“Oh, I knew!” he shouted, staunching a bleeding nose on the sleeve of his tunic. “Of course I knew. Do I not eat stick every day? Am I not the smallest? But it was you who did not know! You who thought you could cheat me and be safe! You did not know that your box would be all over the road, that your bottles would be broken, that all your things would be so spoiled that you could not steal other lads’ clients this morning again! Pick them up then! Stoop! Yes, stoop in the dust and pick them up!”
The other boys were laughing at Yoryi now.
“He has played you a good trick, the little one!”
“Did you think,” shouted Aleko, “that you could touch me and go free?” and before Yoryi, furious now with rage, could catch him a second time, he doubled, and ran round the corner of the University Road.
Being fleet of foot, he left Yoryi far behind him, and running up one street and down another and across a third, he soon arrived safe and unpursued at the top end of Stadium Street and back again in Constitution Square.
A sound of music came from the direction of the Palace and he looked up eagerly. The guard was changing; he could hear the measured tread of the soldiers. Though he had been in Athens nearly two years the spectacle had never lost its charm for him.
Pushing, stooping, dodging, he elbowed his way to the edge of the pavement and waited.
On they came, the officer, the band, the marching men, the beautiful blue flag held aloft by a white-gloved sergeant. Aleko knew all about it, for a soldier had told him one day that you had to be a good-conduct man to be allowed to carry the flag, and that you had to wear white gloves: and the boy had long ago decided that when his time came to serve as a soldier, he would always carry the flag.
Up sprang all the officers who happened to be sitting at the little café tables in the square, and stood saluting. Civilians who were passing stopped and uncovered; coachmen stood up on their boxes bare-headed; Aleko pulled off his tattered cap in imitation and stood with the hot sun shining on his tumbled fair hair.
An old man looked down on him and smiled. Then, catching sight of the dust and smears of blood on the boy’s face, he remarked with a chiding gesture:—