. Curtis and his two friends were sitting in the mayor's café, drinking muddy black coffee, served in tiny cups.

Noisy voices, as of an increasing and excited throng, were audible. Michali, the mayor and the Swede rushed to the door, but were almost immediately swept back on the crest of an angry human wave. Two or three tall young shepherds, with long crooks in their left hands and with hairy cloaks thrown over their shoulders, were flinging their fists in the air and shouting hoarsely. Papa-Maleko, fully as tall as they, and looming above them by the height of his priest's hat, was flourishing angrily a bit of letter paper, and evidently attempting to out-yell them. His head was thrown back and his great black beard, jerked by his rapidly moving chin, twitched and danced upon his breast. Every moment more men, women and children crowded into the café, until it became thronged to suffocation. Curtis seized the little table that stood before him firmly with both hands and pulled it over his lame foot.

The demarch, clambering upon a bench, shouted and gesticulated, evidently for order. His efforts, at first unavailing, at last resulted in partial quiet, and he began to speak. He finished and stepped down. Then one of the shepherds jumped upon the improvised platform. He was no orator, but with few and hesitating words, told his story. It was evidently a case where facts were eloquent, for his voice was soon drowned in an inextinguishable roar, in the midst of which Papa-Maleko sprang upon another bench and commenced to speak, still shaking the bit of paper. Silence again fell. Curtis could understand scarcely anything. Each of the speakers talked so rapidly that the words seemed all joined together into one word of interminable length. He only knew that he was listening to an outburst of wild, crude eloquence—the eloquence of passion—the exultation of righteous indignation. When the priest had finished he tore the paper into little bits, and threw them into the air with thumbs and fingers extended like the ribs of a fan, the Greek gesture of a curse.

"Na!" he cried.

In the moment of silence, of evident perplexity, which followed, Curtis arose, and, seizing Michali firmly by the shoulder, pulled him nearer.

"What in heaven's name is all this?" he asked.

"Bad, very bad," replied the Cretan. "Kostakes Effendi, with two hundred and fifty men, has two villages destroyed on other side of mountain, and kill many people. He write letter and say we send him Panayota, the priest's daughter, for his harem, he go 'way. If no, he come through the pass, burn, kill."

Curtis sank upon the seat and stared dumbly at the broad back of the villager just before him. It expanded into the front of a whitewashed cottage, with a laughing Greek girl standing beneath a porch of vines. She had soft brown hair, large chestnut eyes and a low, broad forehead. As he looked, a frightened expression crept into the eyes, and she turned them upon him appealingly.

"By God, they shan't have her!" he cried aloud, smiting the table with his fist. Rising without thinking of his foot, he began to shout the situation excitedly into Lindbohm's ear. The latter listened with apparent stolidity, but, making a thrust with the imaginary sword, punched the broad back viciously with his fist.

Another of the shepherds mounted the bench. Papa-Maleko surged through the crowd and shook his fist at the speaker. This last orator was about forty years of age, sturdy and florid. He had small, keen eyes and a conciliatory manner.

"What does he say?" asked Lindbohm of Michali.

"He say, send the girl. We have but little ammunition, few guns. Kostakes Effendi have plenty men, plenty guns. Better one suffer than all. Kostakes, he say is no genuine Turk anyway. His mother was a Greek—he probably marry the girl."

Then an unexpected thing happened. The orator was having a visible effect on a portion of his audience. He was dispersing the patriotic exaltation of the weaker minded, and was causing even the boldest to feel the hopelessness of their condition. At this critical moment the Swede, who had grown deathly pale, gave way to frenzy. He threw the listening throng to right and left as easily as though he were walking through a field of tall wheat. Reaching the bench of the astonished orator, he kicked it from under him. The Cretan sprang to his feet and drew his knife. Lindbohm seized the uplifted wrist and twisted it until the weapon fell to the floor. Then he savagely hustled the orator through the crowd, too astonished to interfere, to the door, the entire throng surging into the open air after him. Curtis forgot his foot, but was sharply reminded of it, by putting it on the floor in his eagerness to follow. When he finally reached the door, Lindbohm was bounding merrily after the escaping coward, beating him over the back with his own staff. Some of the Cretans were laughing and others were shouting "Bravo!"

"He will go to join the Turks," said Michali to Curtis.

"That's where he ought to be," replied the American.

CHAPTER VIII
SMOKE BY DAY AND FIRE BY NIGHT

The peaceful village was transformed into a scene of tumult. An invisible thundercloud seemed hovering in the clear sky. The frightened children and the timid women, running about the streets, reminded Curtis of the sudden motherward flurry of chickens, at the shadow of the swooping hawk. He was left alone in the deserted inn. He dragged a bench to the open door and sat down. Those rapid preparations for defense were going on which suggest themselves instinctively to people bred and reared in a land of strife. A group of sturdy mountaineers soon collected on the square, wearing well-filled cartridge belts and carrying Gras rifles. The throng grew, and every new arrival was greeted affectionately by his first name, "Bravo, Kyr' Yanne!" or "Bravo, Kyr' George!" The demarch formed the nucleus of the group, the red marks under his eyes blushing like new cut slashes.

A rapid jingling of bells, and the sound as of animals running, were heard, and a sentinel goat appeared on the edge of a distant rock. He cast an agitated glance back over his wethers, and slid down, his four hoofs together, his back humped into a semicircle, his bucolic beard thrust outward. Others appeared and slid over, as though borne on the crest of a torrent. Then two tall shepherds were sketched for an instant on a background of mountains and sky, swinging their crooked staves. But they, too, were caught by the invisible torrent and swept into the town. Boys were dispatched into the surrounding hills, and within an hour the streets were filled with bleating flocks. The group of armed men grew to fifty. Lindbohm and Michali had both been provided with guns. The Swede had been induced to discard the straw hat as too conspicuous a mark, and to bind a dark handkerchief about his head. Curtis felt himself one of them, and yet knew that he was not.

"If I had a gun, I might get up there among the rocks and do something," he muttered. "I can shoot just as well if I am lame, if I could only get into position. Pshaw! What's the matter with me? This isn't my fight. I'm a non-combatant, I am."

The priest came down, leading Panayota by the hand and carrying a cross. The girl was white, even to the lips, but there was a proud smile on her face and her eyes were shining. She wore a short Cretan knife in her belt. Papa-Maleko held aloft the cross and solemnly blessed the waiting warriors, after which he presented the sacred symbol to the lips of each in turn. Lindbohm strode over to Panayota and pulling the handkerchief from his head, bowed low, with his hand upon his heart.

"Before they get you," he said, "they must yust take us all."

Curtis shouted "That's right!" but was not aware of the fact until the little army turned and looked at him inquiringly.

"I'll make a fool of myself here yet," he said, sinking back on the bench.

Michali translated Lindbohm's speech and a great shout of "Bravo! bravo!" went up.

Lindbohm was in his element.

"There was," he understood, "no way for the enemy to get in from the land side except through the pass. They might approach with difficulty from the seashore, but there was only one place where they could land. Men were watching that, and a smoke by day or a fire by night would warn the villagers. Very good. Fifty men might defend this pass against two hundred and fifty, but they must lose no men and must make every shot count. How much ammunition had they?"

"Not much. Only their belts full, and possibly as much again, curses on the English!"

"Very well. We must use it the more carefully. We must not get excited. Kostakes Effendi cannot possibly reach the ravine before nightfall—can he get through without a guide?"

"No," replied the demarch, "impossible."

Panayota spoke. She said only two words, and she said them quietly, though distinctly, but they fell like a thunderclap.

"Peter Ampates!"

This was the name of the cowardly shepherd whom Lindbohm had driven from the town.

"Is there any way to build fires so as to light up narrow places in the ravine?"

There were two or three such places where bonfires could be located that would make the pass as light as day. People standing behind the rocks in positions of comparative safety could easily feed the flames by tossing wood into them.

"Send out the boys and girls then to prepare these fires and to pile up brushwood enough behind the rocks to keep them burning all night," commanded the Swede. "Build one fire at the mouth of the pass—" but here he was interrupted by a chorus of protest. "Let the Turks get into the pass and then we will kill them," cried his listeners.

"Very well, but see that they don't get through."

Papa-Maleko had a suggestion to make. The Sphakiotes often got the Turks into narrow defiles and rolled stones down upon their heads. There were half a dozen precipitous places in the gorge where this could be effectively done.

"Capital idea," assented Lindbohm. "Let some more women go to those places and pile up heaps of the biggest stones they can carry." Lindbohm suggested that the men, who now numbered sixty, should take their places near the mouth of the defile. In a few brief words he also laid the foundation of an effective commissariat. The mayor's brother, too old a man to fight, was instructed to superintend the sending of food twice a day, in case the siege should be protracted, and above all, water, which could not be found up among the rocks. Women and boys were to act as carriers.

A messenger was sent to Korakes, an insurgent chief, who, with three hundred men, had established his headquarters near the village of Alikiano.

"We might be able to hold out for a week," said Lindbohm to Curtis, "and Korakes will surely come to our aid. At any rate, we must yust take our chances."

CHAPTER IX
AWAITING THE SIGNAL

Curtis was left alone in the priest's house. Papa-Maleko had gone up the ravine.

"If one of my boys were wounded," he said, "and I were not there to comfort him, God might forgive me, but I should never forgive myself."

The day passed very peacefully. Curtis sat in the door of the parsonage, with his bandaged foot upon a stool. The children, usually so noisy in the streets, were quiet, and the gossips were either gone or were talking in whispers. A woman sat in a doorway opposite holding her babe, that squealed and shouted with delight at the familiarity of a pet kid. The mother smiled sadly, and then clasped the child to her bosom, smothering it with affection. The sudden purple twilight of the orient fell, and a light breeze flew up from the sea, beating the blossoms from the cherry and pear trees and scattering their faint, delicious perfume. The purple changed to black and the nightingales began to sing. The flocks had gone to sleep. The antiphonous bleating and the jangle of the bells were swallowed up in the darkness that was silence, save where now and then a little lamb cried softly to its mother across the meadows of dreamland or a bell tinkled musically. There was a purring of many waters.

"By Jove, war's a queer thing," mused Curtis. "It's hate and lust and bigotry. It's a big fiendish lie, and all the time a thousand voices are preaching truth and love. Here am I, sitting among the nightingales, the cherry blossoms and the dreaming sheep, and a mile from here all the men of the vicinity are trying to cut one another's throats. And I suppose I'd be with 'em if it wasn't for this blamed foot. These Cretans are plucky fellows. By George, I glory in their sand! Had they been a lot of cowards they would have given up the girl—but they wouldn't have got her while I could hold a gun! Why, she's a natural queen! She'd grace any man's fireside, she would. What beautiful eyes she has! what a mouth! what a carriage, and spirit, too! Talk about your ancient epics and your ancient heroines! Why, here's the Trojan war right over again, or the spirit of it. We aren't shy on men and women these days; we're shy on Homers. And that girl, that Panayota, she's as pure as snow. She'd knife herself in a minute before she'd allow herself to fall into the hands of the Turks. Whatever else the boys do, I hope they'll pink that Kostakes chap. I'd like to pot him myself."

As the time wore on, Curtis found himself leaning forward in the darkness, listening for the sound of distant shots. He wondered if the Turks would attack that night and if he could hear the shots if they did.

He went to the door and called to an old man who was talking in a low tone, but excitedly, to the woman across the way. The babe had been put to bed. They both came running, and he asked them, framing his sentence with much care:

"Has the fighting begun? Can the guns be heard from here?"

They replied in concert, volubly and at great length. Then they held a conference and withdrew.

"That's the trouble with a foreign tongue," mused Curtis. "You can talk to them all right, but they talk so fast that you can't understand what they say to you. Now, I said it correctly," and he repeated the sentence.

After about half an hour the old man returned, bringing some bread, cheese, halva and a glass of dark wine. Curtis repeated the Greek word for "thank you" half a dozen times, and then fell upon the food voraciously. "The more I see of these people, the better I like them," he muttered. "Now, I call that thoughtful of the old man."

