"MITSOS TORE UP GREAT HANDFULS OF UNDERGROWTH AND THREW THEM ON"
There was still a little spirits left, and between his wetting and his scorching Mitsos felt that he would be none the worse for it, and he left his jacket to dry by the beacon while he went back to where the body of the Turkish soldier lay to look for his pistol, which he had till then forgotten. He searched about for some little while without finding it, for it had fallen in a tangle of undergrowth; and taking it and the man's gun, which might come in useful, he turned to go. Then for the first time a sudden feeling of compassion came over him, and he broke off an armful of branches from the trees round, and threw them over the body in order to cover it from the marauding feeders of the mountain; and then crossing himself, as the Greeks do in the presence of the dead, he turned away; and going once more up to the beacon to fetch his jacket, which had grown dry and almost singed in that fierce heat, he ran off down the hill to join the clan.
They had gone but slowly, for they did not wish to reach Kalamata till an hour before daybreak, and had, when Mitsos came up, halted at the bottom of the range where the foot-hills begin to rise towards Taygetus. He was challenged by one of the sentries, and for reply shouted his own name to them; and finding Demetri was his challenger, stopped to tell him of the success of the beacon and the answer flared back from Bassae, and then went on to seek for Nicholas or Petrobey to report his return.
Petrobey was sitting by a camp-fire when he came up, talking earnestly to Nicholas and Father Andréa, who had come in from the Nauplia contingent, and only smiled at Mitsos as he entered.
"That is the order, father," he was saying; "we want to take the place at all costs, but the less it costs us the better. I should prefer if it capitulated, and not waste lives which we can ill spare over it. All the Turks inside the walls will be our prisoners, and them—"
"Yes?"
"Perhaps the moon will devour them," said Petrobey. "I shall make no conditions about surrender. Good-night, father. And now, little Mitsos; the beacon, we know, got lit. How in the name of the Virgin did you manage to do it?"
Mitsos unbuttoned his jacket and showed the sore and reddened skin beneath.
"There is much in a shirt," he said, laughing, and told his story.