"Do you know him, Uncle Nicholas?" he asked, at length.
"No, I do not know him, but he is one of my unhappy race, whom this brood of devils oppresses and treats as it would not treat a dog. Mitsos," he said, with a gesture of fire, "swear that you will never forget this! Look here, look here!" he cried. "Look how they have made of him an offence to the light; look how they killed him by a disgraceful death, and why? For no reason but because he was a Greek. Look at his face; force yourself to look at it. The lips are purple; the eyes, as dead as grapes, start from his head. He was killed like a dog. If they catch you alone in such a place they will do the same to you, to you whose only offence is, as this poor burden's has been, that you are Greek. Look at his neck, swollen in his death struggle. Do you know how the accursed men killed Katzantones and his brother? They beat them to death with wooden hammers, sparing the head only, so that they might live the longer. Katzantones was ill and weak, and cried out with the pain; but Yorgi, as he lay on the ground, with arms and legs and ankles and hands broken, and lying out of semblance of a man, only laughed, and told them they could not kill a fly with such puny blows."
The boy suddenly turned away.
"Enough, enough!" he said. "I do not wish to look. It is too horrible. Why do you make it more frightful to me?"
Nicholas did not seem to hear what he said, and went on, in a sort of savage frenzy.
"Look, look, I tell you!" he cried, "and then swear in the name of God, remembering also what I told you of my wife and child, that you will have no pity on the race that has done this—on neither man, woman, nor child; not even on the poor, weak women, for they are the mothers of monsters who do these things. This is the work of the men they bear—this and outrage and infamous lust, and the sins of the cities which God destroyed."
He was silent a moment, and then spoke more calmly.
"So swear, Mitsos, in the name of God!"
And Mitsos, with quivering lips of horror, but suddenly steeled, looked at the dead thing and swore.
"And now," said Nicholas, "take hold of the feet, and we will give it what burial we can. Stay, wait a moment." He tore off a piece of the man's tunic, and, dipping his finger in the blood that still was wet on the shoulder, wrote in Turkish the word "Revenge," and fastened it to the end of the rope which still dangled from the tree. Then he and Mitsos took the body some yards distant into the copse that lined the road, and tearing up brushwood gave it covering. On this they laid stones until it was completely concealed and defended against the preying creatures of the mountain.