“Ali Bey,” replied Hassan sternly, “your adherents are already overpowered—your whole plot is known to Mohammed Ali—his troops surround your house—you have no means of defence or escape; you can only now trust to the Viceroy’s clemency.”
“You, at least, shall never live to boast of this treachery,” cried Osman Bey, who was literally foaming with rage, as he drew his sword and sprang upon Hassan.
The result was such as might have been expected where strength, skill, and coolness were on one side and ungovernable fury on the other. Scarcely a few seconds elapsed ere Osman Bey’s sword-arm, severed by one cut, fell to the ground.
“Bind up his wound and secure him,” said Hassan coolly to one of the Bashi-Bazouks who was near him; and without deigning another look at his fallen adversary, he addressed himself to Ali Bey, saying—
“I would fain avoid useless bloodshed; will you yield yourselves prisoners or not?”
Ali Bey, though a cruel and vicious man, was not deficient in courage; but the hapless fate of his confederate, the determined language and commanding appearance of Hassan, and the formidable row of pistol-barrels that gleamed at his back, might well have intimidated a bolder spirit. In the countenance of his companions he read nothing but dismay, so he replied, “We yield ourselves,” and sullenly threw his sword on the floor at Hassan’s feet.
His comrades followed his example, and in a few minutes they were all disarmed and pinioned. Their persons were searched by Hassan’s order, and he thus obtained possession of the paper to which the seals of the conspirators had been affixed.
Hassan spent the remainder of the night in visiting all the quarters of the house and seeing that the prisoners of all ranks were duly guarded. The Bashi-Bazouks who had witnessed the summary chastisement that he had inflicted on Osman Bey, and who seemed to feel an intuitive conviction that he was armed with the authority which he assumed, obeyed him without a murmur.
No sooner had the day dawned than he took the yuzbashi and a few more of the men to the roof of the house, whence he showed them two field-pieces already in position in their front and the troops of Mohammed Ali drawn up and surrounding them on every side.
“Did I speak the truth,” said Hassan, “when I told you that if you continued in mutiny you would be cut off to a man?”