Transcriber's Note:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation in the original document have been preserved.

The book uses both Palæologus and Palælogus.
The book uses both DeStreeses and De Streeses.
The book uses both Moesian and Mœsian
In all cases, both spellings have been retained.

Page 304: Ramedan should possibly be Ramadan.

"Your swarthy hero Scanderbeg,

Gauntlet on hand and boot on leg,

And skilled in every warlike art,

Riding through his Albanian lands,

And following the auspicious star

That shone for him o'er Ak-Hissar."
Longfellow

THE CAPTAIN OF THE JANIZARIES

A STORY OF THE TIMES OF SCANDERBEG
AND
THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE

By JAMES M. LUDLOW, D.D. Litt.D

ELEVENTH EDITION

NEW YORK AND LONDON

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1886, by Dodd, Mead & Co.

Copyright, 1890, by James M. Ludlow.

Electrotyped by Dodd, Mead & Co.

PREFACE.

The story of the Captain of the Janizaries originated, not in the author's desire to write a book, but in the fascinating interest of the times and characters he has attempted to depict. It seems strange that the world should have so generally forgotten George Castriot, or Scanderbeg, as the Turks named him, whose career was as romantic as it was significant in the history of the Eastern Mediterranean. Gibbon assigns to him but a few brief pages, just enough to make us wonder that he did not write more of the man who, he confessed, "with unequal arms resisted twenty-three years the powers of the Ottoman Empire." Creasy, in his history of the Turks, devotes less than a page to the exploits of one who "possessed strength and activity such as rarely fall to the lot of man," "humbled the pride of Amurath and baffled the skill and power of his successor Mahomet." History, as we make it in events, is an ever-widening river, but, as remembered, it is like a stream bursting eastward from the Lebanons, growing less as it flows until it is drained away in the desert.

Though our story is in the form of romance, it is more than "founded upon fact." The details are drawn from historical records, such as the chronicles of the monk Barletius—a contemporary, though perhaps a prejudiced admirer, of Scanderbeg—the later Byzantine annals, the customs of the Albanian people, and scenes observed while travelling in the East.

The author takes the occasion of the publication of a new edition to gratefully acknowledge many letters from scholars, as well as notices from the press, which have expressed appreciation of this attempt to revive popular interest in lands and peoples that are to reappear in the drama of the Ottoman expulsion from Europe, upon which the curtain is now rising.

THE CAPTAIN OF THE JANIZARIES.

CHAPTER I.

From the centre of the old town of Brousa, in Asia Minor—old even at the time of our story, about the middle of the fifteenth century—rises an immense plateau of rock, crowned with the fortress whose battlements and towers cut their clear outlines high against the sky. An officer of noble rank in the Ottoman service stood leaning upon the parapet, apparently regaling himself with the marvellous panorama of natural beauty and historic interest which lay before him. The vast plain, undulating down to the distant sea of Marmora, was mottled with fields of grain, gardens enclosed in hedges of cactus, orchards in which the light green of the fig-trees blended with the duskier hues of the olive, and dense forests of oak plumed with the light yellow blooms of the chestnut. Here and there writhed the heavy vapors of the hot sulphurous streams springing out of the base of the Phrygian Olympus, which reared its snow-clad peak seven thousand feet above. The lower stones of the fortress of Brousa were the mementoes of twenty centuries which had drifted by them since they were laid by the old Phrygian kings. The flags of many empires had floated from those walls, not the least significant of which was that of the Ottoman, who, a hundred years before, had consecrated Brousa as his capital by burying in yonder mausoleum the body of Othman, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty of the Sultans.

But the Turkish officer was thinking of neither the beauty of the scene nor the historic impressiveness of the place. His face, shaded by the folds of his enormous turban, wore deeper shadows which were flung upon it from within. He was talking to himself.

"The Padishah[1] has a nobler capital now than this,—across the sea there in Christian Europe. But by whose hands was it conquered? By Christian hands! by Janizaries! renegades! Ay, this hand!"—he stripped his arm bare to the shoulder and looked upon its gnarled muscles as he hissed the words through his teeth—"this hand has cut a wider swathe through the enemies of the Ottoman than any other man's; a swathe down which the Padishah can walk without tripping his feet. And this was a Christian's hand once! Well may I believe the story my old nurse so often told me,—that, when the priest was dropping the water of baptism upon my baby brow, this hand seized the sacred vessel, and it fell shattered upon the pavement. Ah, well have I fulfilled that omen!"

The man walked to and fro on the platform with quick and jarring step, as if to shake off the grip of unwelcome thoughts. There was a majesty in his mien which did not need the play of his partially suppressed fury to fascinate the attention of any who might have beheld him at the moment. He was tall of stature, immensely broad at the shoulders, deep lunged, comparatively light and trim in the loins, as the close drawn sash beneath the embroidered jacket revealed: arms long; hands large. He looked as if he might wrestle with a bear without a weapon. His features were not less notable than his form. His forehead was high and square, with such fulness at the corners as to leave two cross valleys in the middle. Deep-set eyes gleamed from beneath broad and heavy brows. The lips were firm, as if they had grown rigid from the habit of concealing, rather than expressing, thought, except in the briefest words of authority,—Cæsar-lips to summarize a campaign in a sentence. The chin was heavy, and would have unduly protruded were it not that there were needed bulk and strength to stand as the base of such prominent upper features. Altogether his face would have been pronounced hard and forbidding, had it not been relieved as remarkably by that strange radiance with which strong intelligence and greatness of soul sometimes transfigure the coarsest features.

These peculiarities of the man were observed and commented upon by two officers who were sitting in the embrasure of the parapet at the farther end of the battlement. The elder of the two, who had grown gray in the service, addressed his comrade, a young man, though wearing the insignia of rank equal to that of the other.

"Yes, Bashaw,[2] he is not only the right hand of the Padishah, but the army has not seen an abler soldier since the Ottoman entered Europe. You know his history?"

"Only as every one knows it, for in recent years he has written it with his cimeter flashing through battle dust as the lightning through clouds," replied the young officer.

The veteran warmed with enthusiasm as he narrated, "I well remember him as a lad when he was brought from the Arnaout's[3] country. He was not over nine years of age when Sultan Mahomet conquered the lands of Epirus, where our general's father, John Castriot, was duke. As a hostage young George Castriot was brought with his three brothers to Adrianople."

"Are his brothers of the same metal?" asked the listener.

"Allah only knows what they would have been had not state necessity——" The narrator completed the sentence by a significant gesture, imitating the swirl of the executioner's sword as he takes off the head of an offender.

"But George Castriot was a favorite of the Sultan, who fondled him as the Roman Hadrian did his beautiful page, Antinous. And well he might, for a lad more lithe of limb and of wit never walked the ground since Allah bade the angels worship the goodly form of Adam.[4] Once when a prize was offered for the best display of armor, and the provinces were represented by their different champions in novel helmets and corselets and shields, none of which pleased the imperial taste, it was the whim of the Padishah to have young Castriot parade before the judges panoplied only in his naked muscle, and to order that the prize should be given to him, together with the title Iscanderbeg.[5] And well he won it. In the after wrestling matches he put upon his hip the best of them, Turcomans from Asia, and Moors from Africa, and Giaours[6] from the West. And he was as skilful on a horse's legs as he was on his own. His namesake, Alexander, could not have managed Bucephalus better than he. I well remember his game with the two Scythians. They came from far to have a joust with the best of the Padishah's court. They were to fight singly: if one were overthrown, the other, after the victor had breathed himself, was to redeem the honor of his comrade. Scanderbeg sent his spear-head into the throat of his antagonist at the first encounter, when the second barbarian villain treacherously set upon him from the rear. The young champion wheeled his horse as quickly as a Dervish twists his body, and with one blow of his sword, clove him in twain from skull to saddle."

"Bravo!" cried the listener, "I believe it, for look at the arm that he has uncovered now."

"It is a custom he has," continued the narrator. "He always fights with his sword-arm bared to the shoulder. When he was scarce nineteen years old he was at the siege of Constantinople, in 800 of the Hegira,[7] with Sultan Amurath. His skill there won him a Sanjak.[8] Since that time you know his career."

"Ay! his squadrons have shaken the world."

"He has changed of late, however; grown heavy at the brows. But he comes this way."

As the general approached, the two bashaws bowed low to the ground, and then stood in the attitude of profound obeisance until he addressed them. His face gleamed with frank and genial familiarity as he exchanged with them a few words; but it was again masked in sombre thoughtfulness as he passed on.

Near the gate by which the fortress was entered from the lower town was gathered a group of soldiers who were bantering a strange looking creature with hands tied behind him—evidently some captive.

"What have you here?" said Scanderbeg, approaching them.

"That we cannot tell. It is a secret," replied the subaltern officer in charge of the squad, making a low salâm, and with a twinkle in his eyes which took from his reply all semblance of disrespect.

"But I must have your secret," said the general good-naturedly.

"It is not our secret, Sire," replied the man, "but his. He will not tell us who he is."

"Where does he belong? What tongue has he, Aladdin? You who were once interpreter to the Bey of Anatolia should know any man by his tongue."

"He has no tongue, Sire. He is dumb as a toad. His beard has gone untrimmed so long that it has sewed fast his jaws. He has not performed his ablutions since the last shower washed him, and his ears are so filled with dirt plugs that he could not hear a thunder clap."

The face of the captive seemed to strangely interest the general, who said as he turned away, "Send him to our quarters. The Padishah has taken a fancy to deaf mutes of late. They overhear no secrets and tell no tales. We will scrape him deep enough to find if he has a soul. If he knows his foot from his buttocks he will be as valued a present to His Majesty as a fifth wife.[9] Send him to our quarters."

The general soon returned to the fortress. A room dimly lighted through two narrow windows that opened into a small inner court, and contained a divan or couch, a table, and a motley collection of arms, was the residence of the commandant. A soldier stood by the entrance guarding the unfortunate captive.

"You may leave him with me," said Scanderbeg approaching.

The man was thrust into the apartment, and stood with head bowed until the guard withdrew. The general turned quickly upon him as soon as they were alone.

"If I mistake not, man, though your tongue be tied, your eye spake to me by the gate."

"It was heaven's blessing upon my errand reflected there," replied the man in the Albanian language. "I bear thee a message from Moses Goleme, of Lower Dibria, and from all the provinces of Albania, from every valley and every heart."

"Let me hear it, for I love the very flints on the mountains and every pebble on the shore of old Albania," replied Scanderbeg eagerly.

"Heaven be praised! Were my ears dull as the stones they would open to hear such words," said the man with suppressed emotion. "For since the death of thy noble father—"

"My father's death! I had not heard it. When?" exclaimed the general.

"It is four moons since we buried him beneath the holy stones of the church at Croia, and the Sultan sent us General Sebaly to govern in his stead."

"Do you speak true?" cried Scanderbeg, laying his hand upon the man's shoulder and glaring into his face. "My father dead? and a stranger appointed in his stead? and Sultan Amurath has not even told me! Beware, man, lest you mistake."

"I cannot mistake, Sire, for these hands closed the eyes of John Castriot after he had breathed a prayer for his land and for his son—one prayer for both. Moses Goleme was with us, for you know he was thy father's dearest friend and wisest counsellor, and to him thy father gave charge that word should be sent thee that to thee he bequeathed his lands."

"Stop! Stop!" said Scanderbeg, pacing the little room like a caged lion. "Let me think. But go on. He did not curse me, then? Swear to me,"—and he turned facing the man—"swear to me that my father did not curse me with his dying breath! Swear it!"

"I swear it," said the man, "and that all Albania prays to-day for George Castriot. These are the tidings which the noble Moses bade me bring thee, though I found thee at the Indus or under the throne of the Sultan himself. I have no other message. That I might tell thee this in the free speech of Albania I have kept dumb to all others. If it be treason to the Sultan for thee to hear it, let my head pay the penalty. But know, Sire, that our land will rest under no other rule than that of a Castriot."

"A Castriot!" soliloquized the general. "Well, it is a better name than Scanderbeg. Ho, guard! Take this fellow! Let him share your mess!"

When alone the general threw himself upon the divan for a moment, then paced again the apartment, and muttered to himself——

"And for what has a Castriot given himself to the Turk! Yet I did not betray my land and myself. They stole me. They seduced my judgment as a child. They flattered my conceit as a man. Like a leopard I have fought in the Padishah's arena, and for a leopard's pay—the meat that makes him strong, and the gilded cage that sets off his spots. I have led his armies, for what? For glory. But whose glory? The Padishah cries in every emergency, 'Where is my Scanderbeg? Scanderbeg to the rescue!' But it means, 'Slave, do my bidding!' And I, the tinselled slave, bow my head to the neck of my steed, and the empire rings with the tramp of my squadrons, and the praise of Scanderbeg's loyalty! Pshaw! He calls me his lightning, but he is honored as the invisible Jove who hurls it. And I am a Castriot! A Christian! Ay, a Christian dog,[10] indeed, to fawn and lick the hands of one who would despise me were he not afraid of my teeth. He takes my father's lands and gives them to another; and I—I am of too little account to be even told 'Thy father is dead.'"