After he had finished eating he tried his foot, bearing his weight on it until he could endure the pain no longer.

"I believe it's better," he soliloquized, and then cried inconsequentially:

"By Jove! I wonder if that old blockhead thought I was asking for something to eat? Panayota would have understood me in a minute. Why, she and I get along all right together in Greek. But then, I mustn't judge the rest of these people by her."

He wound up his watch at ten o'clock, and lay down upon the divan.

"There's going to be no fight to-night," he muttered. "And, at any rate, it wouldn't be my fight if there was."

He fell asleep, and dreamed of Panayota, gigantic in size, standing on a cliff by a wan, heaving sea. She was hurling jagged pieces of rock down at a line of ant-like Turks, crawling far below. The wind was blowing her hair straight out from her forehead, and he could only see her mouth and chin, but he knew it was Panayota. He ran to help her, when the demarch seized him to hold him back. He awoke, and found that an old man was shaking his arm and crying excitedly in Greek, "Fire! fire!"

Curtis' first thought was that the house was burning. He put his hand on the old man's shoulder and jumped over to the door. Half a dozen people were standing in the moonlight, pointing toward the hills. Two women, one holding a very young babe in her arms, were crossing themselves hysterically and calling on the name of the Virgin. An old man of eighty, whom Curtis had frequently seen bent nearly double and walking with a cane, now stood erect, fingering the trigger of a rifle. A stripling of twelve was shaking his fist toward a red eye of flame that glowed among the rocks, high up and far away.

CHAPTER X
WAR IN EARNEST

That was one of Lindbohm's bonfires, sure enough. Perhaps a battle was going on at that moment.

"Mother of God, save my man!" cried the woman with the baby. "Save him, save him!"

"Mother of God, save my boy, my cypress tree, my Petro!" groaned the old man.

"Curse the Turks! May their fathers roast in hell!" shrieked the lad. "Give me a gun, I'm old enough to shoot."

For three hours they stood watching the fire, as though they could actually see what was taking place there. At times they stood silent for many minutes together, listening, listening for the sound of guns; but they could hear nothing. At last a shout was heard in the distance:

"Oo-hoo!"

"What is it? What is it?" the watchers asked, hoarsely, looking at one another with pale faces.

Again "Oo-hoo! Oo-hoo!" nearer.

At last footsteps were heard, as of one running and stumbling among loose rocks, and at length little Spiro Kaphtakes staggered up to the group and stood panting before them. His trousers were torn, and blood was flowing from his legs. The women and the old man stared at him open-mouthed for a long minute, and then, pouncing upon him, began to shake him.

"What is it? what news?"

"Is my Petro safe?"

"How goes it with my Yanne?"

Others ran up out of dark alleys and from the doorways of distant houses, and soon twenty or more surrounded the poor boy, gesticulating, screaming. They could not wait for him to get his breath. His tongue lolled out like that of a Chinese idol, and he swallowed the air instead of breathing, rolling his eyes about helplessly the while. At length, with a supreme effort, he gasped:

"Yanne!"

The woman with the babe reeled as though the earth were slipping from beneath her-feet. A neighbor caught the child and the mother fell limply to the ground. Then, while friends dashed water upon her face and rubbed her hands, the boy talked rapidly, shrilly, flinging his arms about with loose-elbowed gestures. The woman opened her eyes and two of the men helped her to her feet. She tottered for a moment, disheveling her hair with despairing hands and whispering hoarsely:

"Yanne! Yanne! What shall I do? What shall I do?"

But suddenly the brave woman-soul asserted itself and her frail body straightened, tense, defiant, ready for any effort. Clasping the babe to her breast she kissed it tenderly many times. Holding it for a moment at arm's length, she looked at it hungrily, and then turned her eyes away. A neighbor took the child.

"Come!" said the mother, and she ran lightly up the ravine, followed by the boy. The babe bleated "Mama! mama!" like a frightened lamb, but the woman did not look back. Hopping two or three steps from the doorway, Curtis seized a woman by the arm.

"Killed?" he asked in Greek.

"Eh?"

"Killed?"

Unfortunately, everybody understood, and all commenced talking at once.

"I don't understand," shouted Curtis. "Silence! Killed? killed?"

"Silence!" cried the old man with the musket, raising his right hand in a commanding gesture above the heads of the too-willing talkers.

"No," he replied to Curtis, slowly and distinctly, "not killed. Badly wounded."

"Thanks," replied the American. "Thanks, thanks, I understand."

Just before sunrise Michali, with his leg broken, was brought in on a donkey.

CHAPTER XI
AN AMATEUR SURGEON

They laid the wounded Cretan on the lounge in the parsonage. He was pale as death from loss of blood, and kept snapping at his under lip with his teeth, but he did not groan.

"We are a pair of storks now," he said, smiling at Curtis, and then he fainted away. Curtis cut the trouser from the wounded leg. A ball had struck the shin.

"It's not badly splintered, old man," said the American, as Michali opened his eyes again. "I don't know anything about surgery, but I should think the proper thing would be to wash it, support it with some splints and bind it up tight. Shall I try it?"

"What you need?" asked Michali.

"Some warm water, two or three straight sticks and a piece of cloth that I can tear up into strips."

The wounded man called for the necessary articles and they were soon brought. Curtis washed the blood away carefully.

The end of a piece of bone pushed against the skin from beneath and made a sharp protuberance.

"I'm awfully sorry, old man, but I've got to hurt you—like the devil, I'm afraid."

"All right, my friend," replied Michali, "only do not be long."

"No, only a minute. Here, lie on your back. That's right. Now take hold of the sides of the lounge and hang on tight. That'll help you. I know it from having teeth filled. Now, tell this old man to take hold of your ankle so, with both hands, and pull, slowly, carefully, till I say 'stop,' and not to commence pulling till I say 'now.' You'd better explain—your Greek is some better than mine."

Michali explained.

"Does he understand?"

"Perfectly."

Curtis put his hand about the broken shin in such a way that he could push the fragment of bone into place.

"This can't be wrong," he reflected. "At any rate, there's nothing else to do."

Looking at the old man he nodded.

"Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!" gurgled Michali, as though the words were being pulled from his throat with a hook. There was so much agony in them, they meant so much more than the screams of a weaker person would have meant, that the amateur surgeon felt sick at his stomach and it cost him a tremendous effort to see through a sort of blindness that settled like a cloud before his eyes. But the two ends of the bone came together and he resolutely pushed the splinter into place.

Still holding the leg tightly he looked at Michali. Great drops of sweat were standing on the Cretan's face and his underlip was bleeding, but he smiled bravely.

"All over," said Curtis. "Now for the sticks and the strips."

Fortunately for the success of the operation the boy who had led the mule was outside, giving an account of the progress of the battle. He proved a greater attraction even than the broken leg. Curtis, finding himself alone with his patient, shut and locked the door.

"Does it hurt you very much, old man?" he asked. "I suppose the proper thing now would be to give you something to put you to sleep. Don't you think you could sleep a little while anyway?"

"No, no, I cannot sleep. It hurts me some, but not much—not too much."

Curtis sat quietly for some time in the semi-darkness of the room, listening to the chatter of the boy outside, punctuated by the excited exclamations of the listeners. He glanced at the drawn face of Michali, which had a ghastly hue in the wan light. The wounded man's eyes were open, but he made no sound.

"He's a plucky beggar," thought Curtis. "I wonder if it would do him any harm to talk? I say, Michali," he asked aloud, "how is it going? What are they doing up there?"

"They tried to come through about eleven o'clock—but how can I tell you, since you do not the ravine know? It begins wide on the other side—a deep, steep valley, with many pine trees, and paths along the sides. Near the top of the mountain the ravine becomes narrow, between walls of rock, what you call it?—perpendicular. If the Turk ever gets over the summit we are lost. Very well—that devil Ampates! Lindbohm should have killed him!"

"Why, what did he do?"

"Without him the Turk never could have found the best path. Well, we have men on all the paths with dogs—good dogs, hear half a mile, bark—O, like the devil! We stay high up, most of us, where ravine is narrow, so not to scatter out too much. We hide behind the rocks on both sides of the ravine, on the other side the mountain. We listen and listen, O, how we listen! Nothing. The wind in the pine trees. For hours we listen. My ears get very wide awake. I think I hear the wind among the stars. Then, all at once, we sit up very straight, holding our guns ready. 'Boo! boo! woo!' It is old Spire's dog, down below. We sit very still. Perhaps the dog made a mistake. Perhaps he bark at the moon. But no. 'Bang!' goes old Spiro's gun. Then we know. That was the signal—Ah, mother of God!"

No Greek can talk without violent gesticulations, that frequently bring all the muscles of his body into play. Michali forgot the leg in his excitement, and gave a little jump that wrenched it slightly.

"Never mind, old man. Don't talk any more—you'd better lie quiet," said Curtis. "You drove 'em back, did you?"

"Twenty men went down to the mouth of the pass. We stayed back the narrow part to guard, high up, behind the rocks. Pretty soon they commence shooting and yelling. It was moonlight there, you see, but dark like—like—"

"Like a pocket," suggested Curtis.

"Like a pocket in the ravine, where we were. They keep shooting—'biff, bang, biff, bang'—then all at once—'r-r-r-r-r!' more than a hundred guns at once. 'That's the Turks,' said Lindbohm. 'By damn! they must not get through. Michali, twenty men must come down with me, twenty stay here.' I pick out twenty, and down we go, and hide. Then the women light the fire. Whoof! the light jumps up and slashes open the ravine. There they come, there come the Turks, running, running. The boys keep shooting from above, 'ping! ping!' but they not hit much, straight down so. One, two, three drop, but the rest keep coming. We lay our rifles across the rocks and take aim. Lindbohm, he keep saying, very low, 'Not yet, not yet, steady, boys, steady—'"

"Steady, boys, steady!" cried Curtis; "that's old Lindbohm—yes, yes?"

"My God! I think the Turks get right on top of us, when 'bang!' Lindbohm shoot right by my ear and blow a hole through a Turk. Then we all shoot, shoot, shoot, but every time one Turk die, two new ones come around the corner. And I think they get through, but the women pry off big piece of rock. O, most as big as this house, and it kill two Turks. Then the Turks turn and run—"

"Hurrah!" sobbed Curtis.

"Hurrah!" echoed Michali. "We killed thirty-four damned Turks!"

"How many men did you lose?" asked Curtis.

"One, shoot through the head. He high up and fall down into the ravine. Turks laugh very loud. Another here, through the stomach. He die pretty soon—he with us. His name Yanne. And me, I get this little wound in the leg. How they hit my leg, I don't know."

As they were talking the church bell began to ring.

CHAPTER XII
"STILL I SAY UNTO YOU, COURAGE"

"Hello! What's that for?" asked Curtis.

Michali shrugged his shoulders. "Who knows?" he replied.

Curtis hopped to the door, unlocked it and looked out. The church stood across the road on the top of a big, flat rock. Though small, it boasted a Byzantine dome. The bell hung in a frame erected over the porch, and the rope was tied about a wooden pillar, to prevent its being blown out of reach by the wind.

"Why, it's Papa-Maleko himself," cried the American.

The priest gave the rope two or three more decisive jerks, and then, leaving the end dangling, started for the house. His stately black robe was rent down the front, and the wind blew the pieces out behind, exposing his voluminous Cretan breeches and his yellow boots. His long hair had writhed loose from its fastenings and had fallen down his back. It was beautiful and reminded Curtis of Panayota. His tall hat was battered at the side, so that the roof looked as though it were slipping off. He spoke a few words to Michali, and then, opening the trunk studded with brass nails, he took out and donned his sacerdotal vestments, a sleeveless cloak with a cross in the middle of the back and a richly embroidered stole. Running his fingers through his long, glossy hair and shaking it out as a lion shakes his mane, he strode back to the little church, into which the people were already excitedly pouring.

