"Well, a pretty mess we are in now," said Raining to himself as he wrathfully trotted back to Debreczen, and as he rushed into Rákóczy's room exclaiming, "Well, Kökényesdi has toasted us finely!" there stood Kökényesdi before his very eyes.
"What, you here?"
"Yes, I am; and another time your honour will know that whenever I am at my own place I am not at home."
It was the Friday before Whit Sunday, and the time about evening. A great silence rested over the whole district, only from the minarets of Varalja one Imâm answered another, and from the tombs one shepherd dog answered his fellow: it was impossible to distinguish from which of the two the howling proceeded.
A couple of turbaned gentlemen were leisurely strolling along the bastions. Above the palisaded gate the torso of a square-headed Tartar was visible, with his elbows resting on the ramparts, holding his long musket in his hand. The Tartar sentinel was gazing with round open eyes into the black night, watching lest anyone should come from the direction in which he was aiming with his gun, and blowing vigorously at the lunt to prevent its going out. While he was thus anxiously on the watch, it suddenly seemed to him as if he discerned the shape of a horseman approaching the city.
In such cases the orders given to the Osmanli sentinels were of the simplest description: they were to shoot everyone who approached in the night-time without a word.
The Tartar only waited until the man had come nearer, and then, placing his long musket on the moulding of the gate, began to take aim with it.
But the approaching horseman rode his steed as oddly as only Hungarian csikósok[10] can do, for he bobbed perpetually from the right to the left, and dodged backwards and forwards in the most aggravating manner.
[10] Horse-dealers.