Scanderbeg paused in the light that streamed through the western window. It was near sunset, and a ruddy gleam shot across the room.

"This light comes from the direction of Albania, and so there comes a red gleam—blood red—from Albania into my soul."

He drew the sleeve of the left arm and gazed at a small round spot tattooed just above the elbow—the indelible mark of the Janizary.

"They that put it there said that by it I should remember my vow to the Padishah. And, since I cannot get thee out, my little talisman, I swear by thee that I shall never forget my vow; no, nor them that made my child-lips take it, and taught me to abjure my father's name, my country's faith, and broke my will to the bit and rein of their caprice. It may be that some day I shall wash thee out in damned Moslem blood. But hold! that would be treason. Scanderbeg a traitor? How they will hiss it from Brousa to Adrianople; from the lips of Vizier and pot-carrier! But is it treason to betray treason? But patience! Bide thy time, Castriot!"

A slight commotion in the court drew the attention of Scanderbeg. In a moment the sentry announced:

"A courier from His Majesty!"

The message told that the Ottoman forces had been defeated in Europe—the noted bashaw, Schehadeddin, having been utterly routed by Hunyades. The missive called the Sultan's "always liege and invincible servant, Scanderbeg, to the rescue!" Within an hour a splendid suite of officers, mounted on swift and gaily caparisoned steeds, gathered about the great general, and at the raising of the horse-tail upon the spear-head, dashed along the road to the coast of Marmora where vessels were in waiting to convey them across to the European side. Scanderbeg had but a moment's interview with the dumb captive, sufficient to whisper,

"Return our salutation to the noble Moses Goleme; and say that George Castriot will honor his confidence better in deeds than he could in words. I know not the future, my brave fellow, and might not tell it if I did, even to ears as deaf as yours. But say to Goleme that Castriot swears by his beard—by the beard of Moses—that brighter days shall come for Albania even if they must be flashed from our swords. Farewell!"

The man fell at the general's feet and embraced them. Then rising he raised his hand, "By the beard of Moses! Let that be the watchword between our people and our rightful prince. Brave men scattered from Adria to Hæmus will listen for that watchword. Farewell, Sire. By the beard of Moses!"

Scanderbeg summoned a soldier and said sternly, "Take this fellow away. He is daft as well as dumb and deaf. Yet treat him well. Such creatures are the special care of Allah. Take him to the Bosphorus that he may cross over to his kin, the Greeks, at Constantinople."

CHAPTER II.

A little hamlet lay, like an eagle's nest, high on the southern slope of the Balkan mountains. The half dozen huts of which it consisted were made of rough stones, daubed within and without thick with clay. The roofs were of logs, overlaid with mats of brushwood woven together by flexible withes, and plastered heavily. The inhabitants were goatherds. Their lives were simple. If they were denied indulgence in luxuries, they were also removed from that contact with them which excites desire, and so were contented. They seldom saw the faces of any from the great world, upon so large a portion of which they looked down. Their absorbing occupation was in summer to watch the flocks which strolled far away among the cliffs, and in winter to keep them close to the hamlet, for then terrific storms swept the mountains and filled the ravines with impassable snow.

Milosch and his good wife, Helena—Maika Helena, good Mother Helena, all the hamlet called her—were blessed with two boys. Their faces were as bright as the sky in which, from their lofty lodgings, they might be said to have made their morning ablutions for the eleven and twelve years of their respective lives. Yet they were not children of the cherubic type; rather tough little knots of humanity, with big bullet-heads thatched over with heavy growths of hair, which would have been red, had it not been bleached to a light yellow by sunshine and cloud-mists. Instead of the toys and indolent pastimes of the nursery they had only the steep rocks, the thick copse, the gnarled trees, and the wild game of the mountains for their play-things. They thus developed compactly knit muscles, depth of lung and thickness of frame, which gave agility and endurance. At the same time, the associations of their daily lives, the precipitous cliff, the trembling edge of the avalanche, the caves of strange beasts, the wild roaring of the winds, the awful grandeur of the storms, the impressive solitude which filled the intervals of their play like untranslatable but mighty whispers from the unknown world taking the place of the prattle of this,—these fostered intrepidity, self-reliance, and balance of disposition, if not of character. For religious discipline they had the occasional ministrations of a Greek priest or missionary monk from the Rilo Monastir, many leagues to the west of them. They knew the Creed of Nicæa, the names of some of the saints; but of truly divine things they had only such impressions as they caught from the great vault of the universal temple above them, and from the suggestions of living nature at their feet.

By the side of Milosch's house ran—or rather climbed and tumbled, so steep was it—that road over the Balkans, through the Pass of Slatiza, by which Alexander the Great, nearly two thousand years before, had burst upon the Moesians. Again, within their father's memory, Bajazet, the "Turkish Lightning" as he was called because of the celerity of his movements, had flashed his arms through this Pass, and sent the bolts of death down upon Wallachia, and poured terror even to the distant gates of Vienna. Often had Milosch rehearsed the story of the terrible days when he himself had been a soldier in the army of the Wallachian Prince Myrtche; and showed the scar of the cut he had received from the cimeter of a Turkish Janizary, whom he slew not far from the site of their home.

Their neighbor, Kabilovitsch, a man well weighted with years, not only listened to these tales, but added marvellous ones of his own; sometimes relating to the wars of King Sigismund of Hungary, who, after Prince Myrtche, had tried to regain this country from the cruel rule of the Moslems; more frequently, however, his stories were of exploits of anonymous heroes. These were told with so much enthusiasm as to create the belief that the narrator had himself been the actor in most of them. For Kabilovitsch was a strange character in the little settlement; though not the less confided in because of the mystery of his previous life. He had come to this out-of-the-way place, as he said, to escape with his little daughter the incessant raids and counter-raids of Turks and Christians, which kept the adjacent country in alarm.

Good Uncle Kabilovitsch—as all the children of the hamlet called him—named his daughter, a lass of ten summers, Morsinia, after the famous peasant beauty, Elizabeth Morsiney, who had so fascinated King Sigismund.

Morsinia often braided her hair, and sat beneath her canopy of blossoming laurel, while Constantine, the younger of Milosch's boys, dismounted from the back of his trained goat at the mimic threshold, and wooed her on bended knee, as the good king wooed the beautiful peasant. Michael, the elder boy, was not less ardent, though less poetic, in the display of his passion for Morsinia. A necklace of bear's claws cut with his own hand from a monster beast his father had killed; a crown made of porcupine quills which he had picked up among the rocks; anklets of striped snake skin—these were the pledges of his love, which he declared he would one day redeem with those made of gems and gold—that is, when he should have become a princely warrior.

To Constantine, however, the little maiden was most gracious. It was a custom in the Balkan villages for the young people, on the Monday after Easter, to twist together bunches of evergreens, and for each young swain to kiss through the loops the maid he loved the best. With adults this was regarded as a probationary agreement to marry. If the affection were mutually as full flamed the following Easter, the kiss through the loop was the formal betrothal. Constantine's impatience wreathed the evergreens almost daily, and, as every kiss stood for a year, there was awaiting them—if the good fairies would only make it true—some centuries of nuptial bliss.

The little lover had built for himself a booth against the steep rocks. Into this Morsinia would enter with bread and water, and placing them upon the stone which answered for a table, say, in imitation of older maidens assuming the care of husbands, "So will I always and faithfully provide for thee." Then she would touch the sides of the miniature house with a twig, which she called her distaff, saying, "I will weave for thee, my lord, goodly garments and gay." She would also sit down and undress and redress her doll, which Constantine had carved from wood, and which they said would do for the real baby that the bride was expected to array, in the ceremony by which she acknowledged the obligations of wifehood.[11]

But Michael was not at all disconsolate at this preference shown his brother; for he knew that Morsinia would prefer him to all the world when she heard what a great soldier he had become. Indeed, on some days Michael was lord of the little booth; and more than once the fair enchantress put the evergreen loop around both the boys in as sincere indecision as has sometimes vexed older hearts than hers.

CHAPTER III.

In the winter of 1443—a few months subsequent to the events with which our story begins—the Pass of Slatiza echoed other sounds than the cry of the eagle, the bleating of the flocks, and the songs and halloos of the mountaineers. Distant bugle calls floated between the cliffs. At night a fire would flash from a peak, and be suddenly extinguished, as another gleamed from a peak beyond. Strange men had gone up and down the road. With one of these Uncle Kabilovitsch had wandered off, and been absent several days. Great was the excitement of the little folks when Milosch told them that a real army was not far off, coming from the Christian country to the north of them, and that its general was no other than the great Hunyades, the White Knight of Wallachia—called so because he wore white armor—the son of that same King Sigismund and the fair Elizabeth Morsiney. How little Morsinia's cheeks paled, while those of the boys burned, and their eyes flashed, as their father told them, by the fire-light in the centre of their cabin, that the White Knight had already conquered the Turks at Hermanstadt and at Vasag and on the banks of the Morava, and was—if the story which Milosch had heard from some scouts were true—preparing to burst through the Balkan mountains, and descend upon the homes of the Turk on the southern plains. Little did they sleep at night, in the excitement of the belief that, at any day, they might see the soldiers—real soldiers, just like those of Alexander, and those of Bajazet—tramping through the Pass. The tremor of the earth, occasioned by some distant landslide, in their excited imagination was thought to be due to the tramp of a myriad feet. The hoot of the owl became the trumpet call for the onset: and the sharp whistle of the wind, between leafless trees and along the ice-covered rocks, seemed like the whizzing flight of the souls of the slain.

Once, just as the gray dawn appeared, Kabilovitsch, who had been absent for several days, came hurriedly with the alarming news that the Turks, steadily retiring before the Christians, would soon occupy the Pass. They were already coming up the defiles, as the mists rise along the sides of the mountains, in dense masses, hoping to gain such vantage ground that they could hurl the troops of Hunyades down the almost perpendicular slopes before they could effect a secure lodgment on the summit. The children and women must leave herds and homes, and fly instantly. The only safe retreat was the great cave, which the mountaineers knew of, lying off towards the other Pass, that of Soulourderbend.

The fugitives were scarcely gone when the mountain swarmed with Moslems. The mighty mass of humanity crowded the cliffs like bees preparing to swarm. They fringed the breastworks of native rock with abattis made of huge trunks of trees. During the day the Turks had diverted a mountain stream, so that, leaving its bed, it poured a thin sheet of water over the steepest part of the road the Christians were to ascend. This, freezing during the night, made a wall of ice. The Christians were thus forced to leave the highway and attempt to scale the crags far and near; a movement which the Turks met by spreading themselves everywhere above them. Upon ledges and into crevices which had never before felt the pressure of human feet clambered the contestants. Every rock was empurpled with gore. Turkish turban and Hungarian helmet were caught upon the same thorny bush; while the heads which had worn them rolled together in the same gully, and stared their deathless hatred from their dead eyes.

The Turks in falling back discovered the mouth of the cave in which the peasants had taken refuge. As the Moslem bugles sounded the retreat, lest they should be cut off by the Christians who had scaled the heights on their flanks, they seized the women and children, who soon were lost to each other's sight in the skurry of the retiring host. The hands of Constantine were tied about the neck, and his legs about the loins, of a huge Moslem, to whose keeping he had been committed. An arrow pierced the soldier to the heart.

It seemed as if more than keenness of eye—some inspiration of his fatherly instinct—led Kabilovitsch on through the vast confusion, far down the slope, outrunning the fugitives and their pursuers, avoiding contact with any one by leaping from rock to rock and darting like a serpent through secret by-paths, until he reached the horsemen of the Turks, who had not been able to follow the foot-soldiers up the steep ascent. He knew that his little girl would be given in charge to some one of these. He, therefore, concealed himself in the growing darkness behind a clump of evergreen trees, close to which one must pass in order to reach the horses. A moment later, with the stealth and the strength of a panther, he leaped upon a Turk. The man let go the tiny form of the girl he was carrying; but, before he could assume an attitude of defence, the iron grip of Kabilovitsch was upon his throat, and the steel of the infuriated old man in his heart. Under the sheltering darkness, carrying his rescued child, Kabilovitsch threaded his way along ledges and balconies of rock projecting so slightly from the precipitous mountain that they would have been discerned, even in daylight, by no eye less expert than his own. At one place his way was blocked by a dead body which had fallen from the ledge above, and been caught by the tangled limbs of the mountain laurel. Without relinquishing his load, he pushed with his foot the lifeless mass down through the entanglement, and listened to the snapping of the bushes and the crashing of loosened stones, until the heavy thud announced that it had found a resting place.