"It looks bad," said Michali; "he is about to ask for God's help."

"I'm going across," said Curtis.

"Can you walk so far?" asked Michali.

"O, yes; with this crutch I can get over there all right."

Though the church was crowded, there was absolute, solemn silence. These simple people believed that they were in the very presence of God. Kindly hands seized Curtis and assisted him into one of the high-backed, narrow seats ranged along the walls. Two tall candles threw a flickering light on a crude St. George and the Dragon, of mammoth size, painted on the screen. Every new comer kissed the face of a florid virgin that looked up out of a gaudy frame, reposing on the slanting top of a tall stand near the door. Numerous eikons in gilded frames hung about the wall, and a silent throng of forgotten saints, painted on the dome above, peered dimly down upon the worshippers. The windows were narrow, but enough sunlight straggled in to give a ghostly look to the candles, lighted here and there. Papa-Maleko's voice was musical and tender. He commenced chanting in a low, pleading tone, but as the glorious words of the litany gradually took possession of his soul, the melodious, full-voweled Greek syllables rolled more and more confidently from his tongue. The poor, frightened mothers and children of his flock raised their faces and sniffed the wholesome incense that now pervaded the building. The spirit of the scene carried Curtis away. He was awed and mysteriously refreshed, as one who, in a noisome cavern, feels the cool, sweet air blowing upon him from the darkness. He found himself beating the arm of his seat and chanting inaudibly, again and again, the sublime words, "Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott."

"Ah, yes, God will protect us! He is our very present help in time of trouble."

And now, Papa-Maleko is blessing his flock, one by one. Down the aisle he passes, holding a little cross to the eager lips, speaking words of comfort.

"Courage, courage, my children," he says; "when God is with us who can be against us? Christ is fighting for us and the Holy Virgin and all the saints. Courage, courage."

They seized his hand and kissed it. Women sobbed in an exaltation of faith. Mothers pressed the cross to the lips and foreheads of their wondering babes.

"The Virgin is our helper," they said.

"Christ and the Virgin be with you," responded the priest.

So he stood, his left hand lifted in blessing, his right extending the cross; stately in his flowing robes, calm in the dignity of his exalted message.

"Have courage, my children," he repeated, smiling benignly. "It came to me there in the mountains, like a voice from God. 'Ye are Christians; why do ye not call upon the God of hosts?'"

"Papa-Maleko!"

In an instant the whole congregation had turned and were looking towards the door. There stood a tall shepherd with a rifle in his hand. His face was blackened with powder and he seemed covered with blood.

"What is it? what is it?" shrieked a dozen voices.

"There is a terrible fight. Loukas and Spiro are killed—"

The words of the priest rang out clear and strong:

"Our God is a very present help—courage, my children!"

"My left arm is broken. The Turks got on top of the hill, where the girls were, but the girls all jumped off, laughing. All killed, Paraskeve, Elene, Maria—"

The speaker's voice was drowned in a pandemonium of shrieks and sobs.

But again the priest was heard, reverently, distinctly, firmly, like the voice of Christ calming the waters.

"They are with Christ in paradise. Still I say unto you, courage. Since God is with us who shall stand against us?"

"Panayota was with them, but her dress caught in a thorn bush, and before she could tear herself loose the Turks had her."

Every eye in the church was riveted upon the priest. The cross rattled to the floor, and his arm dropped to his side. His lips were white and there was a terrible look in the large brown eyes.

"Panayota! Panayota!" he called hoarsely. His voice sounded far away now. Suddenly he tore off his sacred vestments and flung them in a heap on the floor. Striding to the wounded shepherd, he snatched the gun from his hand. Looking from the window, Curtis saw him running toward the hills, his long hair streaming on the wind. The flock poured out after him and the American was sitting in the deserted house of God, gazing at a pile of sacred robes and muttering stupidly:

"Panayota! Panayota!"

CHAPTER XIII
THE BRAVE THING TO DO

"Hark!" said Curtis, who was sitting in the door of the parsonage. "What's that?"

"I didn't hear anything," replied Michali.

"I did. I believe it was a gun. It was a faint throb in the air. There it goes again. There they go!"

No mistake was possible this time.

"They're coming through," said Michali, rising upon his elbow. "The Turks will be here pretty quick, now, I think."

"Hello," cried Curtis, "there comes the demarch. There he goes into that house. Now he comes out—there he goes into another—what's up, I wonder? Here he comes!"

Kyr' Nikolaki looked in at the door. His face was flabby with fatigue and his under lids had drooped perceptibly, enlarging the red pits beneath his eyes into semicircles.

"What is it? what is it?" asked Curtis, who had not clearly understood the few hurried words addressed by the demarch to Michali.

"They're nearly out of cartridges. They can't hold the pass over an hour longer. They're going to send the flocks and the women and children down to the sea. The village owns a lot of caiques there. Then the men will retreat last, fighting, shooting all the time."

"But what are you quarreling about?"

"O, nothing. Nothing at all."

It did not take the Ambellakians long to pack up. The most treasured belongings were thrown into blankets, which were rolled into bundles, and then, away for the ravine and the sea!

A mother dashed by the house with a babe under her left arm and a bundle over her right shoulder. Another dragged two frightened children along the stony street, clutching tight a tiny wrist with each hand. An aged couple doddered by, the man with feeble and palsied hand striving to support the woman, who clung to a frame containing two bridal wreaths. From amid the faded orange blossoms smiled the youthful eyes of a shy mountain girl and a stout pallikari—man's work lasts so much better than man himself.

The confusion grew to frenzy. A parrot-like chatter and screaming of women filled the air. A florid housewife stumbled and wheezed down the street, carrying a pair of long-handled coffee stew pans. She did not know what they were, but had seized them through force of habit. Another bore a cheap chromo, representing skin-clad hunters thrusting spears into a number of colossal polar bears. She fell and jabbed her knee through the picture, but picked up the frame and ran on with that. Scrips, or bags of pied and brightly-colored wool, of which two or more are to be found in every Cretan peasant's house, were hanging from the arms and shoulders of many of the fugitives.

At a burst of firing, seemingly more distinct and nearer than anything that had preceded it, an old woman stopped, and fumblingly extracted a silver mounted eikon from her scrip. After kissing it and making the sign of the cross several times, she replaced it, and hurried on again. A babe was laughing and clutching with glee at the disheveled locks of its fleeing mother. A girl of six hugged to imminent suffocation a shapeless and wrinkled pup.

The demarch came in again, accompanied by Lindbohm and a stalwart mountaineer. The Swede had a gun in his left hand. In the grime of his powder-blackened face his eyes looked unnaturally blue. But they were no longer childlike. It was rather the blue of an angry sea.

"Panayota's taken," he said to Curtis.

"I know it."

"There's nothing to be done now except to rally the men and rescue her." The Swede did not talk like a man in despair. He seemed, on the contrary, exalted by a great resolve.

"We will get together and fall upon Kostakes like a thunderbolt. We'll not let him go far. And if he harms a hair of her head—" He doubled his ponderous fist and shook it. Then he whirled about briskly and gazed at Michali.

"We'll take you somehow," he said. "We'll be as careful as we can. They'll kill you if you stay here."

"I not go," replied Michali. "I have said it to the demarch. Take two strong men to carry me. They better be fighting. Leave a gun with me. When they find me I will kill two, three Turks. Ha! By God, I surprise them! So I die!"

"Come, no more of this foolishness," said Lindbohm. "I take him on my back, and the shepherd here take you," turning to Curtis.

But Curtis had been thinking very fast, and the bright image of his beautiful and high-spirited hostess in the hands of the Turks had sharpened his wits to an extraordinary degree.

"Look here, Lindbohm," he said, speaking very rapidly, "I'll stay here and look out for Panayota. They won't kill me, I'm a non-combatant, and the Turks won't be so apt to abuse the girl when there's a foreigner amongst them. Help me to the wine cave. I'll hide there till the right moment and then I'll give myself up."

Lindbohm saluted.

"I would not have asked it," he said, "but it is the brave thing to do. Ah, tell the officer you're a newspaper correspondent. That's the safest thing."

The firing had ceased entirely for several minutes. Now rapid footsteps were heard. Looking toward the door Curtis saw a Cretan shepherd fling by. He was running low to the ground, carrying his gun horizontally, like a man hunting—or being hunted. Another and another passed.

"We have five minutes now," said Lindbohm, holding out his arms to Michali. "They have given up the pass. Come! Must I take you, or will you come on my back?"

"I come," replied Michali, "to the wine cave."

Lindbohm kneeled by the divan and Michali put his arms about his neck. The Swede arose, wrenching from the Cretan's throat a groan that ended in a low, sharp shriek.

Lindbohm strode from the door, followed by the demarch and the shepherd, the last mentioned carrying Curtis.

Five or six shots, followed by a persistent fusillade, were heard.

"Now I think they come through," muttered Lindbohm, breaking into a run. Michali was breathing in tremulous, faint groans between set teeth. Then, mercifully, he fainted, and remained unconscious until the Swede, panting with exertion, bounded through the arbor into the dim café.

The demarch ran to his wine barrels, and, pulling an empty one around parallel with the wall, smashed in its end with the butt of a musket, using the weapon as though it were a battering ram. Michali was shoved into the barrel as tenderly as possible and the broken pieces were laid in beside him. Then they pushed the tun back into place, with the open end against the wall.

"And you?" said Lindbohm, turning to Curtis, who was sitting upon the table where the shepherd had dropped him.

"Save yourselves!" cried the American, pointing to the door. A shepherd, standing behind the platane tree, was aiming at something above him. He fired, and jerking the empty shell from his smoking piece, reloaded. Three Cretans darted to the rear of the café, trailing blue ropes of smoke from the muzzles of their guns. The man behind the tree started after them, but stopped at a crash of musketry and dropped his gun with a "ching" among the rocks. His legs broke at the knees as though some one had playfully jabbed them from behind. As he instinctively threw forward his arms to save himself from falling, his elbows collapsed and his hands fell flopping at the wrist, like penguin's wings. He was dead before his body reached the ground.

Lindbohm snatched his musket from the table and ran from the café, followed by the demarch and the shepherd. Curtis slipped into a corner, behind the huge oil crock. The sound of the firing continued, but no one came into the café. Ten minutes, twenty minutes passed. They seemed hours to the American. Occasionally he heard a sput, sput against the outside of the soft wall. Once a "ftha," like the hissing of a cat, was followed by a humming sound, as a bullet, slightly flattened by the sand, sang in through the open door.

It did not occur to him that these things were dangerous.

"I must see what they are doing," he said. "It's a good fight! It's a good fight!"

He slid around the smooth, cool crock and leaned out from his hiding place. He could see nothing but a strip of the open door and a huge vine, sturdy as the trunk of a tree. He jumped back just in time to save himself. The café was poured full of Turks, bringing Panayota and her father. An officer, young, slender and very handsome, dropped into a chair and laid his unsheathed sword before him on the table. The soldiers fell respectfully back, leaving the girl and the priest standing facing the officer. Ampates slunk in the background with Panayota's Cretan knife in his hand. It was he who had led the way to the women, by a round-about path.

A long conversation ensued, in which Kostakes spoke with insinuating sweetness, smiling continually and occasionally twirling the ends of his small, dark mustache. His intentions with reference to Panayota were honorable, he said. The priest began his reply in a pleading tone but ended with a fiery denunciation. Once or twice a soldier stepped threateningly towards him, but Kostakes waved the would-be murderer back with a slight gesture or an almost imperceptible movement of the head. Panayota was magnificent. She seemed at no moment to have any doubt of herself. She stood erect, pale, calm, contemptuous, until near the end of the interview when, with an incredibly quick movement, she snatched the sword from the table, and, turning the hilt towards her father, threw back her head and closed her eyes. The officer with a loud cry sprang to his feet, tipping over the table, and a soldier knocked the weapon harmlessly into the air. All the Turks in the room leaped upon Papa-Maleko, who fought like a cornered cat, wounding one, two, three of his assailants. The Turks did not dare shoot, for fear of killing their officer or the girl. Curtis came from his hiding place, crying hoarsely in English:

"Panayota! For God's sake! For God's sake! Panayota!" and then "Don't shoot! Don't shoot! You'll kill Panayota!"

