"Nothing broken. Nothing broken," reiterated Curtis. "The blood is from the—" he did not know the word for skin, so he lifted up a little tent on the back of his left hand with the finger and thumb of his right.
"Nothing, nothing at all," said the priest. Panayota turned her eyes toward the smoky and cobwebbed rafters and crossed herself. The steel cross in the door leaped to a parallel of presented muskets, and Kostakes Effendi reappeared. Twirling his mustache, he gazed perplexedly at the group within the café, but recovered himself in a moment and advanced smiling.
"So his reverence is quite well again! I am glad to see it, very glad. I feared that his skull was fractured. A musket butt is no plaything."
The Turk assisted Curtis to the door, and into a cavalry saddle on the back of a respectable looking horse.
"It is the horse of my sous-lieutenant," explained Kostakes, "who really prefers to walk—Lieutenant Gadben, Monsieur—but I have not the honor of knowing your name."
"Curtis—"
"John Curtis, American journalist."
Half an inch of saber cut disfigured the lieutenant's left temple. Curtis wondered at first glance how far it extended under the flower pot hat. The possessor of the cut was a grizzled man of fifty, with a short pointed beard and a mustache, into the left side of which cigarettes had burned a semicircular hole. The Turkish troops were drawn up in marching order, dirty, dust-stained, faded, some of them shoeless, but there was something about them, something in the attitude of the bodies and the obedient expectancy of the countenances, that suggested the soldier.
Curtis was amazed at the amount of desolation which had been accomplished in so short a time. The ruffian hand of war had wrecked the peaceful and idyllic town as a discontented child smites a playhouse of blocks. Everything combustible had been set on fire, and even from the stone houses smoke was pouring. Doors had been torn from the hinges, windows smashed in, arbors pulled down. The fire in the square filled the nostrils with the familiar odor of burning olive oil. The houses with their denuded window holes reminded Curtis of men whose eyes had been ruthlessly gouged out.
Lieutenant Gadben brought the hilt of his sword to his forehead and said something to the Captain in Turkish. The latter glanced at his little army and Curtis followed his eye. The men involuntarily straightened up, stiff as posts.