"So God rest his soul, be he Christian or Paynim!" muttered the old man. "And now, my child, are you frighted?"

"No, father, not when you are with me," said Morsinia.

"Could you stand close to the rock, and hold very tight to the bush, if I leave you a moment?"

"Yes, father, I will hold to the bush as tight as it holds to the rock."

Kabilovitsch grasped a root of laurel, and, testing it with main strength, swung clear of the ledge, until his foot rested upon another ledge nearly the length of his body below. Bracing himself so that he spanned the interval with the strength of a granite pillar, he bade the child crawl cautiously in the direction of his voice. As she touched his hands, he lifted her with perfect poise, and placed her feet beside his own on a broad table rock.

"Now, blessed be Jesu, we are safe! Did I not tell you I would some day take you to a cavern which no one but Milosch and I had ever seen? Here it is. Unless Sultan Amurath hires the eagles to be his spies—as they say he does—no eye but God's will see us here even when the sun rises. You did not know, my little princess, what a coward your old father had become, to run away from a battle. Did you, my darling?" said he kissing her. "Never did I dream that Ar——, that Kabilovitsch would fly like a frightened partridge through the bushes. But my girl's heart has taken the place of my own to-night."

As he spoke he slipped from his shoulders the rough cape, or armless jacket, of bear-skin, and wrapped the girl closely in it. He then carried her beneath the roof of a little cave, where he enfolded her in his arms, making his own back a barrier against the cutting night wind and the whirling snow. The cold was intense. Thinking only of the danger to the already half-benumbed and wearied body of the child, he took off his conical cap, and unwound the many folds of coarse woollen cloth of which it was made, and with it wrapped her limbs and feet.

Thus the night was passed. With the first streak of the dawn Kabilovitsch crept cautiously from the ledge, and soon returned with the news that the Turks had vanished, swept away by the tide of Christian soldiers which was still pouring over and down the mountain in pursuit.

Horrible was the scene which everywhere greeted them as they clambered back toward the road. The dead were piled upon the dying in every ravine. Red streaks seamed the white snow—channels in which the current of many a life had drained away. The road was choked with the hurrying victors. But the old man's familiarity with the ground found paths which the nimble feet of the maid could climb; so that the day was not far advanced when they stood on the site of their home. Scarcely a trace of the little hamlet remained. Whatever could be burned had fed the camp-fires of the preceding night. The houses had been thrown down by the soldiers in rifling the grain bins which were built between their outer and inner walls.

The old man sat down upon the door-stone of what had been his home. His head dropped upon his bosom. Morsinia stood by his side, her arm about his neck, and her cheek pressed close to his, so that her bright golden hair mingled with his gray beard—as in certain mediæval pictures the artist expresses a pleasing fancy in hammered work of silver and gold. They scarcely noticed that a group of horsemen, more gaily uniformed than the ordinary soldiers, had halted and were looking at them.

"By the eleven thousand virgins of Coln! I never saw a more unique picture than that," said one who wore a skull cap of scarlet, while an attendant carried his heavy helmet. "If Masaccio were with us I would have him paint that scene for our new cathedral at Milano, as an allegory of the captivity in Babylon."

"Rather of the captivity in Avignon. It would be a capital representation of the Holy Father and his daughter the Church," replied a companion laughing. "Only I would have the painter insert the portrait of your eminence, Cardinal Julian, as delivering them both."

"That would not be altogether unhistoric; for the deliverance was not wholly wrought until our time," replied the cardinal, evidently gratified with the flattering addition which his comrade, King Vladislaus, had made to his pleasing conceit. "But if to-day's victory be as thorough as it now looks, and we drive the Turks out of Europe, it would serve as a picture of the captivity in which the haughty, half-infidel emperor of the Greeks and his daughter, Byzantium, will soon be to Rome."

"But, by my crown," said Vladislaus, "and with due reverence for the great cardinal under whose cap is all the brain that Rome can now boast of—I think the Greeks will find as much spiritual desolation in Mother Church as these worthy people have about them here."

"I can pardon that speech to the newly baptized king of half-barbarian Hungary, when I would not shrive another for it," replied Julian petulantly. "The son of a pagan may be allowed much ignorance regarding the mystery of the Holy See. But a truce to our badgering! Let us speak to this old fellow. Good man, is this your house? By Saint Catherine! the girl is beautiful, your highness."

"It was my home, Sire, yesterday, but now it is his that wants it," replied Kabilovitsch.

"And where do you go now?" asked the cardinal.

"Towards God's gate, Sire; and I wish I might see it soon, but for this little one," said the old man, rising.

"Holy Peter let you in when you get there," rejoined His Eminence, turning his horse away.

"Hold! Cardinal," replied the king. "I am surprised at that speech from you. You have tried to teach me by lectures for a fortnight past that Rome has temporal as well as spiritual authority, all power on earth as well as in heaven. Now, by Our Lady! you ought to help this good man over his earthly way towards God's gate, as well as wish him luck when he gets there. But the priest preaches, and leaves the laity to do the duties of religion. Credit me with a good Christian deed to balance the many bad ones you remember against me, Cardinal, and I will help the man. The golden hair of the child against the old man's head were as good an aureole as ever a saint wore. And that Holy Peter knows, if the Cardinal does not. Ho, Olgard! Take the lass on the saddle with you. And, old man, if you will keep close with your daughter, you will find as good provision behind the gate of Philippopolis as that in heaven, if report be true. And, by Saint Michael! if we go dashing down the mountain at this rate we will vault the walls of that rich Moslem town as easily as the devil jumped the gate of Paradise."

Kabilovitsch trudged by the side of Olgard, who held Morsinia before him. It was hard for the old man to keep from under the hoofs of the horses as the attendant knights crowded together down the narrow and tortuous descent. Suddenly the girl uttered a cry, and, clapping her hands, called,

"Constantine, Constantine!"

The missing lad, emerging from a copse, stood for an instant in amazement at the apparition of his little playmate; then dashed among the crowd toward her.

"Drat the witch!" said a knight—between the legs of whose horse the boy had gone—aiming at him a blow with his iron mace. Constantine would have been trampled by the crowding cavalcade, had not the strong hand of a trooper seized him by his ragged jacket and lifted him to the horse's crupper.

"So may somebody save my own lad in the mountains of Carpathia!" said the rough, but kindly soldier.

"Ay, the angels will bear him up in their hands, lest he even dash his foot against a stone, for thy good deed," exclaimed a monk, who, with hood thrown back, and almost breathless with the effort to rescue the lad himself, had reached him at the same moment.

"Good Father, pray for me!" said the trooper, crossing himself.

"Ay, with grace," replied the monk, extricating himself from the crowd, and hasting back to the side of a wounded man, whom his comrades were carrying on a stretcher which had been extemporized with an old cloak tied securely between two stout saplings.

As night darkened down, the plain at the base of the mountain burst into weird magnificence with a thousand campfires. The Turks were in full retreat toward Adrianople, and joy reigned among the Christians. It was the eve of Christmas. The stars shone with rare brilliancy through the cold clear atmosphere.

"The very heavens return the salutation of our beacons," said King Vladislaus.

A trumpet sounded its shrill and jubilant note, which was caught up by others, until the woods and fields and the mountain sides were flooded with the inarticulate song, as quickly as the first note of a bird awakens the whole matin chorus of the summer time.

Cardinal Julian, reining his horse at the entrance to the camp, listened as he gazed—

"'And with the angel there was a multitude of the heavenly host praising God!' Let us accept the joy of this eve of the birth of our Lord as an omen of the birth of Christian power to these lands, which have so long lain in the shadow of Moslem infidelity and Greek heresy. Our camps yonder flash as the sparks which flew from the apron of the Infant Jesu and terrified the devil.[12] Sultan Amurath has been scorched this day, though the infernal fiend lodge in his skin, as I verily believe he does."

"Amurath was not in personal command to-day. At least so I am told," replied Vladislaus. "He is occupied with a rebellion of the Caramanians in Asia. Carambey, the Sultan's sister's husband, led the forces at the beginning of the fight. He was captured in the bog, and is now in safe custody with the Servian Despot, George Brankovich. Hunyades and the Despot have been bargaining for his possession. But the real commandant, as I have learned from prisoners—at least he was present at the beginning of the fight—was Scanderbeg."

"Scanderbeg?" exclaimed Julian with great alarm. "What! the Albanian traitor, Castriot?—Iscariot, rather, should be his name—This then, Your Majesty, is no night for revelry; but for watching. The flight of the enemy, if Scanderbeg leads them, is only to draw us into a net. What if before morning, with the Balkans behind us, we should be assaulted with fresh corps of Turks on the front? There is no fathoming the devices of Scanderbeg's wily brain. And never yet has he been defeated, except to wrest the better victory out of seeming disaster. Does General Hunyades know the antagonist he is dealing with? that it is not some bey or pasha, nor even the Sultan himself, but Scanderbeg? I have heard Hunyades say that since the days of Saladin, the Moslems have not had a leader so skilful as that Albanian renegade: that a glance of his eye has more sagacity in it than the deliberations of a Divan:[13] and that not a score of knights could stand against his bare arm. We must see Hunyades."

"I confess," replied King Vladislaus, "that I liked not the easy victory we have had. I would have sworn to prevent a myriad foes climbing the ice road we travelled yesterday, if I had but a company of pikemen; yet ten thousand Turkish veterans kept us not back; and they were led by Scanderbeg! There is mystery here. Jesu prevent it should be the mystery of death to us all! Let's to Hunyades! If only your wisdom or prayers, Cardinal, could reclaim Scanderbeg to his Christian allegiance, I would not fear Sultan Amurath, though he were the devil's pope, with the keys of death and hell in his girdle."

Hunyades was found with the advance corps of the Christians. But for his white armor he could scarcely be distinguished from some subaltern officer, as he moved among the men, inspecting the details of their encampment. The contrast of the commander-in-chief with the kingly and the ecclesiastical soldier was striking. He listened quietly to their surmises and fears, and replied with as little of their excitement as if he spoke of a new armor-cleaner:

"Yes! we shall probably have a raid from Scanderbeg before morning. But we are ready for him. Do you look well to the rear, King Vladislaus! And do you, Cardinal, marshal a host of fresh Latin prayers for the dying; for, if Scanderbeg gets among your Italians, their saffron skins will bleach into ghosts for fright of him."

The cardinal's face grew as red as his cap, as he replied:

"But for loyalty to our common Christian cause, and the example of subordination to our chief, I would answer that taunt as it deserves."

CHAPTER IV.

The company which Kabilovitsch and the children had joined was halted at the edge of the great camp. Other peasants and non-combatants crowded in from their desolated homes; but neither Milosch's face, nor Helena's, nor yet little Michael's, were among those they anxiously scanned. The command of King Vladislaus secured for the three favored refugees every comfort which the rude soldiers could furnish. The boy and girl were soon asleep by a fire, while the old man lay close beside them, that no one could approach without arousing him. He, however, could not sleep. On the one side was the noisy revelry of the victors; on the other, the darkness of the plain. Here and there were groups of soldiers, and beyond them an occasional gleam of the spear-head of some sentinel, who, saluting his comrade, turned at the end of his beat.

The dusky form of a huge man attracted Kabilovitsch's eye. As the stranger drew near, his long bear-skin cape terminating above in a rough and ungraceful hood, and his long pointed shoes with blocks of wood for their soles, indicated that he was some peasant. He seemed to be wandering about with no other aim than to keep himself warm. Yet Kabilovitsch noted that he lingered as he passed by the various groups, as if to scan the faces of his fellow-sufferers.

"Heaven grant that all his kids be safe to-night!" muttered the old man.

As the walking figure passed across the line of a fagot fire, he revealed a splendid form; too straight for one accustomed to bend at his daily toil.

"A mountaineer? a hunter?" thought Kabilovitsch, "for the field-tillers are all round of shoulder, and bow-backed. But no! His tread is too firm and heavy for that sort of life. One's limbs are springy, agile, who climbs the crags. A hunter will use the toes more in stepping."

