His hand was moving towards one of the pistols in his belt. Frank had only the fraction of a second in which to take action. He shot out his right fist, struck the Kurd on the point of the jaw, and hurled him backward into the ruins.
When Abdi regained his senses it was dark, and the so-called Reuben Donessa had disappeared. And a revolver was missing from Abdi's belt.
CHAPTER XII
IN THE HILLS
In the hills of Gallipoli, between Uzundere and Biyuk Anafarta near the Salt Lake, a platoon of Kurdish troops had just joined a half-company of Anatolians. They were taking their midday meal on a level stretch of turf some seven hundred feet above sea-level. It was the only clear space of considerable size in a wilderness of scrub. Below them ran the rough track from Biyuk Anafarta to Boghali. The hill of Sari Bair, nearly three hundred feet above them, blocked the direct view to the nearest part of the sea; but north and south of that eminence the blue waters were clearly visible. The horizon was dotted with dark shapes, no doubt warships and transports of the Allied fleet. To the south, over the lower hills between them and Boghali, they looked down upon the Narrows, with Kilid Bahr on the European shore and Chanak on the Asiatic. To the north-east stretched the Dardanelles above the Narrows, and here too vessels, but Turkish, were passing up and down.
It would have been apparent to the most casual observer that the arrival of the Kurds was not welcome to their Anatolian brethren-in-arms. The Kurd has a habit of assuming a swaggering air of superiority. The Anatolians were in charge of a captain and a lieutenant, the Kurds of a lieutenant only; but this latter officer, seated with the others a little apart from the men, was treating the captain as though he were a subaltern. Ignoring his inferiority in rank, he had questioned and cross-questioned in a bumptious way that raised the captain's gall. As the captain remarked in an undertone to his lieutenant, this barbarous Kurd could not have been more insolent if he had been a German. And as it was with the officers, so with the men. They ate their simple food together, but the Anatolians maintained a sullen silence amid the loud talking of the Kurds. When it was a question of fetching water from the stream that flowed through the rocky bottom below, it was two of the Anatolians who were told off to the job by the Kurdish sergeant, and went sulkily to obey.
The Kurdish lieutenant was holding forth to the other officers.
"Wallahy!" he said. "Here I am, but it is not where I would wish to be. The fight against odds is the breath of his nostrils to a Kurd. If there had been a few squadrons of Kurds in Egypt the other day we should have been in Cairo by now."
"But there were Kurds--many Kurds," the captain ventured to remark. "It was told me by my cousin in a letter."
"Ahi! Are we in Cairo? In truth we are not. I repeat, if there had been Kurds we should have been in Cairo. Therefore there were no Kurds. Mashallah! Did not Liman Pasha whisper in my ear, the day after we set foot in Gallipoli, 'With ten thousand Kurds, noble Abdi, we could conquer the world. Therefore take me now twenty of your excellent men and catch this Englishman. Have we not had for ten days half a company of Anatolian asses on the trail?'"