"About an hour. Just long enough to collect any spoils of war and burn the town."
"Burn the town?"
"Certainly, this is war, and war, even for a nation as highly civilized as Turkey, consists in doing your enemy as much harm as possible."
Curtis glanced uneasily at the row of barrels in the cave. Here was a new dilemma. Should he give up the brave Cretan and appeal to Kostakes' manliness and chivalry? He looked at the Turk shrewdly. Somehow he did not have confidence in him.
Besides, Michali could understand French. If he were conscious, he could call out and give himself up, if he thought it were safe.
"I would stay here," thought Curtis, "and ask him to leave me the café as a shelter. But there's Panayota, I mustn't desert her."
The firing had ceased and the looting had begun. Turks darted by the door in the abandoned glee of destruction, or passed more slowly, dragging bedticks, doors, pieces of furniture and other inflammable articles, which they were casting upon a great bonfire in the square. A wave of ribald laughter, that started somewhere in the distance and ran nearer and louder, splashed into the open door. A soldier danced in with an eikon of the Holy Virgin, and held it up for the guard to spit upon. Then he tossed it into the fire. The priest, who was sitting on the floor, supported by the kneeling Panayota, covered his eyes with his hands and shuddered with horror. The trellis for the demarch's grape arbor came down with a crash and was wrenched loose from the grip of the despairing vines. The benches whereon the gossip shepherds had sat and sipped their coffee, bore company in the fire with the only rocking chair in the village, in which a very old lady used to sway to and fro and sing lullabies of her forgotten childhood. A soldier seized one of the tables within the café and tossed it through the open door. Then he dragged out a long bench, that scraped and spluttered on the floor of hard beaten earth. Two others braced themselves between the wall and the oil crock. An inspiration flashed through Curtis' mind.
"Stop! stop!" he shouted. "It is full of oil—the lady on the floor."
"Mais, certainement," cried Kostakes, and he sent the soldiers from the room.
"The same argument will apply to the wine barrels," reflected Curtis. "They would have been at them in a minute more."