Kabilovitsch's curiosity could not keep his eyes from growing heavy with the cold and the flicker of the fire light, when they were forced wide open again by the approach of the stranger. The old man felt, rather than saw, that he was being closely studied from behind the folds of the hood which the wanderer drew close over his face, to keep out the cutting wind which swept in gusts down from the mountains. He passed very near, and was talking to himself, as is apt to be the custom of men who lead lonely lives.

"It is bitter cold," he said, with chattering teeth, "bitter cold, by the beard of Moses!"

The last words startled Kabilovitsch so that he gave a sudden motion. The stranger noticed it and paused. Gazing intently upon the old man, who had now assumed a sitting posture, he addressed him—

"By the beard of Moses! it's an awful night, neighbor."

"Ay, by the beard of Moses! it is; and one could wear the beard of Aaron, too, with comfort—Aaron's beard was longer than Moses' beard; is not that what the priest says?" said Kabilovitsch, veiling his excitement under forced indifference of manner, at the same time making room for the visitor, who, without ceremony stretched himself by his side, bringing his face close to that of the old man, and glaring into it. Kabilovitsch returned his gaze with equal sharpness.

"What know you of the beard of Moses?" said the stranger. "Was it gray or black?"

"Black," said Kabilovitsch, studying the other's face with suspicion and surprise. "Black as an Albanian thunder cloud, and his eye was as undimmed by age as that of the eagle that flies over the lake of Ochrida."[14]

"You speak well," replied the stranger, pushing back his hood.

His face was massive and strong. No peasant was he, but one born to command and accustomed to it.

"You are——Drakul?" asked the man.

"No."

"Harion?"

"No."

"Kabilovitsch?"

"Ay, and you?"

"Castriot."

Kabilovitsch sprang to his feet.

"Lie down! Lie down! Let me share your blanket," said the visitor. "This air is too crisp and resonant for us to speak aloud in it; and waking ears at night-time are over quick to hear what does not concern them. We can muffle our speech beneath the blanket."

Kabilovitsch felt the hesitation of reverence in assuming a proximity of such intimacy with his guest; but also felt the authority of the command and the wisdom of the precaution. He obeyed.

"I feared that I should find no one who recognized our password. I must see General Hunyades to-night; yet must not approach his quarters. Can you get to his tent?"

"Readily," said Kabilovitsch. "During the day my little lass yonder won the attention of King Vladislaus, and he gave me the password of the camp to-night for her safety. 'Christus natus est'."

"You must go to him at once, and say that I would see him here. You will trust me to keep guard over these two kids while you are away? I will not wolf them."

"Heaven grant that you may shepherd all Albania,"—and the old man was off.

"I knew that the prodigal Prince George would come back some day," said he to himself. "Many a year have I kept my watch in the Pass, and among the mountains of Albania. And many a service have I rendered as a simple goatherd which I could not have done had I worn my country's colors anywhere except in my heart. And, 'by the beard of Moses!' During some weeks now I have carried many a message, had some fighting and hard scratching which I did not understand, except that it was 'by the beard of Moses!' And now Moses has come; refused at last to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, and will free his people. God will it! And George Castriot has lain under my blanket! I will hang that blanket in the church at Croia as an offering to the Holy Virgin.—But no, it belongs to the trooper. Heaven keep me discreet, or, for the joy of it, I cannot do my errand safely. I'll draw my hood close, lest the moon yonder should guess my secret."

Kabilovitsch was challenged at every turn as he wound between the hundreds of camp-fires and tents; but the magic words, "Christus natus est," opened the way.

A circle of splendid tents told him he drew near to headquarters. In the midst of them blazed an immense fire. Camp-tables, gleaming with tankards and goblets of silver, were ranged beneath gorgeous canopies of flaxen canvas, which were lined with blue and purple tapestries. A multitude of gaily dressed servitors thronged into and out of them. Here was the royal splendor of Hungary and Poland; there the pavilion of the Despot of Servia; there the glittering cross of Rome; and, at the extreme end of this extemporized array of palatial and courtly pride, the more modest, but still rich, banner of the White Knight.

Kabilovitsch approached the latter.

"Your errand, man?" said the guard, holding his spear across the flapping doorway of the tent.

"Christus natus est!" was the response.

"That will do elsewhere, but not here," rejoined the guard.

"My business is solely with General Hunyades," said Kabilovitsch.

"It cannot be," said the spearman. "He has no business with any one but himself. If you are a shepherd of Bethlehem come to adore the Infant Jesu—as you look to be—you must wait until the morning."

"My message is as important to him as that of the angels on that blessed night," said the goatherd, making a deep obeisance and looking up to heaven as if in prayer, as he spoke.

"Then proclaim your message, old crook-staff! we have had glad tidings to-day, but can endure to hear more," said the guard, pushing him away.

"No ear on earth shall hear mine but the general's," cried the old man, raising his voice: "No! by the beard of Moses! it shall not."

"A strange swear that, old leather-skin! Did you keep your sheep in Midian, where Moses did, that you know he had a beard. Your cloak is ragged enough to have belonged to father Jethro; and I warrant it is as full of vermin as were those of the Egyptians after the plague that Moses sent on them. But the ten plagues take you! Get away!"

"No, by the beard of Moses!" shouted Kabilovitsch.

"Let him pass!" said a voice from deep within the tent.

"Let him pass!" said another nearer.

"Let him pass!" repeated one just inside the outer curtain.

The goatherd passed between a line of sentinels, closely watched by each. The tent was a double one, composing a room or pavilion, enclosed by the great tent; so that there was a large space around the private apartment of the general, allowing the sentinels to patrol entirely about it without passing into the outer air.

At the entrance of the inner tent Hunyades appeared. He was of light build but compactly knit, with ample forehead and generous, but scarred face; which, however, was more significantly seamed with the lines that denote thought and courage. He was wrapped in a loose robe of costly furs. He waved his hand for Kabilovitsch to enter, and bade the guards retire. Throwing himself on a plain soldier's couch, he drew close to it a camp seat, and motioned his visitor to sit.

"You have news from the Albanians, by the beard of Moses?" said Hunyades inquiringly.

A moment or two sufficed for the delivery of Kabilovitsch's message.

"Ho, guard! when this old man goes, let no one enter until he comes back; then admit him without the pass, instantly," said Hunyades, springing from the couch. "Now, old man, give me your bear skin—now your shoes—your cap. Here, wrap yourself in mine. You need not shrink from occupying Hunyades' skin for a while, since you have had to-night a more princely soldier under your blanket. Did you say to the north? On the edge of the camp? A boy and a girl by the fire; and he?"

The disguised general passed out.

CHAPTER V.

"By the beard of Moses! I'll break your head with my stick if you come stumbling over me in that way," growled Scanderbeg from beneath his blanket, as a peasant-clad man tripped against his huge form extended by the camp fire.

"Then let the cold shrink your hulk to its proper size," replied the stranger. "But you should thank me, instead of cursing me, for waking you up; for your fire is dying out, and you would perish, sleeping in the blanket that exposes your feet that it may cover your nose. But I'll stir your fire and put some sticks on it, if I may sit by it and melt the frost from my beard and the aches from my toes. But whom have you here?"

The man stooped down and eagerly removed the blanket from the partially covered faces of the children.

"Constantine!" he exclaimed, "God be praised! and Kabilovitsch's girl,—or the starlight mocks me!"

"Father!" cried the boy, waking and throwing his arms about the neck of the man who stooped to embrace him.

"And Michael? is he here, too?" asked Milosch.

"No, father," said the child. "We were parted at the cave, and I have not seen him except in my dream."

"In your dream, my child? In your dream? Jesu grant he be not killed, that his angel spirit came to you in your dream! Did he seem bright and beautiful—more beautiful than you ever saw him before—as if he had come to you from Paradise? No? Then he is living yet on the earth; and by all the devils in hell and Adrianople! I shall find him, though I tear him from the dead arms of the traitor Castriot himself, as I was near to taking you, my boy, from the grip of the Turk whose heart I pierced with an arrow the day of the fight;—but I was set upon and nigh killed myself by a score of the Infidels."

"And our mother dear?" asked Constantine. "She is safe?"

"Ay! ay! safe in heaven, I fear, but we will not give up hope until we have searched our camps to-morrow; nor then, until we have burned every seraglio of the Turks from the mountains to the sea. But who brought you and the lass here?" asked Milosch, eyeing the form of the surly man beside him.

"Why, good Uncle Kabilovitsch did," said the boy, staring in amazement at the spot now usurped by the strange figure of Scanderbeg.

"Kabilovitsch went to fetch some fire-peat from the gully I told him of," muttered Scanderbeg.

"Yes, he is coming yonder," said Milosch, as Kabilovitsch's well-known hood and cape were outlined against the white background of a snow-covered fir tree a short distance off. "But he has found no fuel. Wrap close, my hearties: you will have no more blaze to-night. Ha! Kabilovitsch!" said he, raising his voice, as the familiar form seemed about to pass by. "Has the fire in your eye been put out by the cold, that you cannot find your own place, neighbor? I would have sworn that, if Kabilovitsch were blind, he could find a lost kid on the mountains; and now he hardly knows his own nest."

The assumed Kabilovitsch came near, and gave an awkward salute, which, while intended to be familiar, was not sufficiently unlimbered of the habit of authority to avoid giving the impression that its familiarity was only assumed.

"By the beard of Moses! I had almost mistook my own camp, now the fires are smouldering," said he, approaching.

"He is not Kabilovitsch," said Milosch, half to himself and half aloud.

"No," replied Scanderbeg. "But I'll go and find Kabilovitsch. Perhaps he has more peat than he can carry. And, stranger, I'll help you find what you are seeking—for you seem daft with the cold—if you will help me find him I am to look for. By the beard of Moses! that's a fair agreement; is it not?"

"A strange swear, that!" said Milosch, looking after the two forms vanishing among the fir trees. "It is some watchword, and I like it not among these camp prowlers. I fear for Kabilovitsch. The newcomer wore his clothes, which I would know if I saw them on the back of the cardinal; for good Helena cut the hood for our neighbor as she cut the skirt for his motherless child, little Morsinia there. Some mischief is brewing. I shall watch and not sleep a wink."

Had one been lurking in the copse of evergreens to which the men withdrew, he would have overheard conversation of which these sentences are parts.

"Yes, General Hunyades, the time has come. I can endure the service of the Sultan no longer. But for what I am about to do I alone am responsible, and must decline to share that responsibility with any other, either Moslem or Christian. I believe, Sire, that I am in this directed by some higher power than my own caprice. I am compelled to it by invisible forces, as really as the stars are dragged by them through the sky yonder."

"No star," replied Hunyades, "has purer lustre than that of your noble purpose, and none are led by the invisible forces to a brighter destiny than is Scanderbeg."

"Let not your Christian lips call me Scanderbeg, but Castriot," said his companion. "Yes, I believe that my new purpose comes from the inbreathing of some celestial spirit, from some mysterious hearing the soul has of the inarticulate voice of God. Else why should the thought of it so strangely satisfy me? I cast myself down from the highest pinnacle of honor and power and riches with which the Moslem service can reward one;—for I am at the head of the army, and even the Vizier has not more respect at Adrianople than have I wherever the soldiers of the Sultan spread themselves throughout the world. To leave the Padishah will be to leave every thing for an uncertain future. Yet I am more than content to do it."

"Not for an uncertain future, noble Castriot," replied Hunyades warmly, grasping his hand. "The highest position in the armies of Christian Europe is yours. My own chieftaincy I could demit without regret, knowing that it would fall into your hands. The army of Italy you can take command of to-morrow if you will; for that scarlet-knobbed coxcomb of an ecclesiastic, Julian, is not fitted for it. Or Brankovitch, the Servian Despot, will hail you as chief voivode.[15] You have but to choose from our armies, and put yourself at the head of whatever nation you will: for the legions will follow the pointing of your invincible sword as bravely as if it were the sword of Michael, the Archangel."

"No! No! These things tempt me not," said Scanderbeg. "I must live only for Albania. That strange spirit which counsels me comes into my soul like a pure blast from off my Albanian hills. The voices that call me are like the dying voice of my father, the sainted Duke John, who prayed then for his land and for his son—for both in the one breath that floated his soul to God. Let me look again upon the rocky fastnesses of the Vitzi, the waters of little Ochrida and Skidar, and call them mine; I shall then not envy even the plume on your helmet, generous Hunyades; nor regret what I forsake among the Moslems, though my estate were that of the entire empire which the Padishah sees in his dreams, when, not the city of Adrian, but the city of Constantine shall have become his capital."

"Christendom will hardly forgive the slight you put upon it, noble Castriot, by declining some general command, and will soon grow jealous of your exclusive devotion to little Albania," said Hunyades, with evident candor.

