The colonel stated to his under officers, in hearing of the men, that the young Turk was really one of Castriot's scouts, and that the young woman was an accomplice. Borrowing from one and another sufficient Albanian costumes to substitute for Constantine's disguise, Kabilovitsch dismissed the couple.
There was no end to the badgering the officious soldier who had first arrested the scout received at the hands of his comrades. They jeered at his double mistake in taking the fellow yesterday as a Turkish spy in Albanian uniform, because he had slipped away so shrewdly, and now again being duped by him a real Albanian in Turkish disguise. Some threw the halter over the fellow's neck; others made mimic preparation for hamstringing him; while one presented him with an immense scroll of bark purporting to be his commission as chief of the department of secret service, finishing the mock presentation by shivering the bark over the fellow's head. The unhappy man contented himself philosophically:—
"No wonder General Castriot baffles the enemy when his own men cannot understand him. You were all as badly twisted by that fellow's tricks as I was. But I will never interfere with that red head again, though he wears a turban and is cutting the throat of the general himself."
Two days later a beautiful girl accompanied by her brother—who was as unlike her as the thorn bush is unlike the graceful flowering clematis that festoons its limbs, both of them in apparent destitution, refugees from near the Greek border—entered the town of Sfetigrade. By order of the general, to whom their piteous story was told by Kabilovitsch—for he had chanced, so he said, to come upon them as they were inquiring their way to the town—they were quartered with a family whose house was not far from the citadel. For some weeks the girl was an invalid. A raging fever had been induced by over excitement and the subsequent fatigue of the long journey. Colonel Kabilovitsch could not refrain from expressing his interest in the young woman by almost daily calls at the cottage where she lay. One day, when it was supposed by the surgeon that she might not live, the old man was observed to stand long at the cot upon which the sick girl was lying. A look of agony overspread his features when the surgeon, who had been feeling her pulse, laid her almost nerveless hand beneath the blanket.
"Dear, good old man," said the housewife. "I warrant he has laid some pretty one of his own in the ground. Maybe a child, or a lover, sometime back in the years. These things do come to us over and over again."
The brother of the sick girl scarcely noticed the visits of Colonel Kabilovitsch, except to respond to his questions when no one but himself could give the exact information about the patient's condition; for none watched with her so incessantly.
But her marvellous natural vitality enabled the sufferer to outlive the fever; and, as she became convalescent, the old colonel seemed to forget her. His interest was apparently in her suffering rather than in herself.