The crack was wide enough for one at a time, and we slid through like shadows, the open leaf slamming behind us. We stood in a large courtyard. To right and left were solid, timeworn buildings, two stories high. In front was a broken wall, partially built over by a structure of moldy brick, but there was a gap sufficiently large to reveal the Bosphorus. The court was cluttered with bales of goods and boxes and a number of men and women in Gypsy dress who were occupied in staring at us.
But we did not spare any protracted attention for them. There were two far more interesting characters close at hand. One was a stalwart, black-bearded man, with a seamed, wicked face that wore an habitual scowl. The other was a girl of perhaps eighteen, whose lissome figure set off her ragged dress like a Paquin toilette. She was very brown. Her hair was a tumbled heap of midnight, and her eyes were great glowing depths of passion. Her shapely legs were bare almost to the knee, and her flimsy bodice scarcely covered her. But she carried herself with the unconsciously regal air that I had noticed in Wasso Mikali.
She regarded me almost with contempt, but her eyes fairly devoured Nikka.
"This is the one," she cried, "he ran like that stallion we had from the Arab of Nejd, and you should have seen him strip the old Frank. He would have had the other one too if his friend had been as swift. Heh, foster-father, he has the makings of a great thief!"[[1]]
[[1]] Nikka afterwards translated these conversations for me.
But the man only glowered at us, his hand on the hilt of one of the long knives in his waist-sash.
"Be still, girl! You jabber like a crow."
"And you snarl like a wolf, Old One," she retorted. "I say I saw them."
"Somewhat of it I saw myself," he admitted, "but is that a reason for taking strangers in from the street? Who knows them?"
"Nobody," answered Nikka promptly. "Only our knives can speak for us."