"Christendom will not lose, but gain, thereby," replied Scanderbeg. "For is not Albania, after all, a key point in the mighty battle which is still to be waged with the Turk over these Eastern countries of Europe, from Adria to the Euxine?"

"How so?" asked Hunyades. "Have we not this day broken the power of the Turk in Europe? and is he not now in headlong haste to the sea of Marmora?"

Scanderbeg replied with slow, but ominous, words:

"General Hunyades, the Moslem power was not this day broken. Trust not the semblance. My arm could have hurled your soldiers down the northern declivities of yonder mountains with as much ease as yours shattered the Turkish ranks at Vasag and Hermannstadt. The armies still in front of you wait but the word to assail your camp with dire vengeance for their mysterious defeat—ay, mysterious to them. And the Padishah is hasting with the hordes released by his victories over the Caramanians, to join them. No, Sire, the battle for empire on these plains, and in Macedonia, and along the Danube, has not ended: it has but just begun. And Albania will be the key spot for a generation to come. No Ottoman wave can strike central Europe but over the Albanian hills. A Christian power entrenched there will be a counter menace to every invasion from the side of the Moslem, and a tremendous auxiliary in any movement from the side of Christendom. My military judgment concurs with the voice of that spirit which speaks within me, and bids me as a Christian to live for Albania."

"I see in your plan," replied Hunyades, "a gleam of that far wisdom that won for you the title of 'The eye of the Ottoman,' as your valor made you the 'right hand of the Sultan.' While my view of the relative power of the two civilizations now fronting each other on our battle-lines might be different from yours, and I should place the key point in the great field rather on the lower Danube than so far to the west, I yet submit my judgment to yours. Assign to me my part in the affair you would execute, and, my word as a soldier and a Christian, you shall have my help."

"Nay," replied Scanderbeg. "As I said, I can share the responsibility of my action with no one. Grave charges will ring against my name. My old comrades will scorn my deed as treacherous. Even history will fail to understand me. Let me act alone; obeying that strange voice which will justify me, if not before men, at least at the last day of the world's judgment. The Moslem has wronged me; outraged my humanity; slit the tongue of my conscience that it should not speak to me of my duty; and tried to put out the eyes of my faith. The Divinity bids me avenge myself. But the vengeance is only mine, and God's. No other hand must be stained with the blood of it, least of all thine, noble Hunyades. My plan must be all my own. I only ask that, when I have extricated myself from Moslem ties, I may have the friendship of Hunyades. Especially that the way may be left open for my passing through the places now held by your troops, without challenge and delay. All else has been arranged by a handful of faithful Albanian patriots."

"It shall be as you desire, General Castriot. Choose your password, and it shall open the way for you though it were through the back door of the Vatican."

"Let then the 'beard of Moses' be respected. My trusty Albanians are accustomed to it."

"Good!" replied Hunyades. "And I will seal our compact by taking Adrianople in honor of the departure of its only defender."

"Nay," said Scanderbeg. "It will not be wise to press upon the capital. Every approach is guarded more securely than were those at Vienna by the Christians. The Padishah's engineers are more skilful than any in the land of the Frank or German. The new compound of saltpetre and sulphur, of which you hardly know the use, is buried beneath every gate; and a spark will burst it as Ætna or Vesuvius.[16] Even the valor of the White Knight cannot conquer the soulless element. The black grains never blanch with fear. No panic can divert a stone ball hurled from cannon so that it shall not find the heart of the bravest. I advise that your armies pause awhile with the prestige of having scaled the Balkans. In a few months opportunities may have ripened. Once I am in Albania, Sultan Amurath shall know that the name of Scanderbeg—the Lord Alexander—was not his, but Fate's entitling; for, unless my destiny is misread, the Macedonian legions of the Great Alexander were not swifter than my new Macedonian braves shall be. This will encourage the Venetians and Genoese; and with their navies on the Hellespont, the timid Palælogus pressing out from his covert of Constantinople, and insurrection everywhere from the Crimea to Peloponnesus, there will not, a generation hence, be left a turban in Europe. Believe me, General, the Turk's grip of nearly a century, since he pinched the continent at Gallipoli, cannot be loosened in a day."

"To no other than Castriot would I yield my judgment; and not to him, but that his words are as convincing as his sword. Then so let it be," was the reply of the Christian leader.

The Albanian disappeared.

CHAPTER VI.

Hunyades, closely muffled in his bear-skin disguise, returned to the camp.

"A desperate adventure that of Castriot," thought he. "It is well that he permits no voice but his own to speak his plans, and no ear but mine to hear them.

"Hist!

"No; it is but the ice crackling from the balsams. Yet who knows what interlopers there may have been? and if the brave Scanderbeg may not be hamstrung before he reaches his own camp? The ride will be long and rattling after he enters the Turkish lines. Will it excite no suspicion? Nor his absence? Heaven guard the brave heart, for the very mole holes in the ground are the Sultan's ears, into which he drinks the secrets of his soldiers. By the way, I must lift the dirty cap from the fellow who called me Kabilovitsch at the herdsman's fire; for the messenger who brought me word surely said that only Castriot and the two children were there. Who may this other one be? I must discover; and if he knows aught he should not, he shall know no more this side of hell-gate, or my dagger's point has grown so honest that it has forgotten the way to a knave's heart."

Approaching the little group, Hunyades went behind them, that, if possible, he might overhear some words before any persons there knew of his presence.

Milosch had been ill at ease through the continued absence of his friend Kabilovitsch, the peculiar action of the strange man who had taken his place beneath the blanket, and the apparition of the one who wore the cap and cape which he thought he could not mistake. There had always been a mystery about Kabilovitsch's early life, which their long and close neighborly relations upon the mountain had not enabled him to solve. The girl, he often thought, was of too light a build and too fair featured to be the child of the mountaineer. The story Kabilovitsch often told about the early death of the child's mother, Milosch's wife never heard without impatience and a shrug of the shoulders. Who was the child? Could there be any plot to carry her away among persons who knew the secret of her birth? Milosch could reach one definite conclusion about the matter, and that was that he ought to guard the child just now. So, with senses made alert by suspicion, he heard the soft footfall of Hunyades through the crust-broken snow; and though with head averted, noted his stealthy approach. The caution observed by the stranger made Milosch feel certain of the intended treachery. Loosening the short sheath-knife, which hung by the ring in its bone handle from his girdle, he grasped it tightly, and with a sudden bound faced the intruder.

"Your business, man?" said he, eyeing him as a hunter eyes a wolf to anticipate the spring of the brute, that the knife may enter his throat before the fangs strike.

"A rude greeting to a neighbor, that," was the quiet reply.

"A fair enough greeting to one who wears a neighbor's fleece, and prowls by night about his flock. Stop! not a step nearer! or, by the soul of Kabilovitsch, whom, for aught I know, you have murdered, I will send you to meet him!"

A motion of the stranger toward his weapon was anticipated by the mountaineer, who gripped the intruder with the strength of a bear, pinioning his arms by his sides, and falling with him to the ground. In an instant more, however, the dagger point of his antagonist began to penetrate Milosch's thigh. Clenching tighter to prevent a more deadly thrust, he felt beneath his opponent's rough outer robe the hard corselet woven with links of iron—not the coarse fabric such as was worn by common soldiers, but the lighter steel-tempered underwear of knights and nobles.

"You have murdered another better than yourself, damned villain, and have stolen his shirt. But it shall not save you this time."

As he let out these words one by one and breath by breath, Milosch worked the knife into such a hold that he could press it into the back of his antagonist. Slowly but surely the stout point made its way between the hard links until the man's flesh quivered with the pain. Then Milosch hissed through his clenched teeth:—

"Who are you? If you speak not, you die. If you lie, let the devil shrive your black soul! for I'll send you to him on the knife point. Speak!"

"I am General Hunyades," replied the almost breathless man.

The words relieved him from the pressure of the knife, but not from the crunching hug of his captor.

"Prove it!" hissed Milosch. "I have heard that Hunyades has a scar on the left side of the neck. Uncover your neck!"

Milosch released Hunyades' left hand sufficiently to allow him to reach upward. In an instant the leathern string which bound the bear-skin cape about his neck was broken, the lacings of a velvet jacket loosened, and the fingers of Milosch led over the roughened surface of the scarred skin.

The herdsman rose to his knees, and kissed the hand of the general.

"Strike thy dagger into me! for I have raised my hand against the Lord's anointed," cried he in shame and fear.

"Nay, friend," said the chief; "the fault was mine, and yours shall be the reward of the only man who ever conquered Hunyades. Your name, my good fellow?"

"Milosch!"

"Milosch, the goatherd of the Pass? I have heard tell of your strength; how you could out-crunch a bear; I believe it. You have been faithful to your absent friend, as you have been severe with me."

"But what of my friend Kabilovitsch? You surely wear his gear," said Milosch.

"Yes, I borrowed these of a passing stranger—I know not that he be Kabilovitsch—with which I might pass disguised among the guards. The owner of this cape and hood is keeping warm in a tent hard by until I return. But whom have you here?"

"The lad is mine. The lass is my neighbor's. He calls her Morsinia, in honor of your fair mother," replied Milosch.

"Then I must see her face. She should be fair with such a name."

As he raised the coarse-knit hood which closely wrapped her, a flicker of the dying fire-light illumined for an instant the features of the child. The uncombed mass of golden hair made a natural pillow in which lay a face unsurpassed in balance of proportion and delicacy of detail by any sculptor's art. Her forehead was high and full, but apparently diminished by the wealth of curling locks that nestled upon brow and temples; her nose straight and thin, typically Greek; her lips firm, but arched, as with some abiding and happy dream; her skin, purest white, tinged with the glow of youthful health, as the snow on the Balkans under the first roseate gleam of the morning sun.

"A peasant's child?" asked the general. But without waiting for reply, continued, "No, by the cheek of Venus! It took more than one generation of noble culture, high thoughts and purest blood, to mould such a face as that. She was not born in your neighbor's cot on the mountains? Will you swear that she was? No? Then I will swear that she was not. And the boy? Ah!" said he, scanning Constantine's face. "I know his stock. He is a sprig of the same rough thorn-tree that came near to tearing me to pieces just now. But his face is gentler than yours. Yet, it is a strong one; very bold; broad-thoughted; deep-souled; a sprig that may bear even better fruit than the old one."

"Heaven grant it may!" said Milosch, fervently.

"Yes, if you will let me transplant it from these barren mountains to the gardens of Buda and the banks of the Drave, it will get better shelter than you can give it. The boy shall be my protégé for to-night's adventure, if his father will enter my personal service. You see, you gave me so warm a welcome that I am loath to part company with you, my good fellow."

"Heaven bless you, Sire!" replied Milosch; "but my heart will cling to these cliffs until I know that my faithful wife and other boy are no longer among them."

"I shall give orders that the camp be searched," promised Hunyades. "If they live, and have not been carried away by the Turks, they must have sought refuge somewhere in the host. Farewell! When you will, Hunyades shall stand the friend of Milosch."

The apparent old herdsman returned through the heart of the camp to headquarters.

"Methinks, comrade, that you bandied words with a greater than you knew, when you teased the old goatherd awhile ago," said a sentinel, thrusting his thumb into the side of the spearman at the entrance to the general's hut. "Do you note his mien as he comes yonder? That crumpled old bear skin cannot hide his straight back; nor those shoes, as big as Spanish galleons, break the firmness of his tread. If the gust of wind should lift his cape you would see at least a golden cross on his shoulders. You cannot hide a true soldier."

The bear-skin passed between the fluttering canvas without challenge. Hunyades made a playful salute to Kabilovitsch, who rose to meet him.

"I found your camp. I have looked into the face of your little daughter."

"Mary save her!" said the old man with gratified look.

"I say I saw your daughter, your daughter, you know," said the general again, quizzing Kabilovitsch with his eyes.

"Ay, my daughter! and the Virgin Mother never sent a fairer child, save Jesu himself, to prince or peasant."

"Come, now," said the general, "tell me, did the Holy Virgin send this child to prince or peasant?"

"Why?" said Kabilovitsch, "these horny hands should tell thee, Sire, that I was not royal born."

"But the girl may be, if you were not. Is she your child?"

"Yes, my child, if heaven ever sent one to man."

"But, tell me," probed the general, "how did heaven send you the maiden? Did the mother bring her, or did the angels drop her at your door? For, if that girl be your child, heaven did not know you even by sight; since it put not a freckle of your dark skin upon her fair face, nor one of your bristles into her hair. The stars are not begotten of storm-clouds; nor do I think she is your daughter."

To this the old man replied, more to himself than to his interrogator, "If she is not mine by gift of nature, she is mine by gift of Him who is above nature."

