"Did you bring off my bagpipe?" asked Tamas Macmillan, wounded to the death. "'Tis the sweetest instrument in a' Scotland."
A laugh of derision greeted the question, and even the little sub-lieutenant smiled as he fainted away in the arms of Ferguson, who muttered fiercely, "If they don't give him the Victoria cross for this I'll desert."
Mr. Ferguson is still with the army.
CHAPTER XXXV
IN THE MIDST OF ALARMS
The report soon spread among the Turks that the English had been driven into the sea. Islam, that always believes in final universal triumph and the death of all unbelievers, was drunk with victory. The Mohammedans of Canea did not stop to think how few they were. It seemed to them that the vengeance of Allah was at hand, and that the whole world of the faithful had arisen. A band of howling demons poured down the streets of the Christian quarter, shooting into the windows and doors of the houses, hacking down with their long knives all who were not able to get out of sight. The shells which the "Hazard" continued to drop into the town in hopes of quelling the uprising only added to the terror of the victims and the fury of the murderers. The Mohammedan has no fear of death when he is on God's business. Kostakes' terrible Bashi Bazouks were everywhere. These are the irregulars who furnish their own arms and equipment. They or their families have suffered in some previous conflict with the Christians, and they kill for revenge and the true faith.
Some resistance was made and guns barked from half-closed window shutters into the faces of the marauders. But whenever this happened it only hastened the fate of those within. The Christian quarter swarmed with Turks. They crowded the streets, leaped over the garden walls, pried open the doors of the houses. Those who were not there out of pure thirst for blood came from love of plunder.
Kostakes, with his friend Mehemet and a half dozen of the Bashi Bazouks, did terrible execution. The Captain, as with drawn sword he drove his victims to bay in their gardens or into angles of the wall, imagined he was still talking to Panayota.
"There'll be no more Christians," he shouted again and again as he thrust home with his sword, or as some form writhed on the bayonet that pinned it to the adobe wall.
"We're going to kill them all."