But it was no part of Kostakes' plan to kill Panayota's father in her presence. A Turk, cooler than the rest, reaching over the heads of his comrades, dropped the butt of a rifle on the man's skull and he sank to the ground. Panayota fell on her knees beside him, fumbling in his hair and sobbing, "Papa! papa!"

The heart has a little vocabulary of its own, which it has spoken from the beginning of the world, the same for all peoples, unchanged in the confusion of tongues. Curtis was not noticed in the tumult until he had forced his way into the officer's very presence, where he stood, shaking his fist and shouting, still in his own tongue:

"This is a shame! Do you hear me? You're a scurvy blackguard to treat a girl in that way. If I had you alone about five minutes I'd show you what I think of you!"

Two or three soldiers sprang forward, and a petty officer half drew his sword, but Kostakes, astonished at hearing a language which he did not understand, but which he surmised to be either German or English, motioned them back.

"Qui êtes vous, Monsieur, et que faites vous ici?" he asked in the French which he had learned at the high school at Canea.

"Je suis Américan, correspondant du—du— New York Age," replied Curtis.

"Ah, charmé! charmé! Comment dites vous en Anglais? Welcome. Je suis Kostakes, Capitaine de Cavalerie, à votre service!"

CHAPTER XIV
A CRITICAL MOMENT

Curtis did not find it easy to express his feelings in French to this smiling officer with the straight, large nose, dazzling white teeth and cordial manner, who wore an inverted red flower pot for a hat. French is no language for a self-respecting man to swear in, any way. Besides, one does not, in Ollendorf, learn a vocabulary suitable to critical occasions. All Curtis could think of was "lâche," "sacré bleu" and "caramba." The first did not seem appropriate, the second lost its force by translating itself in his mind into English and he was not certain whether the last was French, Spanish or Italian, so he asked:

"Is this lady a prisoner of war?" And Kostakes answered:

"Monsieur is as gallant as he is brave. I give you my word of honor that neither the lady nor her father shall come to any harm. Is that sufficient?"

It had to be, so Curtis, being anything but a fool, replied:

"A gentleman's word of honor is always sufficient."

"And now," continued Kostakes, "being a non-combatant, you are at perfect liberty to follow your own wishes. Will you remain here or go with us? We shall be charmed, I assure you, charmed to have your society."

"How long will you stay here?"

"About an hour. Just long enough to collect any spoils of war and burn the town."

"Burn the town?"

"Certainly, this is war, and war, even for a nation as highly civilized as Turkey, consists in doing your enemy as much harm as possible."

Curtis glanced uneasily at the row of barrels in the cave. Here was a new dilemma. Should he give up the brave Cretan and appeal to Kostakes' manliness and chivalry? He looked at the Turk shrewdly. Somehow he did not have confidence in him.

Besides, Michali could understand French. If he were conscious, he could call out and give himself up, if he thought it were safe.

"I would stay here," thought Curtis, "and ask him to leave me the café as a shelter. But there's Panayota, I mustn't desert her."

The firing had ceased and the looting had begun. Turks darted by the door in the abandoned glee of destruction, or passed more slowly, dragging bedticks, doors, pieces of furniture and other inflammable articles, which they were casting upon a great bonfire in the square. A wave of ribald laughter, that started somewhere in the distance and ran nearer and louder, splashed into the open door. A soldier danced in with an eikon of the Holy Virgin, and held it up for the guard to spit upon. Then he tossed it into the fire. The priest, who was sitting on the floor, supported by the kneeling Panayota, covered his eyes with his hands and shuddered with horror. The trellis for the demarch's grape arbor came down with a crash and was wrenched loose from the grip of the despairing vines. The benches whereon the gossip shepherds had sat and sipped their coffee, bore company in the fire with the only rocking chair in the village, in which a very old lady used to sway to and fro and sing lullabies of her forgotten childhood. A soldier seized one of the tables within the café and tossed it through the open door. Then he dragged out a long bench, that scraped and spluttered on the floor of hard beaten earth. Two others braced themselves between the wall and the oil crock. An inspiration flashed through Curtis' mind.

"Stop! stop!" he shouted. "It is full of oil—the lady on the floor."

"Mais, certainement," cried Kostakes, and he sent the soldiers from the room.

"The same argument will apply to the wine barrels," reflected Curtis. "They would have been at them in a minute more."

"Does Monsieur elect to stay with us, or with the Greeks?" asked the Captain. "We must leave here immediately, before the Greeks return with reinforcement and seize the ravine."

"If I might be permitted to go with you? But I am lame; I have hurt my foot."

"I regret greatly to hear it. Not seriously, I hope?"

"No, I stepped on a—a—thorn," he did not know the French word for sea urchin.

"I will give a horse—my own, if necessary. I shall be charmed, charmed. And now, perhaps you will excuse me one moment while I marshal the force? Perhaps, also, you will look at the priest's head. I regret that our surgeon was killed in the attack."

Rising, he said a few words in Greek to Panayota, bending deferentially with his hand on his heart. His tones were musical and earnest and Curtis understood him almost perfectly. He spoke high Greek very distinctly. He expressed regret for Papa-Maleko's hurt, and assured the girl of his undying love.

"You are the cause of all this ruin, fair creature," he murmured earnestly. "My love for you brought me here. Have no fears. You shall be treated like a queen. Not a hair of your head nor of your father's shall be harmed. All I ask is a little love in return."

She made no reply. She did not even look up. Curtis felt a great spasm of rage contract his heart, and a queer sickness swoop down upon him. He wanted to kill Kostakes, he did not know exactly why. The man certainly had a right to love the girl; it is any man's inalienable right, established from the beginning of the world, to love any girl; and the protestations of protection were exactly what Curtis wanted, but somehow they made him sick and mad. In the midst of all this killing, why couldn't he do a little for himself? Then Kostakes bent lower, and attempted to lift Panayota's hands to his lips. She threw his arm from her with horror, and, shrinking back, with doubled fists, looked at him with such an ague of open-mouthed, staring disgust as no Duse or Bernhardt ever dreamed of. Curtis felt almost friendly toward Kostakes, who bowed solemnly, with hand upon heart, and strode from the room. Two sentinels took their places just inside the open door, and closed the entrance with crossed bayonets.

CHAPTER XV
THE MAN IN THE BARREL

Curtis parted the long hair carefully on Papa-Maleko's head with his fingers and looked for the wound.

"I ought to have been a doctor," he said to Panayota.

She smiled, a little, fleeting smile that was sadder than tears. Her hair, that had been wound into a great coil at the back of her head, had slipped partly loose. Even as she looked up at Curtis, the glossy rope writhed like a living thing, and a massive loop dropped down upon her temple. Though her cheeks were pale, her lips were still red—Curtis had never noticed until now how red and velvety they were.

"Is he badly hurt?" she asked.

Papa-Maleko's hair was clotted with blood, but Curtis made absolutely sure that the skull was not fractured.

"No," he replied, "it is not broken."

"Thank God! thank God!" cried Panayota.

The priest put his hand on his daughter's shoulder and shuffled to his feet. He staggered a little and caught his head in his hands.

"O papa! papa!" cried the girl, throwing her arms about his neck.

"Bah! I'm all right. I was a little dizzy, that's all."

"Nothing broken. Nothing broken," reiterated Curtis. "The blood is from the—" he did not know the word for skin, so he lifted up a little tent on the back of his left hand with the finger and thumb of his right.

"Nothing, nothing at all," said the priest. Panayota turned her eyes toward the smoky and cobwebbed rafters and crossed herself. The steel cross in the door leaped to a parallel of presented muskets, and Kostakes Effendi reappeared. Twirling his mustache, he gazed perplexedly at the group within the café, but recovered himself in a moment and advanced smiling.

"So his reverence is quite well again! I am glad to see it, very glad. I feared that his skull was fractured. A musket butt is no plaything."

The Turk assisted Curtis to the door, and into a cavalry saddle on the back of a respectable looking horse.

"It is the horse of my sous-lieutenant," explained Kostakes, "who really prefers to walk—Lieutenant Gadben, Monsieur—but I have not the honor of knowing your name."

"Curtis—"

"John Curtis, American journalist."

Half an inch of saber cut disfigured the lieutenant's left temple. Curtis wondered at first glance how far it extended under the flower pot hat. The possessor of the cut was a grizzled man of fifty, with a short pointed beard and a mustache, into the left side of which cigarettes had burned a semicircular hole. The Turkish troops were drawn up in marching order, dirty, dust-stained, faded, some of them shoeless, but there was something about them, something in the attitude of the bodies and the obedient expectancy of the countenances, that suggested the soldier.

Curtis was amazed at the amount of desolation which had been accomplished in so short a time. The ruffian hand of war had wrecked the peaceful and idyllic town as a discontented child smites a playhouse of blocks. Everything combustible had been set on fire, and even from the stone houses smoke was pouring. Doors had been torn from the hinges, windows smashed in, arbors pulled down. The fire in the square filled the nostrils with the familiar odor of burning olive oil. The houses with their denuded window holes reminded Curtis of men whose eyes had been ruthlessly gouged out.

Lieutenant Gadben brought the hilt of his sword to his forehead and said something to the Captain in Turkish. The latter glanced at his little army and Curtis followed his eye. The men involuntarily straightened up, stiff as posts.

Turning in his saddle Curtis cast a furtive glance at Panayota. She was sitting on a mule, looking sadly to earth. One white hand rested caressingly on the wrist of her father, who stood by, holding to the pommel of her high pack-saddle. She had tied a handkerchief about his wound. He was a manly and appealing, albeit extraordinary figure, as he stood there erect, his dark eyes flashing scorn and defiance. His billowy, spade-shaped beard covered his entire breast. He wore no coat and the enormous Cretan breeches and yellow boots seemed to take on added proportions for that reason. An empty cartridge belt, passed under his right arm and over his left shoulder, bore strange comradeship with the cross that hung from his neck. His dark brown hair, that any woman might have envied, fell quite to his waist and rippled in the breeze. Even as Curtis looked, Panayota gathered it in her hands and hastily twisted it into a knot. The Captain said a few words to the Lieutenant, who, turning to the ranks, pointed to four of the men nearest him and transmitted the order to them. They saluted, and stacking their muskets, ran into the café. Instantly the huge oil crock fell across the door, and breaking, gave up its inoffensive golden contents.

"Monsieur, you will destroy the café!" cried Curtis in alarm.

Over went the bar with a sound of smashing glass.

"It will take but a moment," replied the Captain, apologetically. The tables and benches were now going into the pile in the middle of the floor.

"The rascals should have saved the oil to pour on their bonfire," remarked Kostakes judicially. The sound of dull blows caused the Captain to bend and look in at the door.

"Hey! hey!" he shouted, and gave an order. "I told them not to spill the wine, but to roll the full barrels close to the fire," he explained to Curtis. "There is sure to be one or two of them filled with brandy, and their loud explosion does more execution than half a dozen axes."

Michali's barrel was fourth from this end.

"Why the devil wasn't I born with some brains in my head?" groaned Curtis, inwardly. "Why can't you think of something, blockhead?" He was seized with an almost uncontrollable desire to butt his skull against the stone wall of the café. He knew that a happy thought would save poor Michali, and he realized also that undue excitement on his part would betray everything. The picture of his friend being dragged from his hiding place by his broken leg and thrust through with bayonets, leaped before his imagination.

"Monsieur," he said, "I beg grace for the café. Stop the soldiers one moment and I will explain."

Kostakes called to the four vandals and they desisted.

"I beg of you," he said inquiringly to Curtis, "but pray be brief."

