"Is it hiding at any other person's house?"
"No."
Then at last quite out of patience, the slave Mansouri took Babadul by his beard, and shaking his head for him, exclaimed with a roar, "Then tell me, you old dotard! what is it doing?"
"It is baking," answered the tailor, half choked: "I have said it."
"Baking! did you say?" exclaimed the slave, in the greatest amazement; "what did you bake it for? Are you going to eat it?"
"True, I said: what would you have more?" answered Babadul, "it is now baking." And then he gave a full account of what he and his wife had done in the sad dilemma in which they had been placed.
"Show me the way to the baker's," said Mansouri; "at least, we will get it in its singed state, if we can get it in no other. Whoever thought of baking the head of the Aga of the Janissaries? Allah il allah!"
They then proceeded to the baker Hassan's, who was now about taking his bread from his oven. As soon as he became acquainted with their errand, he did not hesitate in telling all the circumstances attending the transmission of the head from the pipkin to the barber's bracket; happy to have had an opportunity of exculpating himself of what might possibly have been brought up against him as a crime.
The three (Mansouri, the tailor, and the baker) then proceeded to the barber's, and inquired from him what he had done with the head of his earliest customer.
Kior Ali, after some hesitation, made great assurances that he looked upon this horrid object as a donation from Eblis himself, and consequently that he had thought himself justified in transferring it over to the Giaour Yanaki, who, he made no doubt, had already made his brother-infidels partake of it in the shape of kabobs. Full of wonder and amazement, invoking the Prophet at each step, and uncertain as to the result of such unheard-of adventures, they then added the barber to their party, and proceeded to Yanaki's cook-shop.