"Oh, Yanni, by a cross-legged Turk!" he said.
"What was I to do? Would it have helped me to fight, and afterwards to be beaten? But Mehemet, I saw, was more at his ease when it was done, and drew his chair a little closer.
"'We shall soon teach you to be quiet and obedient like the rest of your clan,' he said. 'And now for what I came to say. You will soon see Nicholas again, for I have sent for him and for your father. If they come, well and good; I do not really care whether they come or not—for barking dogs hurt nobody. However, they have been barking too loud. And if they do not come, my little Yanni, we shall have to think what to do with you. I have not decided yet'—and the devil came closer to me, Mitsos, and looked at me as a man looks at the fowls and sheep in the market. 'Perhaps there will be a rope for that big brown neck of yours; and yet I do not know, for you are a handsome boy, and I should like to see you about the house, perhaps to hand the rose-water after dinner. Let us see, we would dress you in a blue waistcoat with silver braid, and a red kaftan, I think, and red leggings, with yellow shoes; but I think we would give you no knife or pistol in your belt, for I fancy you have a temper of your own. It is a pity that a handsome boy like you should be so fierce. Perhaps we might even arrange that you were fitted to attend on the women-folk. In any case you will be mine—you will belong to your good, kind masters.'"
Yanni's voice had risen, and he spoke quickly, with a red-hot anger vibrating and growing.
"He said it to me!" he cried, rising to his feet. "To me—free-born of the clan, who have never had any dealings with the accursed race, except to spit at them as they went by! And I—I sat there and said nothing, but for this reason, Mitsos, that I remembered the oath of the clan you had sworn, and I believed, as I believe that the holy Mother of God hears me, that you would come, be it soon or late, and that he should eat his words with a sauce of death to them—the black curse of her who mocked at Christ upon him!"
"Steady, Yanni!" said Mitsos, looking up at his blazing eyes. "Sit down and tell the rest."
"What, Mitsos," cried Yanni, "are you a block of stone or a log, you who are of blood with us?"
"You know I am not. But Mehemet Salik is not on this hill-side. Tell me the rest. If he was here he should never more return to the bestialities of his daily life."
Yanni sat down again.
"Even so. Then day after day he would come in all white and cursing as before, and say, 'The time is drawing near, my little Yanni. They will be here to-morrow or the next day,' as it might be. And yesterday morning he said, 'They will be here to-night.' And I—for I never doubted you, Mitsos—I thought to myself, 'Then I shall not be here to-night'; and as for them, I knew that they would never sit in the house of a Turk. And—and that is all, I think."