He turned and looked at the Tzar of all the Bulgars whose ungainly bulk as he sat on his chair was now agitated by visible tremors:
"Murderer and coward," mused Raoul aloud. "Every time you hire your gun-men to kill an enemy you hurry away to establish an alibi, don't you? You cheap peddler of duped people—you made a rotten bargain this time, didn't you? When your treacherous pal, Tino, betrayed Serbia, you swindled your own people, didn't you?"
He shrugged, dangled his pistols, glanced at Gizzler,—or rather through Gizzler as though, the wretched creature were not there,—and his eyes encountered the interested jet black orbs of Eddin Bey.
Both smiled, Eddin in the face of death; Raoul with the generous grin of a man who recognizes in his enemy a peer.
"Eddin Bey," he said, still smiling, "the Osmanli fight fairly. Ask the British Tommy.... And your fool of a Sultan is dead. And what do you think of affairs at present?"
"They are not any too gay," replied Eddin Bey, laughing, "especially in the Alps."
The half smile on Raoul's face flickered and faded:
"You're about done for, you Turks," he said quietly. "You bet on the wrong horse, too. And now Enver Pasha keeps running to Berlin to ask why the all-highest doesn't make him Khedive of Egypt as he promised. And Taalat is scared, and the butcher Djavid is in the dumps. Oh, I know it was not you Osmanli that set the Kurds and Bashi-Bazouks on the Armenians. That butchery of a million souls, men, women, children, babies, was conceived by the Berlin government and superintended from the Yldiz Palace."
Raoul turned and looked contemptuously at the Germans:
"You square-heads," he said, "have achieved one thing, anyway. Never before in history has a nation been indicted, and it was supposed it could not be done. But it has been done in your case. And for the first time also in history an entire race is spoken of and known to civilization only by a revolting nick-name—boche!