"By Jove! I wonder if that old blockhead thought I was asking for something to eat? Panayota would have understood me in a minute. Why, she and I get along all right together in Greek. But then, I mustn't judge the rest of these people by her."
He wound up his watch at ten o'clock, and lay down upon the divan.
"There's going to be no fight to-night," he muttered. "And, at any rate, it wouldn't be my fight if there was."
He fell asleep, and dreamed of Panayota, gigantic in size, standing on a cliff by a wan, heaving sea. She was hurling jagged pieces of rock down at a line of ant-like Turks, crawling far below. The wind was blowing her hair straight out from her forehead, and he could only see her mouth and chin, but he knew it was Panayota. He ran to help her, when the demarch seized him to hold him back. He awoke, and found that an old man was shaking his arm and crying excitedly in Greek, "Fire! fire!"
Curtis' first thought was that the house was burning. He put his hand on the old man's shoulder and jumped over to the door. Half a dozen people were standing in the moonlight, pointing toward the hills. Two women, one holding a very young babe in her arms, were crossing themselves hysterically and calling on the name of the Virgin. An old man of eighty, whom Curtis had frequently seen bent nearly double and walking with a cane, now stood erect, fingering the trigger of a rifle. A stripling of twelve was shaking his fist toward a red eye of flame that glowed among the rocks, high up and far away.
CHAPTER X
WAR IN EARNEST
That was one of Lindbohm's bonfires, sure enough. Perhaps a battle was going on at that moment.
"Mother of God, save my man!" cried the woman with the baby. "Save him, save him!"
"Mother of God, save my boy, my cypress tree, my Petro!" groaned the old man.