"I am the correspondent of the New York Age. I am neither Greek nor Turk, I assure you. I wish to write glowing accounts of your heroism—and your magnanimity. I have a sentiment connected with the café. It is so beautiful. I have written a little poem about it. It begins thus:

"The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming with purple and gold."

Curtis beat off the waltz time of the meter with great energy.

"It sounds very beautiful. What a pity that I do not understand English! Monsieur's sentiment shall be respected. He shall write for his paper that Kostakes Effendi is not only a magnanimous soldier, but a patron of letters."

The four vandals took their places again in the ranks. Kostakes, waving his sword theatrically, gave the order to march, and they were off up the rocky, winding street, with the little army pattering behind. As they passed the parsonage Curtis noticed that it was in ruins, but the festal wreath of yesterday hung brave and bright above the blackened door.

CHAPTER XVI
TO NO AVAIL

The priest strode by his daughter's side, his hand still lying upon hers. As the cavalcade started he shuddered, and, looking at Panayota, sobbed:

"Oh, my daughter! Would to God you were in your grave beside your mother!"

She put out her white arm, and laid it around his neck.

"I am my mother's child," she replied, piously, "I shall find death somehow sooner than dishonor."

An occasional corpse lay in their path. Curtis observed with pleasure that red, woolen flower pots were beside two of the bodies, but a wave of indignation and pity passed over him as his horse shied from a corpulent body, bent horribly over a sharp backbone of rock. The head lolled downward, and the pupils of the eyes were rolled upward out of sight. There were two red pits beneath the eyes, that made the whites look doubly ghastly.

Curtis lifted his hat.

"Why do you do that?" asked the Captain.

"Because he died like a brave man," replied the American, shuddering as he thought of the jolly and hospitable demarch, who, like an heroic captain of a sinking ship, had remained at his post of duty until escape became impossible.

"I fear you like the Greeks better than you do the Turks," observed Kostakes. "You do not know us yet. You will like us better when you have been with us a few days."

Curtis was determined to be politic. Only thus, he foresaw, could he hope to be of any help to Panayota.

"He stayed behind to fight, when he might have escaped. Had he been a Turk, I should have taken off my hat just the same."

They were about to enter the ravine. From their elevated position the whole town was visible. The American turned in his saddle and cast a glance backward. The smoke from a score of fires tumbled heavenward until, commingling, it formed a somber roof above the town, supported by trembling and bending pillars. There was the distant sea—the very spot where the "Holy Mary" had been sunk. The little stream, whose course they had followed to the ill-fated town, looked no larger than a silver thread. There was the square, ending in the ledge upon which he had first seen Panayota with the water jug upon her shoulder. It had been but a short time ago, a few hours comparatively, and here she was now, a captive being led away in all probability to a shameful fate. Curtis seemed to have lived ages in the past few days, and yet their whole history flashed through his mind during the brief moment of this parting glance. There was the girl, beautiful, desolate, defiant, pure as snow; her hand rested on the shoulder of her father, in one of those pitiful, yet sublime feminine caresses that cry "courage" when, even God Himself seems to fail. She was a Christian, the father a Christian priest, and this was the nineteenth century of our blessed Lord, and there, but a few miles away, lay the great battleships of the Christian powers of Europe, defending the integrity of the Turkish empire!

Curtis gave such a violent start that he nearly fell out of his saddle. Great heavens, was not that the café on fire? The café, where he had left hidden his comrade and friend, Michali, the brave, the boyish, the noble-minded!

"Monsieur!" he cried, "the café! It is burning!"

"Oh, I think not," replied Kostakes.

"But it is. I can see it plainly; you must send people back to put it out."

Kostakes took a pair of field glasses from the hands of an orderly, and, calmly adjusting the focus, looked down the hill, while the little army, escorting Panayota and her father, marched rapidly past, and were swallowed up in the ravine.

"You are right," he said, "it is indeed the café."

"But you are not sending anybody back to put it out!"

"Monsieur could hardly ask me to do that much for sentiment. Some of my rascals must have eluded my vigilance. They shall be punished."

Curtis whirled his horse around, urging it with his fists and his sound foot, and started back toward the town. But the way was steep and rough, and the animal had not gone ten paces before two soldiers sprang to its head and seized the bridle on each side. Curtis kicked and struck at them, and, suddenly overcome with a paroxysm of rage, swore at them, but all to no avail. They turned the horse around and led it back to Kostakes.

"Monsieur's sentiment must be very strong," said the Captain, smiling sweetly.

"There's a wounded man in that building. A wounded man, I tell you, and he'll burn up alive!"

Kostakes shrugged his shoulders.

"It cannot be helped," he replied, "in war, what is a man more or less? But we must not delay. Allons, Monsieur."

And he spurred his horse to a brisk walk, while a stout Turk, throwing the bridle rein of Curtis' animal over his shoulder, trotted along after.

The American looked back.

"I'll slip off and run to the café," he thought, "foot or no foot—damn the foot, anyway!" But another soldier with a loaded musket was following close behind. In his despair, the thought of his passport occurred to him. He pulled it from his pocket with feverish haste. It was badly damaged by water, but it held together and the big seal was still there. Urging his horse forward, he flourished the document in Kostakes' face and shouted:

"I am an American citizen. Do you see that? Voilà! If you do not let me go you suffer for it."

But all to no avail. He was hustled along by order of the smiling and affable Kostakes, and the last thing his eyes rested upon as he plunged into the ravine was a cloud of smoke pouring from the front door of the demarch's café.

CHAPTER XVII
IN THE TRACK OF WAR

It did not require a trained eye to see that the Greeks had defended themselves stubbornly and had inflicted much more injury than they had suffered. Curtis counted twenty-five dead Turks in the defile. The continual dread that his horse should step on them kept him in a state of nervousness. But the animal evidently was possessed of as keen sensibilities as his temporary master, for he avoided the corpses with the most patent aversion. At a turn in the pass, behind a jutting rock, lay two Greeks. Curtis fancied this must have been the place where Michali had received his wound. It was evident that a well-organized and desperate stand had been made here, because in the narrowest part of the pass, only a few yards distant, lay seven Turks in a heap. Glancing back at the two dead Greeks, under the impression that he recognized one of them, the American beheld a sight at once noble and disgusting. The priest had lingered and was leaning toward his slain compatriots, making the sign of the cross with solemn gestures, the while he cried in tones sorrowful and defiant.

"I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die."

Panayota, her glorious eyes streaming with tears, her white hands clasped to her bosom, was looking to heaven and silently praying. Curtis felt his soul uplifted. The narrow walls of the ravine changed to the dim aisle of a cathedral; he seemed to hear a grand organ pealing forth a funeral march.

"Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"

When he opened his eyes he found himself in hell. Two or three Turks, grinning with diabolical hate and derision, were spitting at the dead Cretans. The soldier directly behind Papa-Maleko was jabbing him in the back viciously with the butt of his musket, while another touched him playfully between the shoulders with the point of a bayonet. The priest shrank from the steel with a gasp of pain, but turned back as he stumbled along chanting:

"Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through Jesus Christ, our Lord, amen!"

A little farther on they came upon a sight which made Curtis reel in his saddle—the bodies of the seven peasant girls who had leaped over the cliff: Four lay together in a heap. Of the remaining three, one had fallen face down upon a rock, and her long hair, shaken loose, rippled earthward from the white nape of her neck. Another was sleeping the last sleep peacefully, her head upon her outstretched arm, a smile upon her lips; and still a third lay upon her back. This one seemed to have suffered, for there was a look of terror in the staring eyes. Again the priest lifted his voice.

"I am the resurrection and the life," but the solemn chant was this time interrupted by a shriek from Panayota. Curtis, who had resolutely turned his face from the scene of fascinating horror, looked back quickly at the sound. A slender young girl had arisen upon her elbow, and was stretching her hand imploringly toward the priest. The hand was brown and chubby, but the arm from which the flowing sleeve had slipped away, was very white and shapely. She was dying even then, but the blessed words of her mother's faith and her mother's tongue had pierced her swooning ears and she had paused at the very threshold of death for the priest's benediction. A Turkish soldier thrust her through the neck with his bayonet, and her head dropped softly upon the bosom of a dead fellow.

"But this is barbarous," cried Curtis. "The civilized world shall know of this. Barbarous, I say, uncivilized—you an officer? A gentleman? Bah!"

"But Monsieur is too violent and hasty," replied Kostakes. "Irregularities happen in all armies. The man shall be punished."

"If he is to be shot," said the American, "please put me in the firing squad!"

Emerging from the pass, they came to a steep, wooded ravine, and their path led through an aisle of tall pine trees. The feet of the soldiers made no noise on the carpet of fallen spines. They found four more dead Turks and picked up two that were wounded. After about an hour of forced marching the ravine spread out into a beautiful sunlit valley, whereon the new plowed ground lay in patches of rich brown, terra-cotta and black loam. The vines were just putting forth their pale green sprouts. The laborers had been surprised in the act of heaping conical mounds about the roots, and an occasional discarded mattock betokened hasty flight. Poppies lifted everywhere their slender-stemmed, scarlet beakers—such glasses in shape as are fit to hold the vintage of the Rhine. The little slopes were set thick with candelabras of the ghostly asphodel, whose clusters of pale-pinkish, waxen flowers seemed indeed to belong to regions where the dear sun is but a memory. Scattering fruit trees, in the full revel and glory of their snowy bloom called to each other with perfume.

It was some time after noon now, but they stopped neither to eat nor rest. Curtis' foot began to pain him fearfully, but he made no sign. In the midst of such desolation, he felt pain to be a trivial thing. The vines were here, but where were the toilers? The pear trees were in bloom, but where were the laughing children, the wives and maidens with wine and bread for the midday feast? Once they passed a shock-headed boy of fourteen, or possibly younger, lying dead in a vineyard, with his mattock beside him, and later in the day they came upon a plow in the unfinished furrow. One of the oxen was dead, and the other great beast had struggled to his feet and stood patiently beside the body of his mate.

After that their path led for a way through a field of half-grown wheat. Around nearly every shoot the sweet wild-pea had twined its graceful spiral, bravely lifting the pretty blue of the flowers among the pale green of the grain. When the wind swept over the field it looked like changeable silk.

Toward sunset they came within seeing distance of a white village on a mountain side. A vast olive orchard surrounded it and a dozen or more dark green cypress trees pointed heavenward among the houses, like spires.

"Voilà, Monsieur," cried Kostakes, gaily. "There we shall rest to-night, and shall find time to eat. Are you hungry?"

CHAPTER XVIII
A DESERTED TOWN

An air of indescribable sadness hangs over a deserted town. Any one who has ever passed through a shepherd village, from which the inhabitants have gone for the summer, expecting to return again when the first snows of autumn drive them down from the mountains, has experienced this feeling. Here is the fountain, where the slender, merry maidens met at sundown, to gossip and fill their water jars; here is the café, where the old men gathered together under the platane tree and smoked and dreamed of the long ago; here is a secret nook, guarded by sweet poverty vines, where lovers held tryst in the fragrant twilight. But all is lonely, lonely.

The waters splash with a melancholy sound, the tables and chairs are gone from under the platane tree and the lovers—let us hope they are fled together. The spirit of loneliness dwells where man has been and is not—in a tenantless house, in the chamber of death, by the embers of a camp fire in a vast wilderness. As you follow the streets of a deserted town you hear nothing but the splash, splash of the waters of the fountain or the enquiring twitter of some little bird. Perhaps a cat, tamed more by solitude than by hunger, tiptoes to meet you, purring with diplomatic fervor. But these sounds do not break the silence, they are its foil, its background.

Galata was deserted because its inhabitants had fled two days before from the terrible Turk. Thanks to a timely warning, most of the people had succeeded in getting away, though an occasional corpse proved how narrow had been the escape of the entire population from sudden death.

Kostakes and his little troop now marched through an olive orchard, whose gnarled and venerable trunks had perhaps witnessed the cruelties of the only oppressors worse than the Turk—the haughty, treacherous and inhuman Venetians; they climbed a flight of steps cut in the natural rock and followed a street paved with cobblestones from the walls of partly ruined houses to the village square.

