Suddenly, while I was idly regarding Demetri, the three fellows sprang on me. One had me by each arm before I could so much as move. The third dashed his hand into the breast-pocket of my coat and seized my revolver. They leapt away again, caught up the rifles they had dropped, and held them levelled towards me. The thing was done in a moment, I sitting like a man paralysed. Then one of the ruffians cried:
‘Your Excellency, the gentleman moved his hand to his pocket, to his pistol.’
‘What?’ asked Mouraki, turning round. ‘Moved his hand to a pistol? Had he a pistol?’
My revolver was held up as damning evidence.
‘And he tried to use it?’ asked Mouraki, in mournful shocked tones.
‘It looked like it,’ said the fellow.
‘It’s a lie. I wasn’t thinking of it,’ said I. I was exasperated at the trick. I had made up my mind to fight it out sooner than give up the revolver.
‘I’m afraid it may have been so,’ said Mouraki, shaking his head. ‘Give the pistol to me, my man. I’ll keep it safe.’ His eye shot triumph at me as he took my revolver and turned again to Phroso. I was now powerless indeed.
Demetri finished his hunch of bread, and began to clean his knife, polishing its blade leisurely and lovingly on the palm of his hand, and feeling its point with the end of his thumb. During this operation he hummed softly and contentedly to himself. I could not help smiling when I recognised the tune; it was an old friend, the chant that One-eyed Alexander wrote on the death of Stefan Stefanopoulos two hundred years ago. Demetri polished, and Demetri hummed, and Demetri looked away across the blue water with a speculative eye. I did not choose to consider what might be in the mind of Demetri as he hummed and polished and gazed over the sea that girt his native island. Demetri’s thoughts were his own. Let Mouraki look to them, if they were worth his care.