"And Michael? is he here, too?" asked Milosch.
"No, father," said the child. "We were parted at the cave, and I have not seen him except in my dream."
"In your dream, my child? In your dream? Jesu grant he be not killed, that his angel spirit came to you in your dream! Did he seem bright and beautiful—more beautiful than you ever saw him before—as if he had come to you from Paradise? No? Then he is living yet on the earth; and by all the devils in hell and Adrianople! I shall find him, though I tear him from the dead arms of the traitor Castriot himself, as I was near to taking you, my boy, from the grip of the Turk whose heart I pierced with an arrow the day of the fight;—but I was set upon and nigh killed myself by a score of the Infidels."
"And our mother dear?" asked Constantine. "She is safe?"
"Ay! ay! safe in heaven, I fear, but we will not give up hope until we have searched our camps to-morrow; nor then, until we have burned every seraglio of the Turks from the mountains to the sea. But who brought you and the lass here?" asked Milosch, eyeing the form of the surly man beside him.
"Why, good Uncle Kabilovitsch did," said the boy, staring in amazement at the spot now usurped by the strange figure of Scanderbeg.
"Kabilovitsch went to fetch some fire-peat from the gully I told him of," muttered Scanderbeg.
"Yes, he is coming yonder," said Milosch, as Kabilovitsch's well-known hood and cape were outlined against the white background of a snow-covered fir tree a short distance off. "But he has found no fuel. Wrap close, my hearties: you will have no more blaze to-night. Ha! Kabilovitsch!" said he, raising his voice, as the familiar form seemed about to pass by. "Has the fire in your eye been put out by the cold, that you cannot find your own place, neighbor? I would have sworn that, if Kabilovitsch were blind, he could find a lost kid on the mountains; and now he hardly knows his own nest."
The assumed Kabilovitsch came near, and gave an awkward salute, which, while intended to be familiar, was not sufficiently unlimbered of the habit of authority to avoid giving the impression that its familiarity was only assumed.
"By the beard of Moses! I had almost mistook my own camp, now the fires are smouldering," said he, approaching.