Here the men stacked arms and dispersed among the houses, looking for temporary quarters. Curtis could not help admiring the soldierly way in which everything was done. In ten minutes after their arrival the square looked like a little Indian village filled with wigwams of muskets, and sentries were pacing patiently up and down at all possible places of approach. This was evidently a town of considerable importance, as some of the houses facing the square were two-storied, and in one or two instances the projecting beams supporting the balconies were of carved marble. The fountain, too, that stood beneath a disheveled willow, whose roots drank at the overflowing waters, was of marble.

Three carven swans, the successive wonder of as many generations of unkempt children, swam full-breasted from a square pedestal, each hissing a clear, thin stream into a circular stone basin. An inscription informed posterity that the marble hero who sat atop of the inevitable column was Petros Nikolaides, former mayor of Galata,—an euergetes of imperishable memory. Mr. Nikolaides, with white goggle eyes, looked over the house tops, the olives and cypresses and away to the distant purple hills. His chin was small and cloven with a deep dimple and one side of his drooping mustache had been stoned away twenty years ago by mischievous boys.

Panayota and her father were led to a respectable looking stone house facing the fountain and two sentries were stationed before the door.

"Ah, well," said Kostakes amiably to Curtis, "we shall be quite comfortable here, eh? Will you do me the honor to dine with me?"

"I shall be delighted," replied the American. "It is I who shall receive the honor."

"No, no! I protest, Monsieur. It's quite the other way. We'll have a table set here under this tree. Ah, we shall be very cozy. Voilà! I shall be able to offer you some fresh cheese. If there's anything left, trust to my rascals for finding it!"

A soldier was dragging a stuffed goat-skin from the door of a grocery. At a sign from Kostakes, he set it on end, and ripped open the top with his knife, disclosing the snowy contents.

"Voilà, Monsieur! And no doubt we shall be able to find you some excellent wine, though you must excuse me from joining you in that. Mohammedans do not drink wine."

Kostakes leaped lightly to the ground, and gave his horse to an orderly. Kostakes was a handsome young fellow, almost boyish, and yet with an insolent, aristocratic air. His features seemed to combine sensualism and cruelty with a certain refinement. His lips were too thick and too red, and his chin was square. It was evident at a glance that his under front teeth closed even with the uppers. His nose was his cruel, sensitive feature. It came down straight from his forehead, thin as a knifeblade, and the nostrils had a way of trembling when he talked. Curtis threw his good leg over the horse's mane, and sat, woman fashion, eyeing the Turk. He could not, somehow, reconcile this gentlemanly, smiling young officer with the nightmare that continually haunted him—Michali in the burning building, wounded and screaming vainly for help. There was a sort of ghostly relief in the reflection that the poor fellow must have been over his sufferings long ago. But to burn to death! Ugh! How long does it take a man to burn to death?

"Does your foot pain you?" asked Kostakes, with genuine solicitude. "If those barbarian Greeks had not shot my surgeon—very cruel people the Greeks, especially the Cretan Greeks. When you know them better you will find that they are not half-civilized."

"If you will let one of your men help me dismount," said Curtis, "I will take a wash. I am glad to see that dinner is so nearly ready. I assure you I am half famished."

"One of my soldiers, Monsieur! I would never permit such a thing. I will help you myself. So—so! Ah! How is the foot?"

The American placed the wounded member on the ground and attempted to bear his weight upon it. To his surprise, it seemed much better. But a happy thought, an inspiration, took possession of him. He seized the leg tightly with his hands above the knee and sank upon the edge of the water basin.

"I—I believe it's worse!" he groaned.

"Allah forbid!" cried the Turk. "It is from the long ride. When you have rested it will be better. Now let us wash and eat something—a soldier's frugal meal."

Curtis attacked the repast with the zest of a ravenous appetite. The salt cheese, the brown bread and the country wine seemed to him viands fit for the gods. The orderly brought several heads of long Italian lettuce, which he washed at the fountain and cut lengthwise. They ate it like asparagus or celery, dipping it in salt. The American thought it delicious, and rightly. He would never again be able to relish the pale, tasteless chips sold in America for lettuce at brigand prices. He saw that Panayota and her father were also eating.

"Sensible girl," thought Curtis; "means to keep her strength up. We'll outwit these Turks yet."

He touched glasses with Kostakes, who was disposed to be convivial, albeit in water.

"Do you know, Monsieur le Capitaine," Curtis said, "I cannot decide which is the greater sensation—the pleasure of eating or the pain of my foot. Do you think, if blood poisoning should set in, you have anybody here who could amputate it?"

"Now, Allah forbid!" cried the Turk again. "By day after to-morrow we shall reach a Mohammedan village, and there we shall find a doctor."

CHAPTER XIX
A BLOW IN THE DARK

Curtis shared the quarters of his amiable host, Kostakes Effendi, in the front room of the grocery. Panayota and her father slept next door. The American's bed consisted of blankets laid upon two tables, placed side by side. As the blankets had been prodigally bestowed he found the couch sufficiently comfortable. He lay on his back with his arms under his head, gazing out into the moonlit square. Despite the fatigue and excitement of the day, he was not in the least sleepy. The Cretan night was too intense. The moonlight, wherever it fell, was passionately white, and the shadows of things were as black and distinct as though sketched in charcoal. Rows of soldiers wrapped in their blankets were sleeping in the square. Occasionally one sat up, looked about, and then lay down again. Once, when he was about to drowse off, he was roused to consciousness by a faint mewing overhead, and called softly:

"Kitty! kitty!"

The mewing ceased, for oriental cats are summoned by means of a whistle between the teeth, similar to the sound made by a peanut roaster.

"That's the grocer's cat," mused Curtis. "Poor animal, she doesn't know what's happened. She was asking me as plain as day, 'Do you know where my folks are?' Now, the dog probably went with the old man, but cats are different—the cat and the mortgage stick to the old homestead. I must make a note of that. Let's see. How do the Greeks call their felines? 'Ps-whs-whs.' That's it. Ps-whs-whs!"

A scrambling overhead, and a bolder "meouw!" rewarded the effort. Pussy was between the tile roof and a covering of reeds that, nailed to the rafters, answered the purpose of lath and plaster.

"Ps-whs-whs!"

"Meouw!" still more confidently, and the sound of cautious feet on dry reeds. Kostakes sat up on his table and rubbed his eyes.

"Are you awake, too, Monsieur?"

"Meouw!" said pussy again.

"Ah, the cat keeps you awake. If I were a Greek, now, I should order it killed, but we Turks are very merciful. I will order the sentry to drive it away."

"No, no, I beg of you. I was holding a little conversation with it. I cannot sleep, my leg pains me so. I fear that gangrene is setting in."

"Allah forbid! It is from the fatigue. We shall have a surgeon soon." Kostakes was too good a soldier to keep awake.

"Good night again, Monsieur," he said, and turned over.

Outside the nightingales were calling each other from far, tremulous distances. The waters of the fountain splashed and gurgled unceasingly. Curtis' senses became more and more acute. Sounds that he could not hear a moment ago became audible now, without growing louder. He heard the plying of axes, and once the sound of a hammer, followed by laughter.

"What the deuce are they up to?" he muttered. "Are they building a fortification of any kind? I've got to do some tall thinking in the morning. Somehow or other I must get away with that girl. But how? how? I'll make Kostakes believe I'm lamer than I really am, and he won't watch me so close. But I must have an opportunity. No man can do anything without an opportunity—and that isn't so bad, either. I must make a note of that in the morning. Let's see, what's that other thing I thought of? H'm—hang it, I've forgotten it."

"Meouw!" said kitty.

"That's it, by Jove! Cats and mortgages."

For fully an hour the American invented and discarded schemes for escaping with Panayota. He tried to think of passages in novels describing the rescue of captive maidens by heroes like himself, but fairy tales of enchanted carpets and wishing caps persisted in running through his head, to the exclusion of more practical methods.

"I must watch for an opportunity," he exclaimed, aloud, bringing his fist down upon the table. "If I can't do any better I'll stick to Kostakes till we get to Canea, and then I'll put the matter in the hands of the English consul. Hello! What's that!"

He was sure he heard a dull, crushing blow, followed by a moan and the sound of some one falling. He listened for a long time, but heard nothing more, and yet he was conscious of a sense of horror, as though he had just awakened from a nightmare. He rubbed his eyes and pinched himself.

"I'm awake," he thought, "and yet I feel as though a murder had been committed. Lord, but I'm all haired up! If this keeps on I shall turn spiritualistic medium. I wonder if I can see the folks at home?" And he shut his eyes and fixed his mind upon his father and mother.

"Let's see, now, what time of day is it in Boston?"

He was awakened from his reverie by the voice of Panayota, violent and pleading, by turns; one moment mingled with sobs and the next angry. She was demanding "Where is my father?" and asking for Kostakes. The latter sat up and listened for a moment. Then hastily buckling on his belt and throwing his cloak over his shoulders, he went out. Curtis, who was not undressed, followed him. As he passed through the door, one of the guards seized him, but he struck viciously at the soldier and cried so angrily, "Let go of me or I'll punch you!" that the Captain looked around and spoke two or three words sharply to the guard, who released him. Suddenly remembering that he was very lame, he sat down upon the edge of the fountain. Panayota was standing in the door of her lodging, in the full moonlight. Her attitude, her voice, her face, were eloquent of terror and despair. As soon as she saw Kostakes she stretched her arms towards him and cried:

"Don't let them kill my father. Bring him back to me, please, please!"

"Why, certainly, my own Panayota, You know that I would not harm you nor any one belonging to you. But where is your father?"

"He asked the guard to bring him a drink of water, and the guard told him to come out and get it. And he hasn't come back, I tell you; he hasn't come back. O, Mother of God, help! help! Don't let them kill him."

"I see it all," cried Kostakes; "he has escaped," and he questioned the bystanding soldiers in Turkish.

"Yes, my Panayota. He has taken advantage of my kindness. I ordered that he be not bound and that he be treated with every consideration—for your sake, dear Panayota!" Here his voice became low and tender and he moved nearer. The Turk was, indeed, a gallant figure in the moonlight, leaning gracefully on his sword, the cape of his long military cloak thrown back over his shoulder.

"You hear the men; they say that he darted away and that they ran after him, but could not catch him. Had it been anybody else, they would have shot him down. But I had ordered them not to injure him under any circumstances. This I did for you, my Panayota, because I love you. It is you who—"

"Murderer!" screamed Panayota, leaning toward him with a look of pale hate, the while she fixed him with a long accusing finger. "Murderer—Oh, don't deny it! Coward! Liar! You come to me red with my father's blood and talk to me of love. Apostate! Renegade! Where is my father, eh? You perjured Greek, where is my father?"

Stepping down from the door, majestic as a goddess, she advanced toward Kostakes with arm extended.

He shrank slightly from her and looked uneasily to right and left, to avoid her eye.

"But, my dear Panayota, you shouldn't give way to your temper like that. You wrong me, really you do. I assure you, your good father has escaped."

She dropped her arm heavily to her side.

"Yes," she replied, solemnly, "escaped from a world of murderers and liars. Gone where there is no more killing and burning; where there are no Turks and no renegades—gone, Kostakes Effendi, where you must meet him again, with the brand of Cain upon your brow!"

Turning, she walked back to the house, but stopped in the door and said:

"Do you know how those are punished in hell who renounce the religion of Christ and become Turks? And what torture awaits you, renegade and murderer of a Christian priest? Kill, kill, give up your life to deeds of blood. Never think of forgiveness. There is no forgiveness for such as you. Your place in hell is already chosen. They are even now preparing the torments for you. O God," and she raised her hands as one praying, "may this man's deeds find him out, in this world and in the next. May he be haunted night and day for the rest of his life. May he die a violent and shameful death, and his memory be held in disgust. May his soul go to the place of torment, and be tortured forever. For he has renounced the Son of God, and has slain his holy minister!"