"I will not steal your secret," said Hunyades. "Her name has excited my interest in her and her heaven-given or heaven-lent father. She needs better protection than you can give her in the camp. I will send her to headquarters."

"I would gratefully put her under your protection for a few days," said Kabilovitsch. "My duty takes me away from her for a while; dangerous duty, Sire, and if I should fall—"

"If Kabilovitsch falls, Hunyades will be as true father to the lass. Have you any special desire regarding her or yourself, my brave man? You have but to name it."

"But one, Sire," replied Kabilovitsch. "That I may see her safely conditioned at once. For it may be that before the day dawns I shall be summoned. I serve a cause as mysterious as the Providence which watches over it."

"An Albanian mystery? They are generally as inscrutable as a thunder cloud; but are revealed when its lightning strikes!" replied Hunyades, dismissing the old man, accompanied by two guards, who were commissioned to obey implicitly any orders the herdsman might give regarding the party of refugees by his camp-fire.

CHAPTER VII.

The Christian host prolonged the festival of the Nativity from day to day, until the mustering forces of the Ottomans summoned them from dangerous inactivity again to the march and the battle. The latter they found at Mount Cunobizza, where the enemy had massed an enormous force. The Christian army, with its splendid corps of Hungary, Poland, Bosnia, Servia, Wallachia, Italy and Germany, was not a more magnificent array than that of their Moslem opponents. For the most part of the day the field was equally held, but in the afternoon the Turkish left seemed to have become inspired with a strange fury. The Janizaries, at the time renowned as the best disciplined and most desperate foot-soldiers in the world, were rivalled in celerity and intrepidity, in skilful manœuvring and the tremendous momentum with which they struck the foe, by other Moslem corps; such as the squadrons of cavalry collected from distant military provinces, each under its Spahi or fief-holder; and the irregular Bashi-Bazouks, who seemed to have sprung from the ground in orderly array. Their diverse accoutrements, complexions, and movements suggested the hundred arms of some martial Briareus, all animated by a single brain. The war cry of "The Prophet!" was mingled with that of "Iscanderbeg!" In the thickest of the fight appeared the gigantic form of the circumcised Albanian, his gaudy armor flashing with jewels,[17] his right arm bared to the shoulder, his cimeter glancing as the lightning. The Italian legions opposite him, upon the Christian left, were hurled back again and again from their onslaught, and were pressed mile after mile from the original battle site. Hunyades inflicted a compensatory punishment upon the Moslem left, shattering its depleted ranks as a battering ram crashes through the tottering walls of a citadel. The chief of the Christians saw clearly Scanderbeg's plan[18] to leave the victory in his hands, and at the opportune moment he wheeled his squadrons to the assistance of King Vladislaus, thus combining in overwhelming odds against the enemy's centre, which Scanderbeg had effectually drained of its proper strength. As soon, however, as it was evident that the Christians were the victors, Scanderbeg, by superb generalship, interposed the Janizaries between the enemy and the turbaned heads that, but for this, were being whirled in full flight from the field. The rout was changed into orderly retreat. Hunyades found it impossible to press the pursuit, and muttered,

"Scanderbeg commands both our armies to-day. We can only take what he is minded to give."

At length night looked down upon the camps. Few tents were erected. Hunyades sat for hours beneath a tree, waiting for he knew not what developments. On the Turkish side even the Beyler Beys, the highest commanders, were content to stretch their limbs with no other canopy than the three horse-tails at the spear-head, the symbol of their rank and authority. Far in the rear were the few pavilions of the suite of the Grand Vizier, who represented the absent Sultan Amurath. Late into the night the Vizier sat in counsel with the Sultan's Reis Effendi or chief secretary, to whom was entrusted the seal of the empire. He was enstamping the many despatches which fleetest horsemen carried to distant Spahis, summoning them with their reserves to rally for the defence of Adrianople.

Just before the dawn the secretary was left alone. Even he, and, in his person, the empire, must catch an hour's sleep before the exciting and exacting duties of the new day. He reclined among his papers. But a summons awakened him: the messenger announcing Scanderbeg. The guards withdrew to a respectful distance from the outside of the tent.

"Do not rise," said the general, gently pressing the secretary back to his reclining posture. "I only need the imperial seal to this order."

The secretary scanned the paper with incredulous eyes. It was a firman, or decree of the Sultan, passing the government of Albania from General Sebaly to Scanderbeg, with absolute powers, and ordering the commandant of the strong fortress of Croia to place all its armament and that of adjacent strongholds in Scanderbeg's hand as the viceroy of the Sultan. As the secretary lifted his face to utter an inquiry for the relief of his amazement, knowing that the Sultan, then absent in Asia, could not have ordered such a document, the strong hand of Scanderbeg gripped his throat, and his poniard threatened his heart.

"The mark!" whispered the assailant.

The terrified man tremblingly reached the seal, and pressed it against the wax. The weapon then did its work, and so suddenly that the secretary had no time for even an outcry. Then silently, so that the guards, who were but a few paces distant, heard no commotion, he laid the lifeless form on the divan, and covered it with the embroidered cloak it had worn when living.[19]

Passing out, Scanderbeg gave orders that the tent should not be entered by the guards until morning, that the secretary might rest. He gave the password, "The Kaaba," as sharply as if his lips would take vengeance on the once sacred, but now hated sound. His military staff joined him at a little distance. Vaulting into the saddle he led the way toward the north. At the edge of the camp by a rude bridge he halted, and said to his attendants,

"I meet at this point the Beyler Bey of Anatolia, whose staff will be my escort to his camp. The Padishah's cause needs closest conference of all the commanders; for treason is abroad. Ah! I hear the escort. Return to quarters, gentlemen!"

Riding forward alone in the direction of the noise, he cried, "Who comes?"

"The Kaaba at Mecca," was the response.

"Well, if the Kaaba takes the trouble to come to me it is a good omen, by the beard of Moses!"

"By the beard of Moses!" murmured a group of horsemen, bowing their turbaned heads in the first gray light of the approaching day. The cavalcade closed around the fugitive chieftain, and moved along in silence, except to respond to the sentinels. As they passed the extreme picket of the Turks they halted. A wardrobe had been secreted in a cave beyond a copse near the road. Dismounting, the men exchanged their turbans for caps of wolf or beaver skin. Their gaily trimmed jackets, such as were worn by the Turkish foot-soldiers, gave place to short fur sacks. Their flowing, bag-bottomed trousers were kicked off, leaving abbreviated breeches of leather. In a few moments the splendidly uniformed suite of a Moslem bey was transformed into a rough, but exceedingly unique-looking, band of Albanian guerillas. Scanderbeg assumed a helmet, the summit of which carried as a device the head and shoulders of a goat—since the times of Alexander the Great the symbol of the powers in, or bordering upon, Macedonia. The Turkish uniforms were bundled upon the cruppers for future use.

The men stood for a moment, each by the side of his horse. At a motion of the officer in charge they gave the salute; touching their bared foreheads, and bowing to the ground. The officer then approached Scanderbeg, and, presenting his sword, said:

"Sire! to thee, as the son of our Duke John, we give our swords together with our hearts and our lives." Instantly every sword was laid upon the ground; and the crisp air rattled with the cry, "Long live Duke George! A Castriot forever!"

Scanderbeg gazed silently for a moment upon the faithful group. There was no doubt of their loyalty: for they had proved it by an adventure of rare daring in penetrating the Turkish camp. The face of the great general, usually masking so completely his strongest feelings, lost now its rigidity. His eyes were moist; his lips trembled; every lineament was eloquent with the emotion he could neither conceal nor tell in words. After a few moments' impressive silence, he returned the sword to the officer, and, pointing westward, cried,

"Forward to Albania!"

CHAPTER VIII.

"Thank Heaven! the plan did not fail," said the chief officer, riding by the side of the fugitive general.

"In no particular has it failed, Colonel," replied Scanderbeg. "And for this every praise is due your wise precautions. I have never known better work of brain or nerve. With such grand soldiers as you and your men, I fear nothing for Albania. But your name, Colonel?"

"Moses Goleme," replied the officer courteously.

Scanderbeg reined his horse, and gave him his hand heartily. "A man as grand as he is brave! And do I really look into the face of him whom I was to have sought out in Dibria, that I might tell him his words had been to me like a voice from heaven? Heaven reward you, good Moses! But you must vow to stand by me yet as patiently as you have done hitherto—during my apostasy. I shall need your charity still; for I am but a returning prodigal; a half-Christian; a man of strange ways; of a temper which I understand not myself, and which will disappoint you. Pledge me that you will be my good angel. Counsel me frankly, fearlessly, as a man should always counsel a man. Rebuke me freely: but bear with me in your heart, as you would with a child."

"I may not advise the most capable general in the world," replied Moses Goleme. "I vow to obey. Let that be my part. As I have already imperilled my estates by open opposition to the Turkish rule, and given my life to the liberty of my country, so I offer all to thee, Sire, the sovereign of my heart, until you shall be acknowledged the sovereign of Albania, and a new empire be founded on the east of the Adriatic which shall take the place of the decaying powers of Italy on the west."

"The task your patriotism proposes is vast," replied Scanderbeg; "too vast for one man and one lifetime."

"Too great for any but the great Castriot!" was the answer, evidently as honest as it was reverent. "But you do me too much honor, General, in praising my plan of meeting you. I was ably seconded by my men, and especially by two of them. One of them was wounded."

"I trust you speak not of a brave fellow who brought me the time and place of the rendezvous: for I never saw such strength and daring in my life."

"The same, I fear," said Moses. "A Servian, whom I had not known before yesterday. But he was boiling over with rage for the slaughter of his family, and commended to me by our most trusted scout."

"Did he tell you how he found me out, and communicated your plan to me?"

"No, for he was too severely hurt to speak much."

"I will tell that part for him, then," said Scanderbeg. "It was in the hottest of the fight. My own body-guard was thrown into confusion. A fellow, clad like one of my own staff, crowded close to my side. His horse actually rested against my own, and I would have severed his head from his shoulders for his impudent valor, had not his oath at his beast been 'by the beard of Moses!' Seeing that I observed it he grunted, 'At the brook to the north!' as he dodged the circles of the cimeters; and 'Near the Roman road!' he hissed as he pared the cap from a Christian's head with his sword; and 'At the ninth hour to-night!' he shouted as he parried a thrust. Before I had breathing space—for I was closely beset at the time—he had gone; borne back by a Spahi,[20] who envied him his place and emulated his valor. But he was not skilful in using his weapon or managing his horse. I am grieved, but not surprised, at his receiving hurt. I thought he must have fallen. But who was the other?"

"Yonder old fellow with a huge green turban on the saddle before him. If his brain were as big as his head-piece, he could not have planned better. He has dwelt about here lately."

"I must thank him in person," said Scanderbeg, riding back toward him.

"What!" he exclaimed as the full daylight fell upon the man's features, "Kabilovitsch?"

The old man diverted Scanderbeg's compliments by an expression of solicitude for Milosch, whom he had permitted to undertake the desperate venture already narrated, although until a few days before he, being a Servian, had no knowledge of the project of the Albanians.

"We must haste, Sire," said Moses. "It is advised that you cross to the north of the pass in the Balkans, and take thence the valley way between Caratova and the Egrisu. A message from General Hunyades informs me that relays can be provided along the road, and that every facility shall be given us."

"Kabilovitsch will accompany us?" asked Scanderbeg.

"On one condition, Sire," replied the old man. "My little daughter must go with me: a lass of ten spring tides—"

"Impossible! for our ride must be night and day."

"Then I may follow, but cannot accompany you," said Kabilovitsch.

"I need such men as you with me. No true Albanian will delay for a child. Country must be child and mother to us all," said the general.

The cheeks of Kabilovitsch whitened; his eyes flashed. Looking Scanderbeg squarely in the face, he said quietly, but putting intention into every word,

"George Castriot may lead, but may not rebuke the patriots who have watched for Albania with sacrifices he knows not of, while he has been among our country's enemies. An old man, thy father's friend before thou wast born, may say that, Sire."

Scanderbeg grew pale in turn. He had been unaccustomed to brook insubordination, however righteous. Who had dared to question him? Who to fling the taunt into his face? The hot words were upon his lips. But he paused, at first from the mere habit of self-restraint. Then, because he was a wise man, and realized that he was no longer the tyrant, with power of life and death over his soldiers—men who had been hired, stolen, impressed into the service, and transformed into mere machinery of flesh and blood—but was to be the public liberator of a people every man of whom was already as free as he. Then, he had become a just man. Strange and sanguinary as had been the events accompanying his desertion of the Turks, he had taken this step only after a deep moral struggle. He had revolted from his own past life; and felt an inward disgrace for what had been his outward glory—the service of the Moslem; he despised himself more than any other person could. It was this sense of the justice of Kabilovitsch's rebuke that checked the rage which had blanched his face, and sent the flush to his temples, as he slowly, replied, "I bow to the merited chastisement of your words. Your years and your better life give you license to utter them. My future shall atone for the past. But cannot your child be left safely where she is?"

