He sat down amid the ruins of the hamlet—amid the ruins of his happiness and hopes—to plot. But he could devise nothing. His attempts were like writing on the air. He sat in half stupor; his power to think crushed by the dead weight of mingled grief and the sense of impotency.
But suddenly he started——
"Fool! fool, that I am, to waste the moments! This very night it may be done."
He hastily stripped the body of a dead Turkish soldier, and, rolling the uniform into a compact bundle, plunged with it through the thicket and up the steep mountain side.
CHAPTER XVII.
The valley in which the little hamlet lay, as well as the ravine by which it was approached, was exceedingly tortuous. The stream which seemed to have made these in its ceaseless windings, sometimes almost doubled upon itself, as if the spirit of the waters were the prey of the spirit of the hills that closed in upon its path, and thus it sought to elude its pursuer. Though it was fully twenty miles from the demolished konak to where the narrow valley debouched into the open plain, it was not more than a quarter of this distance in a straight line between those points. The interjacent space was, however, impassable to any except those familiar with its trackless rocks. From a distance the mountain lying between seemed a sheer precipice. But Constantine knew every crevice up which a man could climb; the various ledges that were connected, if not by balconies broad enough for the foot, at least by contiguous trunks of trees, balustrades of tough mountain laurel, or ropes of wild vine. He could cross this wall of rock in an hour or two, but the Turkish raiders would occupy the bulk of the day in making the circuit of the road. Indeed they would in all probability not leave the security of the great ravine, and strike the highway, until night-fall; for the terror of Scanderbeg's ubiquity was always before the Turks. It was this thought that had prompted Constantine's sudden action when he started up from his despairing reverie amid the embers of his home.
It was still early in the afternoon when, having passed with the celerity of a goat among the crags, he looked down from the further side of the great barrier upon the Turkish company. He stood upon a ledge almost above their heads; and never did an eagle's eye take in a brood upon which he was about to swoop, more sharply than did Constantine's observe the details of the camp below him.
There were the horses tethered. Yonder was a group of officers playing at dice. In a circle of guards beyond, a few women and children; and among them—could he mistake that form?
The soldiers were preparing their mess. Some were picking the feathers from fowls; others building fires. Then his surmise had been correct, that they would not leave the valley until night.