She disappeared within the house, and Curtis heard her sobbing in the darkness, "Papa! Papa!"

Kostakes filled the cup which hung from the pillar of the fountain by a chain, and took a long drink. He was trembling so that the tin vessel rattled against his teeth.

"Mon Dieu!" he exclaimed, observing Curtis. "Did you ever see anything so unreasonable as a woman? Here is her father run away, and she accuses me of killing him, and consigns me to eternal torment. Really, she has made me quite nervous. If I were not innocent, I should really fear her curses." And he took another drink of the cool water.

Curtis thought of the dull, crushing blow and the groan that he had heard, and he involuntarily moved a little away from the handsome and affable Kostakes, who had sat down by him on the rim of the basin.

"What do you keep the girl for, anyway?" he made bold to ask. "You surely would not force her to join your—your harem, against her consent?"

Kostakes sighed.

"Monsieur," he said, "is a poet. He will understand and sympathize with me. I love Panayota. I would make her my sole wife in honorable marriage. I desire no other woman but her. Bah! What are other women compared to her? Is she not magnificent? I could not help loving her, even just now, when she was cursing me. It is true that I am part Greek by extraction, and that I was baptized into the Greek church, and that I have become a Turk. But what is religion compared with love? Panayota is all the heaven I want. I am willing to turn Greek again and have a Christian wedding, if she would take me."

"Aren't you conducting your courtship in rather a violent manner?" asked the American. "In my country your conduct would be thought, to say the least, irregular."

"Have you in English the proverb, 'All things are fair in love and war?'"

"Certainly."

"Well, you see this is both love and war. I have possession of Panayota, and I mean to treat her so well that she shall love me. Not a hair of her head shall be touched until she marries me of her own free will."

"But your wives?" asked Curtis. "How many have you of them?"

The Captain shrugged his shoulders.

"Three," he replied. "Dumpy, silly creatures. A Mohammedan has not much difficulty in getting rid of his wives."

Curtis arose.

"If you will help me to the house," he said, "I will try to get a little sleep."

Kostakes sprang to his feet.

"Lean on my shoulder," he said. "So, so, how is the leg?"

"Bad, very bad. I'm really worried about it. Do I bear down on you too heavily?"

CHAPTER XX
FOUR AGAINST ONE

The sound of a reveille awoke Curtis, and he looked out into the dim, dewy morning. The wigwams of muskets had disappeared, and the little army had already fallen in. Several horses, saddled and bridled, stood by the village fountain. One, a young and sleek charger, was impatiently pawing the earth and another was drinking. Kostakes was sitting at a table, giving some orders to his second in command, the veteran with the scar. A sword attached to a leather belt kept company on the cloth with a pile of eggs, a loaf of bread and a pot of steaming coffee.

"Bon jour," cried the Captain gaily, springing to his feet, as he espied the American. "How have you slept, and how is the foot?"

"I got a little sleep, despite the pain, but the foot seems no better. I am getting very anxious to see that doctor of yours."

"To-morrow, I promise you without fail. And now for breakfast, as we must be off."

The Captain and his Lieutenant ran to the American, who put an arm about the neck of each and hopped to the table, groaning ostentatiously. After the hurried breakfast, Panayota was summoned. She came forth, pale as death, a beautiful, living statue of despair. Kostakes offered to help her, but she repulsed him with loathing, and climbed into her saddle as a refuge from his attentions. There were dark circles under her swollen eyes. As she looked about her, as though in hopeless search for the missing dear one, her features trembled on the verge of tears. Groaning:

"Ach, my God!" She clasped her hands tightly in her lap and stared into vacancy. Her beautiful hair was disheveled and her long white cuffs were wrinkled and soiled. The chivalry in Curtis' nature prompted him to speak and comfort her, although the words sounded hollow and false to his own ear.

"Take comfort," he said, "your father is surely alive. Believe me, he has escaped."

She smiled sadly.

"You do not know the Turks," she replied.

"Did I not tell you, my darling?" cried Kostakes eagerly, "of course he has escaped."

She did not even look at him, but murmured:

"Murderer! perjurer!"

Kostakes shrugged his shoulders, as who would say, "See!" and turning to Curtis cried:

"But Monsieur speaks Greek famously!"

"Only a few words and those with much difficulty."

"Mais non! On the contrary I find your Greek very perfect. And now allons!"

They pushed briskly up the narrow street, through a scene of utter desolation. The whirlwind of war had struck the town and wrecked it. As they turned a corner a long-legged, half-grown fowl broke for cover and tilted away, balancing its haste with awkward, half-fledged wings. They came unexpectedly upon a little Orthodox church and a putrid odor assailed Curtis' nostrils. Their path led them around to the front door.

"My God!" he gasped. A sight had met his eyes that was destined to thrill him with sickness and horror to the latest day of his life, as often as the black phantom of its recollection should arise in his mind. The village priest, an old, gray-bearded man, had died about a month before and had been buried in his robes. There was the body, hanging to its own church door, like the skin of a great black bat. Nails had been driven through the clothing at the shoulders, and the weight of the carcass, sinking down into the loose garment, had left it pulled up above the head into the semblance of joints in a vampire's wings.

From a bonfire of bones, half-decayed corpses and sacred eikons—the last named gathered from the houses and the church—a disgusting odor arose and filled the air. The Turks broke forth in derisive laughter as their eyes fell upon the horrid spectacle.

"My rascals have eluded my vigilance, I see," observed Kostakes, "and have been having a little fun in their own way."

"Different nations have different ideas about a joke," gasped Curtis through his handkerchief.

Emerging from the town, they picked their way through a large patch of freshly felled olive trees. The sound of the nocturnal chopping was now explained. About eleven o'clock they stopped for dinner in a small, deserted hamlet. During the progress of the meal a wounded Bashi Bazouk rode into the town and up to the table where Curtis and Kostakes were sitting. The man wore a red turban, which gave to his pallid face a tint similar to that of the underside of a toadstool. His soft shirt had sagged into a little bagful of blood, that dripped out like the whey from a sack of cottage cheese, upon his yellow sash and blue breeches. He said a few words with mouth wide open, as though his under jaw had suddenly grown heavy, and then, reeling, was caught by two soldiers, dragged from the saddle and carried into a hut.

"I must ask you to excuse me for several hours," said Kostakes, rising. "My Bashi Bazouks, whom I left with certain commissions to execute, are being defeated at Reveni, about an hour's march from here. How fifty Bashi Bazouks can find any difficulty with a little place like Reveni is more than I can understand! But I shall soon put a new face on affairs when I arrive!"

"God help the poor people," prayed Curtis, inaudibly.

"I shall leave three of my men behind to look after your wants and those of the young lady. I shall explain to the one I leave with you that he is your servant—that he must bring you anything you ask for. He speaks Greek, so you will be able to get along with him."

Five minutes afterward Kostakes was riding away at the head of his troop. He turned once in the saddle and waved his hand to Curtis. The American picked up his hat from the table and swung it in the air.

"Au revoir, Kostakes," he cried. "The devil confound you and your whole crew of cutthroats—I wonder if this beggar speaks English?"

He glanced suspiciously at the tall, sallow-faced Turk who stood a short distance away, leaning upon his musket.

"No, I guess not. He'd give some sign if he did."

Two other Turks, with musket on shoulder, were pacing back and forth before the door of the hut where Panayota was imprisoned. Curtis could feel his heart thumping against his breast. He struck the place with his doubled fist.

"Keep still, curse you," he muttered, "and let me think. Here is the opportunity—but how? how?"

The army was crawling along a white road that streamed like a ribbon athwart the foot of a hill. The ribbon fluttered as the dust rose in the wind. The bayonets twinkled in a dun cloud.

"Four against one," mused Curtis. "Four Turks against one Yankee trick—but how?"

Kostakes plunged into the hill and disappeared, and the blazing bayonets, line after line, were extinguished in a billow of green thyme. The American looked back over his shoulder at the door of a stone hut—the one into which the wounded Bashi Bazouk had been carried.

"Hey!" he called, "you there, hey!"

The Turk left ostensibly as Curtis' servant, but actually as his guard, stepped briskly forward, and, taking in his own the American's extended hand, pulled him to his feet.

"Help me into the house," said Curtis. "Now bring me that bench."

The man complied, after which he went to the door, and, leaning against the jamb, looked wistfully at his fellows. At one end of the room was a fireplace, filled with ashes and charred pieces of log. It was a primitive concern, the only vent for smoke being a hole in the roof directly overhead. Board platforms on each side the fireplace served as couches for the family. On one of these, flat on his back, lay the wounded man.

"I wonder how badly he's hurt," mused Curtis. "There isn't strength enough left in him to put up a fight, but there's enough left to pull a trigger if I tackle the other chap. Hello, he's got the hiccoughs; why, that's queer."

The man became quiet, and again Curtis relapsed into thought, to be disturbed a second time by the sound of knocking on boards. Looking around, his eyes fell directly upon the eyes of the Bashi Bazouk, and he felt as though he heard some one crying for help when no help was near. The man was resting upon his back and both elbows. For a moment those bloodshot, praying, awful eyes were fixed upon Curtis; then they swept the dingy hut and went out like panes of glass when the light is extinguished in a room. The man fell backward, fluttered on the hard planks and was still. Curtis shuddered.

"That wasn't nice," he muttered, "but this is no time for sentiment."

The other Turk stood by the body of his dead comrade, looking down at the ghastly, upturned face. Curtis pinched the muscles of his own right arm with the fingers and thumb of his left hand, and moved his doubled fist tentatively up and down.

"Where shall I hit him?" he mused. "In the chin or back of the ear? He must never know what struck him."

Bending over, he untied the long strip of cloth about his foot and unwound it. Taking it in his hands he pulled several times on it, to test its strength.

"Strong as a hemp rope. You could hang a man with that."

It was Panayota's blue homespun.

"Hey!" he called to the Turk. "You there. Say, look at this foot of mine, will you, and see what you think of it."

The man kneeled. Curtis drew back his arm, but realized that he could not get sufficient swing in a sitting posture.

"O, hold on a minute. Let me try the foot on the ground and see how it goes."

They rose to their feet together, and the unsuspecting soldier reeled backward, stunned by a vicious punch on the temple. But he did not fall, and Curtis, maddened by a great fear lest he bungle his opportunity, sprang forward and delivered a swinging, sledgehammer-like blow upon his victim's ear, throwing into it the entire strength of his body. The Turk dropped like an ox under the butcher's hammer. Then Curtis hastily bound him, hand and foot, with Panayota's bandage, and, tearing the lining from the man's coat, stuffed it down his throat. Pulling up a plank from the platform by the fireplace, he thrust the limp form out of sight and closed up the opening.

"I hope I didn't kill you," he muttered; "but, as old Lindbohm says, 'you must yust take your chances!'"

He walked once or twice the length of the hut. The foot gave him considerable pain, but it was possible to step on it.

"What'll I do with the other two?" he mused.

He picked up the gun lying on the floor and examined it. It was a Mauser and charged with five shells. He peeped cautiously through the doorway at Panayota's prison, concealing his body. The two guards appeared at the corner and looked curiously in his direction.

"Bah! What a fool I am!" he thought, and hopped boldly into sight, holding up his lame leg by passing his hand under it while he leaned against the jamb. The guards faced about and disappeared, putting the house between themselves and Curtis on their backward march to the other end of their beat.

"I could pot one of them, and then—but no, I might miss, and then I'd be in a pretty mess. And even if I did hit one, the other would have me at a disadvantage."

There was a sound of kicking against the boards at the fireplace. He sprang to the spot, rifle in hand, and tore up the plank. The man was lying upon his back with his eyes open. A great light broke in upon Curtis—an inspiration. He had thrust the Turk out of sight through instinct.

"Pshaw!" he exclaimed, "they can't both leave Panayota. If I call to them, may be one will come out of curiosity, and I'll do this thing right over again. But what'll I tie him with?"