"She is safe where she is; but I may not leave her without providing for her future. Milosch is lying in a cottage but a little before us. If his wounds are not fatal—as I believe they are not, though the leech thought otherwise—I may bring the girl to him, and still overtake you before you come in sight of the Black Mountains. I can cross this country by paths through which I could not direct you. During many years, for justice's sake and our country's, I have wandered over these mountains where only the eagle's shadow has fallen."

"I will stop with you at the cottage," said Scanderbeg, "for, though the moments are precious, I would bless the brave fellow for his work yesterday."

There were several wounded Christian soldiers at the little hovel. A Greek monk was administering both spiritual and physical comfort; for Rilo Monastir had sent its inmates along the track of the Christian army in spite of the insults of the Latin soldiers, who, though in sight of the common enemy of their faith, could not repress the meanness of their sectarian jealousy and hatred. Milosch was doing well. His wounds were, one in the fleshy part of the shoulder, the other a contusion on the head, from a blow which had stunned him. A few weeks would put him again upon his feet, though perhaps his fighting days were over; for the flesh wound lay across an important muscle, and would permanently destroy the strength of the right arm.

Milosch fell in with the proposition of Kabilovitsch regarding Morsinia. Though a Servian, he had lost interest in his own country because of the vacillating course of the Despot, George Brankovitch, who was half Christian and half Moslem, according to the policy of the moment. Milosch would identify himself with the cause of Albania, for which he had already done and suffered so much.

The two men entered into what is known among the Servians and Albanians as "Brotherhood in God," covenanting in the name of God and St. John to devote their lives, each to the other, and both to their common cause. The compact was sealed by each putting the left hand upon the other's heart, and holding up the right hand in invocation of the Divine witness. Kabilovitsch said:

"My brother, I commit to thy keeping our daughter, Morsinia, thine and mine, from henceforth. She is all I have but life to share with thee, which also I freely give."

To this Milosch replied:

"My brother, I commit to thy keeping our boy, Constantine, thine and mine from henceforth. He is all I have that I wot of to share with thee, but my life which—God spare it—I freely give."

"Bismallah!"[21] said Scanderbeg. "And if the girl and the boy were the ones I saw asleep in each other's arms by the fire the other night, the compact is good for two generations at least."

It was agreed that, upon his sufficient recovery, Milosch should bring the children from the camp of Hunyades to Albania.

The ride by the Vitosh and Rilo Mountains where the mighty ranges of the Balkans, the Upper Mœsian, and the Rhodope are thrown close together, was sufficiently grand to engross the eye and mind of the dashing riders. Thus most of the day was passed in silence, broken only by the clatter of the horses' hoofs against the rocks; the roar of cascades making their awful plunge hundreds of feet from the precipices; the complaint of rivers far down at the bottom of ravines, fretting beneath the prison roof of ice and snow; and glorious pines, pluming the brow of crag and ledge, through which the everlasting winds breathed the dirge over fallen empires of men.

As they forced their way up a long and tedious ascent, Scanderbeg joined Kabilovitsch and said:

"To relieve the tedium of this slow part of the journey you must tell me about that lass you would not leave for the love of Albania. A sweet face as I saw it. I could have run off with it myself, had I not other business on hand. And I can pardon a father's heart for clinging very closely to such a child. You will forget my rude speech a while ago. I played with a little lass like that when I was a boy. The face of your child, that night I watched for you, carried me back to those happy days. I could see my little sweet-heart in her; though thirty years have thrown their shadows of dark events across my memory."

Kabilovitsch turned familiarly to Scanderbeg with the query,

"May I read your thoughts, Sire?"

"Yes, he is welcome to do so who can find my soul beneath this battered face."

"That child was the fair Mara, the daughter of the noble George Cernoviche, whose castle ruins lie now by the shore of Ochrida. Am I not right?"

"Right! but I knew not of the fall of her father's house. Can you tell me aught of the history of my little maiden. If she lives, she must be a goodly matron now."

"Yes, I can tell her story and more. She married the noble Musache de Streeses, whose castle once stood near the Skadar."[22]

"Ah! I have heard of his sad fate," replied the general. "Oh, for vengeance on these villains who have despoiled the land! Musache de Streeses was the richest of all the land-owners on the coast of Adria, the soul of honor, a genuine patriot, with whom my father held confidential intercourse. His purse and sword were freely offered for service against the Turk. It was a favorite scheme of my father to some day unite our families. I hear that my nephew, Amesa, has become possessed of those estates, being also nephew to De Streeses, who was slain by the Turks. But my fairy, Mara, you said was married to De Streeses. It was she, then, who, with her infant child, was killed by the Turks during the raid?"

"Noble Castriot! De Streeses and the Lady Mara were murdered, foully, treacherously," said the old man, reining his horse, and speaking with terrible passion.

"Oh, to take vengeance!" exclaimed Scanderbeg. "By the fair face of Mara! this, with the thousand other murders of these years, shall be washed out, if my sword drains a myriad veins of Turkish blood to make sure of his who struck so brutal a blow!"

"Your sword need not search so wide as that," said Kabilovitsch. "The family of De Streeses were murdered by hands we both know but too well."

"How know you, Kabilovitsch?"

The man removed his cap as if inviting the inspection of his face, and, lowering his voice, replied,

"I am not Kabilovitsch, I am Arnaud."

"Arnaud, the forester of De Streeses? Arnaud, whose shoulders I bestrode before I ever mounted a steed?" exclaimed Scanderbeg, turning his horse and stopping, but at his companion's motion indicating caution, lowering his tone, and moving close beside him.

"The same, Sire. And the Turks who murdered the nobleman and his beautiful wife were not such Turks as you have been accustomed to command. Too white of skin and too black of heart were they. I would not say this, but that I give you also my reasons for so grave an accusation. Turks in raiding do not discriminate in their depredations; but these harmed not a leaf beyond the castle of De Streeses. Nor do Turks swear by St. John, as I heard one of them do as he cursed a fellow villain for some slip in the plan. Nor again would Turks, seeking only for plunder, have shown as much eagerness to kill the little babe as they did to slay its father; and this they did, searching even among the ashes for evidence that the tiny bones had been sufficiently charred to prevent their recognition. But the child was not in the castle at the time. My good wife was suckling it—the Lady Mara being of delicate condition—and that night the babe was at the lodge. As soon as the commotion was heard at the castle the child was hidden in the copse."

"But where is this child now?" asked Scanderbeg eagerly.

"You have gazed upon her by my camp-fire, sire; and your soul saw in her face that of the sainted Mara, though your eyes detected her not."

"And you know the perpetrator of this damnable deed?" asked Scanderbeg.

"I may not say I know, since your noble father refused to believe that any other than Turkish hands did it. But he who possesses the estate now knows too much of this affair to thank God in his prayers for his inheritance. I saved the child; yet Lord Amesa has sworn that once a Turk who fell beneath his sword in a private brawl confessed to him that his hands had strangled the infant on the night of the raid. Some one interested had suspicion of where the truth lay, for my own cot was raided, and my wife slain one night during my absence. But the child was safe elsewhere. Since then, knowing that her life was secure only through her being secreted, I have been a wanderer. A price was secretly set upon my head by Amesa. In the mountains of Macedonia, in the pass of the Balkans, have I kept watch over my sacred charge. I want not to see Albania, but as I can see justice done in Albania. Therefore I said I would go only if the lass might go with me, and under the strong protection of a Castriot who knows the truth, whose very soul recognized the child of Mara."

"The child's life shall be as sacred to me as if Mara had become my wife as she vowed in her play, and the child were my own," said Scanderbeg. "But this perplexes our cause. Amesa is one of our bravest, wiliest voivodes. To antagonize him with this old charge would imperil my reception with the people and the liberty of our land. But I pledge you, my good Arnaud, that though vengeance waits, it shall not sleep. In the time when it shall be most severe upon the offender, and most honorable to the name of Albanian justice, the bolt shall fall."

It was readily foreseen by both that only at the peril of her life could Morsinia be allowed to accompany her foster father, Arnaud or Kabilovitsch, to the camp of Castriot. The former forester would be recognized and suspicion at once excited as to the person of his ward. It was, therefore, determined that she should be domiciled safely in a little hamlet on the borders of Albania, where her history was unknown; and that, to elude suspicion, Milosch and the boy, Constantine, should accompany her, as her father and brother, neither of whom knew her true history. The "Brotherhood in God" between Kabilovitsch and his old neighbor gave sufficient warrant for Milosch's claim to paternity.

CHAPTER IX.

But while these refugees from the little hamlet on the mountains were so favored of good Providence, what of the others? Our story must return to the day of the battle in the Pass of Slatiza. Mother Helena fell beneath the sword of a Turk while defending herself from his insults. The boy, Michael, with arms bound above the elbows and drawn back so that, while retaining the use of his hands, he could not free himself, was driven along with others under guard of several soldiers. As they descended the mountains the band of captives was steadily increased by contributions from the cottages and hiding places along the way. They were mostly boys and girls, the old men and women having been slain or left to perish in the utter desolation which marked the track of the army. Some of the captives were children too young to endure the tramp, and were carried upon the horses of the mounted soldiers. No one was treated unkindly. After the first day their bands were untied so that they moved without weariness. They shared the best of the soldiers' rations—sometimes feasting while their captors fasted—and were snugly wrapped in the blankets by the camp-fires at night. The daily march, after the Christian army had abandoned the pursuit, was of but a few miles, with long intervals for rest. Indeed, Michael thought that the troopers were more anxious about his being kept in good condition, even in fresh and comely appearance, than Mother Helena would have been. As they approached Philippopolis they were all made to wash at a stream. Their matted locks were combed:—a hard job with the mass of rebellious red bristles which stood about Michael's head, like a nimbus on the wooden image of some Romish saint. In some instances the captors went into the city and returned with pretty skirts of bright colored wool or silk, and caps made of shells and beads for the girls. Fantastic enough were the costumes and toilets which the rough old troopers forced upon the little maidens; but if they were pleasing to the captors they would prove, perhaps, as pleasing to the rough slave buyers in the market square of Philippopolis, who purchased the girls for disposal again at the harems of the capital. An officer of excise presided over these sales, and, before the property was delivered to the purchaser, retained one-fifth the price as the share of the Sultan. If any of the girls were, in the judgment of the officer, of peculiar beauty or promise, they were reserved for the royal harem; the value of them being paid to their captors out of the tax levied upon the others. This gave occasion for the extravagant and often ludicrous costumes in which the diverse tastes of the soldiers arrayed their captives for the contest of beauty.

The boys, however, were not sold. They were the special property of the Sultan, to be trained as Janizaries for military service, or employed in menial positions about the royal seraglio. The captors received rewards according to the number and goodly condition of the lads they brought in.

The band of boys to which Michael was attached was marched at once to Adrianople. Several hundreds were gathered in a great square court, which was surrounded by barracks on three sides, and on the fourth faced the river Marissa. A great soup kettle, the emblem of the Janizary corps, was mounted upon a pole in the centre of the square, and seemed to challenge the honors of the gilt star and crescent, the emblem of royalty, that gleamed from the tall staff in an adjacent court of the seraglio. There were scattered about utensils for domestic use; the tools of carpenters, blacksmiths, armorers, harness-makers and horse-shoers; old swords, battered helmets, broken wagons, bow-guns, the figure heads of veteran battering rams; indeed all the used and disused evidences that within these walls lived a self-sustaining community, able to provide for themselves in war or in peace.

For several days the new boys were fed with delicious milk and meats, prepared by skilful hands of old soldiers, who knew the art of nursing the sick almost as well as they knew that of making wounds. For a few nights the lads slept upon soft divans, until every trace of weariness from the journey had disappeared. They were then stripped naked and examined carefully by the surgeons. If one were deformed, or ill-proportioned, or failed to give promise of a strong constitution, he was taken away to be trained as a woinak or drudge of the camps. Perhaps three-fourths of the entire number in Michael's company were thus branded for life with an adverse destiny.

The more favored lads were graded into ojaks, or messes; and among them were daily contests in running and wrestling, according to the results of which the ojaks were constantly changing their members; the strongest and most agile living together in honorary distinction from their fellows.

