"Don't be a fool, Zülfikar, my son! Not a soul was outside this fortress to-day or yesterday."
"Your honour has been well taught what to say," said the renegade, with the insolence of fury; "you put on as innocent a face over the business as a new-born lamb."
"I swear to you I don't understand a word of your nonsense."
"Of course, of course! Capital! Excellent! But your honour would do well to keep these falsehoods for the messengers of Ajas Pasha, who will be with your honour immediately; try and fool them if you like, but don't fool me."
Ladislaus Székely, well aware that every word he said was the sacred truth, fancied that Zülfikar's assertion was only a rough joke which he wanted to play upon him, so he cast an angry look on the renegade.
"Be off, my son Zülfikar, and cease joking; or I'll beat you about the head with this hare's foot till I knock all the moonshine out of you."
"Your honour had best keep your hare's foot to yourself, for if I draw my Turkish dagger I'll make you carry your own head."
"Be off, be off, my son!" cried Székely, looking around for a stick, and perceiving a cane in the corner with a large silver knob he seized it. "And now are you going, or I shall come to you?" he added.
Zülfikar had just caught sight, meanwhile, through the window of the aga sent by Ajas Pasha, and fearing to encounter him, hastily skipped through the door, which sudden flight was attributed by Master Ladislaus Székely to his own threats of violence. He followed close upon the heels of the fugitive, and ran almost into the very arms of the aga; whereupon, the aga, also flying into a rage, belaboured the commandant with his fists, reviled his father, his mother, and his remotest ancestry, and only after that began to deliver the message of Ajas Pasha, which he enlarged and embellished with the choicest flowers of an angry man's rhetoric.
At these words Ladislaus Székely changed colour as often as a genuine opal, or as a fractured polyporus fungus. It was clear to him that someone or other had just slain a number of marauding Spahis, but he knew very well that neither he nor his men had performed this heroic deed, for that particular evening they had all been safe and sound at ten o'clock, and yet he was expected to pay the piper!