At the railroad station we fought for places in a first-class compartment, which had room for six and must accommodate eight. The second and third-class cars were jammed to the doors. Women wept, children howled and men swore and struck each other and their women indiscriminately. In the midst of it all, with one warning whistle-blast, the train lunged out of the station, shaking off superfluous passengers as it jolted over the switch on to the main line.
That was a dreadful journey, not long as regards distance, but tediously protracted in time. The country grew steadily more mountainous as we left the coast. The engine panted and heaved; the cars rattled and shook. At frequent intervals we stopped by some station, and the scenes of our departure from Salonika were repeated according to scale. But the engine toiled on, and in the full tide of hours we crawled over a mountain-ridge and saw the sun rising in the east beyond the close-packed roofs of Seres.
It was a town that seemed to huddle together as though in fear, and there were great gashes and gaps in its lines of white-washed house-walls, relics of three wars, each of which had taken toll of its citizens. Here and there a church or a mosque, a school or a government building, rose above the level of two-story dwellings. But it had none of the teeming squalor and gorgeous conflict of colors that made Salonika so effective a gateway.
Nikka commandeered a fiacre in the station-square.
"Do you know the house of Kostabidjian the moneylender?" he asked the driver in Greek that sounded more than passable to me. "Very well, then, drive us there."
"Who is Kostabidjian?" I inquired as the driver whipped up his small horses.
A dour, secretive look had settled on Nikka's face in the last two days. His eyes had narrowed, and their gaze was fixed upon the far horizon when they were not shrewdly surveying the appearances of people around him.
"He is the agent of the tribe," he replied shortly. "It was through him I sent word to my uncle."
I held my peace after that. We drove for half an hour into the northeastern suburbs, where the houses became little villas, with courtyards and small gardens, and sometimes orchards behind. At last we stopped at a gateway overhung by olive-trees, and the driver got down to pull the bell-wire which protruded from an opening by the gate. The solemn clangor echoed faintly, and was succeeded by shuffling foot-steps. A wicket opened, and a dark, bewhiskered face was revealed. Nikka ejaculated a single sentence in the Gypsy dialect that Toutou's gang sometimes used, and the gate swung ajar. I gave the driver of the fiacre a couple of drachmas, and followed Nikka inside.
The individual with the whiskers, a dried-up, elderly man, quickly fastened the gate again, with a sidewise look at Nikka, half respect, half fear. The courtyard was empty, save for some ponies and mules under a shed at the rear, and the custodian motioned to us to follow him to the house.