The sky was already growing dusky red with sunset when they set off. The land-breeze had set in shrill and steady, rattling the dry maize-fields, whistling in the stubborn aloes and cactuses along the road, and whispering in the poplars. Here and there they passed little knots of women flying into Nauplia, all with the same tale. The Turks were undoubtedly coming, and there were still many left in the town; they had been seen not two miles off, and that ten minutes ago.
A gaunt set of apparitions awaited them at the place, men shaking with fever, leaning on crutches, with bandaged arms and swathed heads. Some few only had muskets, the most part short knives, but many only stakes of wood, pointed and hardened in the fire. A crowd of women and children, crying and bewailing themselves, hung about them, unable to make up their minds to face the perils of the dark road into Nauplia, and convinced that Turks were in ambush there. They clung to the men, now beseeching them not to desert them, now begging them not to fight but to surrender. What chance had they against three hundred armed men?
To these the sight of the Capsina and her sailors was like a draught of wine.
"Praise the Virgin," cried one, "it is the Capsina!" And she fell on the girl's neck, sobbing hysterically.
The Capsina disengaged herself.
"There is no time to lose," she said to Kanaris. "Take the women off, and put them in the centre. The attack will be from the north; at least they come from there. These men are useless. Man!" she cried, turning to one, "if your arm shake so, you will as like cut off your own head as the head of a Turk. Get you with the women. You too, and you!"
The second contingent from Nauplia had not yet arrived, and even while the Capsina spoke a man from a farm near, half dressed and bleeding from a wound in the hand, rushed in saying that the Turks had pillaged his house. He had escaped from there with a sword-cut; they were not two hundred yards off. The last of the women were pressing into the centre of the town, and there was only one child left, a boy about three years old, who was clinging, with howls, to his father, a gaunt, fever-stricken man, but capable of using a knife. The Capsina spoke to the child.
"Father will come to you if you will go with the others," she said. "Oh laddie, let go of him. Take charge of the child," she said to the last of the women. "Mind, I leave him with you."
She paused a moment, listening. Above the whistling of the wind could be heard the tramp of feet along the road.
"The others are not here yet," she said. "These feet come from the north. To your posts along the huts by the north, three men together! There are no other orders except to kill; that only, and to save the women."