He cast his eyes about the room. The inevitable chest, studded with brass nails stood against the wall. He opened it.

"Cleaned out, by Jove!"

He went again to his victim, and taking a large jackknife from his pocket, deliberately opened it. The man turned as white as veal, his jaws worked convulsively on the gag as he made a vain effort to plead for mercy, and a pitiful noise, a sort of gurgling bleat, sounded in his throat.

"What the devil ails you?" asked Curtis. "O—I see," and he added in Greek:

"No kill. Cut your clothes—see?"

The American thought of the Turk, and looked out

And stooping, he slitted the Turk's sleeve from wrist to shoulder. Following the seam around with the blade, he pulled away the large rectangular piece of cloth. Seizing the other sleeve, he was about to slash into it, when he thought he heard footsteps among the stones and gravel outside the hut.

"My God!" he cried, in a hoarse whisper, and jumped into the corner beside the door, just as one of the other two Turks walked boldly into the room. Without a moment's thought Curtis brought the barrel of his rifle down upon the man's head, who dropped his own gun and pitched sprawling upon his face. For fully a minute, which seemed an hour, the American stood motionless, breathless, in the attitude which had followed the blow. Every muscle was set to knotted hardness; he held the rifle in both hands, ready to throw it suddenly to his shoulder. He did not breathe, and he listened so intently that he could hear his own heart beating, and the breathing of the man at the fireplace. Suddenly his muscles relaxed like an escaping spring, and he looked nervously about for the detached sleeve. Picking it up, he stooped over the second Turk, when the latter moved his left arm several times with the palm of the hand down, feebly suggesting an effort to rise. Then the arm dropped and the hand beat a faint tattoo on the earthen floor. There was a great shiver of the whole body, a twitching of the muscles, a queer rattle in the throat, and—silence. Curtis stared with open mouth and dilated eyes, and a great, inexplicable horror came over him. "Ah!" he gasped, and, dropping upon his knees, he ran his fingers over the skull. The hair was matted with blood, and a deep, ragged-edged dent bore witness to the terrible force with which the rifle barrel had fallen.

"I've killed a man," he whispered, in an awestruck voice, rising to his feet. Staring fixedly at the silent thing lying there before him, he repeated the sentence over and over again:

"I've killed a man—I've killed a man!"

Then all at once a great change came over him, the joy and fierceness of the lust for blood, and he laughed hysterically, gloating over the dead man before him, as the victorious heroes used to do in the old barbaric ages.

He thought of the other Turk, and looked out of the door just in time to see him turn at the hither corner and disappear as he walked back on his beat. Curtis made a dash for an olive tree about eight rods distant, and, skulking behind it, peeped between the high gnarled roots. When the guard had again appeared and turned back, he ran to a rock and threw himself down behind it, instinctively using tactics by which he had sometimes crept up on a diving duck. He was now within listening distance. The next run brought him to the side of the house, and he had just time to throw his gun to his shoulder when the guard stepped into view. He might have taken him prisoner, but the thought did not occur to him. He had tasted blood. Panayota came to the door and looked wonderingly out. The American ran to her with the smoking musket in his hand and seized her by the wrist. It was the natural act of the savage who has won his woman in fight.

"Come, Panayota!" he cried, "you are free. They are all dead!"

And he started down the hill, pulling the girl with him. She came without a word.

CHAPTER XXI
"MY LIFE, I LOVE YOU"

Tied to a tree was one of those large black and tan mules that are stronger than any horse and tough as steel. This one, a pack animal, had been left behind in charge of the three guards. Curtis picked up the clumsy pack saddle which lay near and threw it upon the beast's back. In his excitement he bungled the unfamiliar straps, but Panayota assisted with nimble and experienced fingers. He helped her to mount, and was about to climb up, when he happened to think of the dead Turks' ammunition. Bringing a supply from the hut, he climbed up behind the girl. So they rode away, the fair Cretan sitting sidewise in the saddle, the American astride behind her. He passed an arm around her waist to steady them both, and accelerated the animal's speed by digging the butt of his musket into its side. He could not use his heels, because one foot was bare and still somewhat lame. Panayota guided the mule by flipping in its eyes, first on one side of the head and then on the other, the end of the rope that was tied about its neck. As Curtis felt beneath his arm the firm but yielding form; as the warm, strong heart throbbed against his hand, his madness became complete. He had killed two men for this girl, and she was worth it. He was ferociously happy. The very touch of her thrilled him. He knew now why he had killed the men—for the same reason that David had slain Uriah. Woman, gentle, refining, softening woman will, in an instant, blot two thousand years of civilization out of a man's nature and turn him back into a primitive savage. He held her very tight, and she made no resistance. What trifles shape our destinies! In the giddy happiness of the moment he could not have framed an original Greek sentence to save his soul, but as he leaned forward with his lips close to the girl's ear, with his face partly buried in her hair, the refrain of Byron's "Maid of Athens" sang itself in his brain, and he whispered again and again, "Zoe mou, sas agapo, zoe mou, sas agapo." She shivered slightly the first time that he repeated the sentence, but she did not repulse him. At last, that first keen madness of contact with her passed away, and he chattered excitedly as he urged on the ambling mule: "Don't be afraid, Panayota; they'll never catch us. I've got you now, not Kostakes. My life, I love you! Go on, you dromedary, or I'll punch a rib out of you! They must kill me before they take you again."

After they had been about an hour on the road, they began to feel uneasy.

"They must have got back by this time," thought Curtis. "I wish I had killed that other Turk, then they would have thought we were rescued," and he looked anxiously back over his shoulder. The idea came to Curtis of turning off sharply from the path and hiding in the hills, but the mountains that enclosed the long valley looked forbidding. They would certainly lose their way and perish of hunger. Besides there were Greeks ahead of them somewhere. As they began to ascend toward Galata, they could see for a long distance over the lovely plain now stretched out before them in the rays of the afternoon sun.

"It'll be time to make a break for the woods," mused Curtis, "when I see them coming." Once a cloud of dust arose far behind and he caught Panayota's arm.

"Look!" he cried. "They're coming!" But she replied:

"No, 'tis a whirlwind."

Curtis did not understand the word, but there was no mistaking the speaking gesture which accompanied it. The mule becoming tired, Panayota slid to the ground, and, throwing the rope over her shoulder, trotted on ahead.

"There's Galata!" she cried, pointing with level arm to the distant village.

"How many hours?" asked Curtis.

"About two more."

"We shall get there after dark, then?"

"Certainly."

The sun was just setting behind a mountain, as it always does in the interior of Crete. Curtis turned in the saddle and took one last long look. The white road lay very plain on the side of the low ridge over which they had come. It was in shape like a giant letter S, one end of which ended at the summit and the other among the green vineyards, climbing half way up the slope. The trees, and the deep water-ways and castles of rock on the side of the hill were indistinguishable at that distance, all blending into a general effect of soft color, but the top of the hill was sketched against the sky as distinctly as a crayon line, and on it every tree, nay, every shrub stood magnified in the parting light. There was something unnatural about this row of trees, rope-walking on a curved line swaying in the sky. As Curtis gazed at the weird effect two giant horsemen balanced on the aerial rope for an instant, and then lunged headforemost into the purple glow on the hither side. They were followed by row after row of mounted men, four abreast, that appeared and disappeared in rapid succession.

"Look, Panayota," said Curtis quietly. The girl went deadly white and crossed herself.

"My little Virgin, help us," she prayed. "The Bashi Bazouks!"

"They haven't got us yet. How far away are they?"

"An hour, may be an hour and a half."

"We'll turn off into the hills when it's a little darker. Can they see us?"

"I think not," replied Panayota. "We are now among the trees. But we'd better wait a little before we turn."

The Turkish troops had now become a long, dark quadrangle, sliding slowly down the giant S. The sun dropped behind the mountain, the white letter became black, and the quadrangle disappeared. The fleeing man and woman were in the world's amethyst shadow.

"Shall we turn now, Panayota?" asked Curtis. "I care not where, so we go together."

For answer she turned and held up her hand. He listened, but heard nothing.

"Voices," said the girl, "and footsteps. But I hear no more. They are moving stealthily."

"Is it more Turks, coming from in front?"

"God knows, but I think not."

She led the mule some distance to the side of the road into a clump of green oleander. Curtis slid to the ground and looked carefully to his rifle.

"Panayota," he whispered, hurriedly, "they shall not take us while I live. I love you. We may have but a few moments together. Let me take one kiss, the first, perhaps the last."

He put his arm about her, but she placed her hand against his breast and pushed him from her, with a cautious "hist!"

The footsteps of many men could be heard plainly, not far up the road now.

"If they would only speak," she muttered.

The words were hardly out of her mouth ere some one uttered a sharp and hurried command in a suppressed tone.

"They are Greeks!" exclaimed the girl. "Now Christ and the Virgin—"

But Curtis put his hand gently over her mouth, whispering:

"Hush! Perhaps it is a ruse."

The moon had not yet arisen, and the darkness was like ink. Some one stumbled, and a musket fell "ching!" among the rocks.

"Take care!" said an imperious voice in Greek.

"That's Kyrios Lindbohm," whispered Panayota. "I know his voice."

"Lindbohm don't know any Greek," replied her companion.

"He could not be in Crete one day without learning the word for 'take care!' I tell you it's Lindbohm. Who that has ever heard that voice could forget it? I should know it," murmured the girl, "if I heard it in my grave."

Curtis was too excited to take note of the singular remark.

The men were now passing them quite close and several of them were conversing in low tones. The girl leaned forward, listening. Then suddenly she called in a loud voice:

"Patriotai, where are you?"

Utter silence for several moments, broken at last by an inquiring "Eh?" and the clicking of rifle locks.

"Lindbohm!"

"Curtis, by damn! It's all right; come out!"

The American sprang eagerly forward, but stepped on a stone. Then he leaped on to the back of the mule and Panayota led the animal out into the highway and into the midst of a goodly company of armed insurgents, who forgot all discipline, and broke forth into a volley of questions.

The American and the Lieutenant were shaking each other by the hand through it all.

"I saved her!" cried Curtis. "I killed two Turks and did up another. Then we ran away on this mule. I cracked one of 'em on the head and shot another. I smashed one with my fist and took his gun away from him. Then I—"

"So you saved Panayota?"

"Yes, I saved her, I tell you. I—"

"Thank God! thank God!" cried Lindbohm, throwing his arms about Curtis' neck.

"Where is my father?" asked Panayota, in a shrill voice that pierced the bubble of questions, suddenly, awkwardly.

Like Another Helen

LIKE ANOTHERHELEN

CHAPTER IYOUTHFUL ENTHUSIASM

CHAPTER IION FRIENDLY SHORES

CHAPTER IIIA COMIC OPERA TOWN

CHAPTER IVA DINNER OF HERBS

CHAPTER VSOME PICTURES AND A RECITATION

CHAPTER VITHE FIRST OF MAY

CHAPTER VIIA DEMAND, AND A COWARD

CHAPTER VIIISMOKE BY DAY AND FIRE BY NIGHT

CHAPTER IXAWAITING THE SIGNAL

CHAPTER XWAR IN EARNEST

CHAPTER XIAN AMATEUR SURGEON

CHAPTER XII"STILL I SAY UNTO YOU, COURAGE"

CHAPTER XIIITHE BRAVE THING TO DO

CHAPTER XIVA CRITICAL MOMENT

CHAPTER XVTHE MAN IN THE BARREL

CHAPTER XVITO NO AVAIL

CHAPTER XVIIIN THE TRACK OF WAR

CHAPTER XVIIIA DESERTED TOWN

CHAPTER XIXA BLOW IN THE DARK

CHAPTER XXFOUR AGAINST ONE

CHAPTER XXI"MY LIFE, I LOVE YOU"

LIKE ANOTHER
HELEN

CHAPTER I
YOUTHFUL ENTHUSIASM