“You speak boldly, youngster,” said the choleric Pasha with a frown. “Do you think that, with my beard beginning to turn grey, I do not know how to tame an unruly horse?”
“I speak boldly, Excellency, because I speak truly; not from any wish to offend. Does Ibrahim Pasha know your Excellency well?”
“Wallàhi! [by Allah!] I believe you he does; we have marched together, bivouacked together, fought together for many years.”
“Then,” said Hassan, “as his Highness has likened your Excellency to that horse, permit your servant to ask you, if you were in an angry and fretful mood, and any one were to attempt to haul at you with ropes, and strike you with a courbatch, in order to tame you, how would he succeed?”
“Wallàhi! I would cut his head off,” exclaimed the Pasha, feeling mechanically for the sword which he had left behind him in the palace. “Do you think that you could mount him?”
“It is better not now,” said Hassan quietly.
“Mount him!” said a voice from behind; “he is afraid to go near the horse.”
Hassan turned to look at the speaker, and saw a large, powerful man of about thirty-five years of age, to whose harsh features a deep scar on the cheek gave a still more forbidding appearance.
“Silence, Osman Bey,” said the Pasha; “because the young man speaks his mind freely, you have no right to insinuate that he is afraid. What say you, Hassan? What do you propose about the horse?”
“If your Excellency desires it,” said Hassan, drawing himself up and casting a look of contempt on Osman Bey, “I will mount the horse immediately, and he shall kill me or I will kill him; but if you ask me what I would advise, I would say leave him alone now: his flank is panting, his eye bloodshot, no good can come from gentle usage now. Let him be taken back to the stable; give orders that no one may tend or feed him but myself, and let me show him to your Excellency after two days are past.”