CHAPTER XXII.
Upon the southern slope of the Black Mountain—that is, on the rising uplands which lead from Albania to Montenegro—lay the ancient and princely estates of the De Streeses. A dense forest of pines spread for miles, like a myriad gigantic pillars in some vast temple. They seemed to support, as it were, some Titanic dome surrounded with pinnacles and turrets, a huge cluster of jagged rocks, which was called by those who gazed upon it from leagues away "The Eyrie." In the midst of these great monoliths, and hardly distinguishable from them, rose the walls of the new castle which the voivode Amesa had built upon the ruins of that destroyed at the time of the massacre of its former possessor.
The horse of the voivode stood within the court, his head drooping, and the white sweat-foam drying upon his heated flanks. His master paced up and down the enclosure, engaged in low but excited conversation with a soldier.
The voivode was of princely mien; tall, but compactly built; face full in its lower development, and somewhat sensual; eyes gray and restless, which gave one at first a sharp, penetrating glance, and then seemed to hide behind the half-closed lids, like some wild animal that inspects the hunter hastily, then takes to covert.
"You are sure, Drakul, that the party which drove you from the hamlet were Turks, and not Arnaouts in disguise, like yourselves?"
"I could not mistake," said Drakul, a hard-faced man, one of whose eyebrows was arched higher than the other, and whose entire countenance was distorted from the symmetrical balance of its two sides, giving an expression of duplicity and cruelty. "I could not mistake, noble Amesa, for I have too often eyed those rascals over the point of my sword not to know a Turk in the dark. But all the fiends combined against us that night. We left our two best men dead, and the two we wanted, the boy and the girl, escaped us. The she-witch did not come back to the village the next day; but the red-headed imp did, and raved like a hyena when he found the girl missing. I watched him as he suddenly went off, doubtless, to some spot they both knew of. The young thief stole the clothes off a dead Turk. The next day we spied him again; this time with that Arnaud-Kabilovitsch, Albanian-Servian, forester-colonel, or whatever he may be, who came back when Castriot did. The fellow escaped us a second time."
"Track him! track him!" cried Amesa spitefully. "I will make you rich, Drakul, the day you bring me that fox's brush of red hair from his head."
"I have tracked him and could take you to the very spot where he and the girl are to-day," said the man. "Come this way, my noble Amesa,"—leading him to the side of the court commanding a far stretch of country to the north-west. "Now let your eye follow Skadar[54] along the left shore: then up the great river.[55] Not two leagues from the mountain spur that bends the stream out of your sight, at the hamlet just off the road into your Uncle Ivan's country—"
"The stargeshina has a red goitre like a turkey cock? I know every hut in the hamlet," interrupted Amesa. "But why think you she is there?"
"Why? I have seen her, and him with her. I followed the fellow day after day. Once I saw him yonder on the spur. He clipped the bark of a tree, and in the smoothed spot cut a line. A little beyond he did the same thing again. He spied this way and that way with all the pains one would take to pick a way for an army. Then he took a roll of paper from his bosom, and marked down something for every mark he had made upon the trees. And when he was out of sight I took the range of his marks, and by St. Theckla! they pointed straight to a path which led down the mountain to the ford in the great river that is opposite the old turkey cock's konak."
"But you may have mistaken the man," suggested Amesa.
"Not I, Sire. I know his head as well as a bull knows a red rag; and his duck legs, and his walk like an ambling horse."
"It is he," submitted Amesa. "But how know you that the girl was there in the hamlet?"
"Did I not see her, my noble Amesa? And could I not know her from the look of her father? If I could forget him living, I have never passed a night without seeing his face as it was dead, when we dragged him to the burning beams of the old house that stood on this——"
"Silence!" cried Amesa in a sudden burst of rage. "How dare you allude to my uncle's death without my bidding?"
There was a pause for a few moments, during which Amesa stamped heavily upon the stone pavement of the court as he walked, like one endeavoring to shake off from his person some noisome thing that troubled him. The man resumed—
"Besides, the children of the village said she was a stray kid there, and not of kin to anybody. And while I was there the same stump-headed fellow who marked the direction came to the hamlet."
"Be ready to accompany me to-morrow, Drakul. You can say that we are scouting."