The officers in charge of these Janizary schools were old or crippled men, whom years or wounds had rendered unfit for service in the field, and who were assigned to the easier task in compensation for past fidelity. The spirit of the veterans was thus infused into the young recruits by constant contact and familiarity with them; and the rigid habits of the after service were acquired almost insensibly through the daily drill and discipline.

Michael's rugged health and mountain training enabled him to advance rapidly through the various grades. Though almost the youngest in his company, he was the first in the race, and no one could take him from his feet in the wrestling match.

"A sturdy little Giaour," said old Selim, a fat and gouty Janizary, the creases of whose double chin were good companions to the sabre-scar across his cheek.

"Ay, tough and handy!" responded Mustapha, an old captain of the corps, ogling Michael with his widowed eye, and stroking his beard with his equally bereaved hand, as he watched the boy wriggling from beneath to the top of a companion nearly double his size. "If the little fellow is as agile in wit as he is in limb he will not long be among the Agiamoglans.[23] A splendid build! broad in the shoulders; deep-chested, but not flat; narrow loins; compact hips—just the make of a lion. As lithe a lad as you were once, my now elephantine Selim, when Bajazet stole you from your Hungarian home. Ah! you have changed somewhat since the old Padishah had you for his page. I remember when your waist was as trim as a squirrel's—but now—from the look of your paunch I would think you were the soldier who drank up the poor woman's supper of goat's milk, and had his belly ripped open by the Padishah to discover his guilt.[24] Only goat's milk swells like that. Let us see if some of the butter sticks not yet to your ribs," said the old soldier, making a pass at his comrade's middle.

"That's not a true soldier's pass, to strike so low," said Selim, laughing. "But you, Mustapha, were once a better runner than yon lad will ever be."

"I was as good with my legs as with my arms," replied the veteran, pleased with the compliment, and fondling his bare calves with his hand. "But at what match did you see me run?"

"I only saw you run once," said Selim, "and that was at Angora, when Timour the Lame[25] was after you to get your ugly head for the pyramid of skulls he left there as a monument. But see the lad! He tosses the big one as a panther topples an ox. We have not had his match in the school since Scanderbeg was a boy."

"Poor Scanderbeg!" said Mustapha.

"How now!" inquired Selim, "is there any news from him?"

"Yes. He has met his first defeat. He was in command at the last battle under the Balkans. Carambey got fast in a bog, in the first battle, and Scanderbeg was unable to redeem the defeat in the second. But he lived not to know it. He sent a host of gibbering Giaour ghosts to hell while on his way to heaven. 'In the crossing of the cimeters there is the gate of paradise,' says the Koran; and, though his body could not be found, he went through the gate, beyond a doubt."

"That is a loss, comrade, the Padishah can never make good with any man in the service. But have you not noted, Mustapha, that Scanderbeg never fought so well against Christians as against the Caramanians, the Kermians and rebellious Turks. In Anatolia I have seen his lips burst with blood,[26] through sheer rage of fight; but in Servia he seemed listless and without heart for the fray. The Grand Vizier has noted it, and twitted him with remembering too well that he was Christian born."

"And how did he take that?"

"Why, the color came to his face; his lips swelled; his whole body shook;—just as I have seen him when compelled to restrain himself from heading a charge, because the best moment for it had not arrived."

"Did the Vizier take note of his manner?"

"Yes, and spoke of it to the Padishah. Amurath looked troubled, and I overheard him say, 'I must not believe it, for I need him. No other general can match Hunyades.' And the Padishah said well; and he had done well if he had taken the Vizier's head from his shoulders for such an insinuation. For Scanderbeg only half loyal were better than all the rest of the generals licking the Padishah's feet. But, Mustapha, we must train the little devil yonder to forget that he ever heard the name of Jesu, Son of Mary, except from the Koran."

"Let us see if he has as much courage as he has cartilage," said Mustapha. "The day is one fit for the water test. Let us have the squad on the river's bank. If you will bring them, I will go and arrange the test."

"It is too cold, and besides I do not like it," said Selim. "I have known some of the best and hottest blood that ever boiled in a child's veins to be chilled forever by it. It is too severe, except for trout."

"But it is commanded. And to-day is as mild as we shall have for a whole moon yet," was the reply, as Mustapha moved toward the water.

The river Marissa was covered with thin ice, not strong enough to bear the weight of a person. A young woinak had attached a small red flag to a block of wood, and whirled it out over the slippery surface some three rods from the shore. The boys gathered naked and shivering at the barrack doors, and, at a signal were to dash after the flag. All hesitated at the strange and cruel command, until a whip, snapping close to their bare backs, started them. Some slipped and fell upon the rough and icy stones of the paving in the court. Others halted at the river's edge. Only a few ventured upon the brittle ice; and they, as it broke beneath them, scrambled back to the shore. One or two fainted in the shock of the cold plunge, and were drawn in by the woinaks. But three pressed on, breaking the ice before them with their arms, or with the whole weight of their bodies, as they climbed upon its brittle edge. Soon they were beyond their depth; one dared to go no further, and, blue and bleeding, gave up the chase. The prize lay between Michael and his companion. This boy was larger and older than he; and finding that the ice would sustain his weight, stretched himself on it, and crawled forward until he grasped the flag. But the momentary pause, as he detached it from the wooden block and put it between his teeth, was sufficient to allow the crackling bridge to break beneath him; and he sunk out of sight. At the same instant Michael disappeared. Though several yards from his companion, he plunged beneath the ice, and reappeared carrying the flag in his teeth and holding his comrade's head above the water until the woinaks could reach and rescue them both.

"Bravo!" shouted the attendants. The boys were hurried into the barracks, and given a hot drink made from a decoction of strong mints; while the woinaks smeared their bodies with the same, and rubbed them until the shock of their exposure was counteracted by the generous return of the natural heat.

"I thought," said old Mustapha, "that we would have drowned some to-day. It is a cruel custom; but it is worth months of other practices to find out a lad's clear grit and power of endurance. The two boys who got the flag will some day become as valiant as ourselves, eh, Selim?" and the living eye of the veteran nodded to the empty socket across his nose—the nearest approach to a wink he was capable of.

"As the boys were floundering in the water," said Selim, "I thought of a scene which I saw about at the same spot—now three score years have gone since it—for it was just after I was brought into the Janizary's school. Our Padishah's great grandfather, the first Amurath, had erected a high seat or throne on the river's bank yonder. You know that Saoudji, the Padishah's son, had joined the Greeks; but the young traitor was captured. Well! old Amurath bade the executioner pass the red hot iron before his son's eyes until the sight was dried up in them. Then, while the blind prince was groping about and begging for mercy, the Padishah, his father, commanded a circle of swordsmen to be formed about him, swinging their cimeters, so that his head would fall by the hand of him whom he chanced to approach. Thus it might be said, that since he was a king's son, he had used the princely privilege of selecting his own executioner. And having thus set them an example of paternal duty, Amurath commanded the fathers of the Greek youths, whom he had captured, to cut off the heads each of his own son. Those whose fathers were not known or could not be found, were tied together in groups and thrown into the stream; the Padishah betting heavily with the Grand Vizier upon those who should float the longest. So, cruel though our customs are, you see, Mustapha, we are not so barbaric as our ancestors."

"Nor so abominably vicious as the Greeks," said Mustapha. "With them the loving mothers put out the eyes of their children.[27] No, we are quite gentle nurses of the lads committed to our charge, though sometimes our tiger claws will prick through the velvet."

"Come, help me up! good Mustapha," said Selim, trying to rise from a bench in the sunshine of the court where they were sitting. "The cold stiffens my bones."

"Bah! comrade, you have no bones, only flesh and belly. How will you balance your fat hulk on the bridge that is finer than a hair and sharper than the edge of a sword that takes you over hell into paradise? I fear me, Selim, that I shall have to content myself with the company of the Prophet and the houris in heaven, for you will never get there, unless I give you a lift across Al Sirat,"[28] said Mustapha, giving his comrade a jerk which sent him far out into the court, where with difficulty he kept his feet upon the slippery stones.

The old fellow took the rough play good-naturedly, and replied,

"You will never see paradise, Mustapha. The houris will have nought to do with so ugly a face as yours. It will turn them all squint-eyed to look at you."

"Do you think I know not the art of love-making?" said Mustapha, striking the attitude of a fashionable young man of the day.

Selim roared with laughter. "Mustapha making love? The thing is impossible; since, if the houri be in the sunshine of your good eye, you have no arm on that side to embrace her; and if you embrace her with the arm you have got, you have no eye on that side to look upon her beauty. Trust me, you old moulted peacock, that I shall get over Al Sirat before Mustapha has found a houri——"

"Hist!" said Mustapha, pointing to the entrance of the square from the seraglio court adjoining, and assuming an attitude of the gravest dignity. In a moment more the two officers knelt, and resting their foreheads on the ground, remained in that position until a lad of some twelve years approached them and touched the head of each with his foot, bidding them rise.

"I have come, good Selim, to see what new hounds you have for me," said the young Prince Mahomet.[29]

"Ah! my little Hoonkeawr![30] the Prophet, your namesake, has sent you a fine one; as lithe as a greyhound and as strong as a mastiff; and, if I mistake not, already trained for the game; for he came from the Balkans, where foxes run wild when and where they will."

"That is capital. I shall like him," cried the prince, with delight. "I must see him."

"Not to-day, your highness; for the boys are under the leech's charge. They have been put to the water-test, and are all packed snugly in their beds."

"The water-test, Selim, and you called me not?" said the boy, looking furious in his rage. "You knew I wanted to see it; and you told me not for spite. You will pay for this one day, you fat villain! And I want the hunt now. I came for it; did I not, Yusef?" addressing a eunuch, an old man with ashen face and decrepit body, but gorgeously arrayed, who accompanied the prince as his constant attendant.

"We must wait, I suppose," said the man, with a supercilious tone and toss of his head, as if to even speak in the presence of the soldiers were a degradation to his dignity.

"To-morrow we will have the hunt in better style than we could arrange it now were the boys able," said Selim, endeavoring to appease the young tyrant.

The prince and his escort moved away without deigning a reply

"It is best not to insist," said the eunuch. "A wise maxim I will give thee, my prince:—Beware of demanding the impossible—check back even the desire of it. The rule of the Janizary school is that the boys have rest after the water-test, and the Padishah would not allow even his own son to break it. I would train thee to self-command; for the time may come when thou shalt command the empire. Your brother, Aladdin, is mortal."

"So you always interfere with me. You hate me, Yusef; I know you do. I wish the boys had all been drowned in the river, and old Selim, and you too," cried the royal lad, giving way to an outburst of childish rage.

"Wait until thou canst get the bit between thy teeth before attempting to run thine own gait," coolly replied the old eunuch.

CHAPTER X.

Beyond the walls of the seraglio lay the royal hunting grounds. Many acres of the city were enclosed within high walls of clayey earth, packed into huge square blocks and dried in the sun; on the top and outside of which bristled a miniature abattis of prickly vines. Some parts of this park were adorned with every elegance that the art of landscape gardening could devise. In the summer season these portions were covered with floral beauties, interspersed with water-jets, which tossed the light silver balls like fairy jugglers; broad basins sparkling with gold fish; and walks leading to little kiosks and arbors. Even its winter shroud could not conceal from the imagination what must have been its living beauty in summer.

The greater part of this reserve was, however, left in its natural state. Gnarled old olive trees twisted themselves like huge serpents above the dense copses of elder and hazel bushes. Dusky balsams rose in pyramids, overtopped by the pines, which spread their branches like umbrellas. Here and there were open fields, encumbered with stinted underbrush, and either broken with out-cropping rocks, or smooth with strips of meadow land now white and glistening under the snow.

This section of the park presented a fascinating appearance on the day of the fox-hunt. Scores of lads from the Janizary school were there, dressed in all shades of bright-colored jackets, and short trousers bagged at the knees; the lower part of the limbs being protected with close-fitting stockings of leather, terminating in light, but strong, sandals. Each wore a skull cap or fez of red flannel, from the top of which and down the back hung a tassel, that, by its length and richness, indicated some prize won by its wearer in previous games. Old soldiers gathered here and there in groups; some, the Janizaries, wearing tall sugar-loaf-shaped hats of gray; others, white turbans, or green ones, indicating that their possessors had made a holy pilgrimage to Mecca. Elegant burnooses, or sleeveless cloaks, of white, black, orange and yellow silks, fluttered in the wind or were gathered at the waist by rich sashes, from which hung great cimeters.

Near an open spot was a stand, or running gallery, enclosed in lattice-work, from behind which the ladies of the harem could witness the sports, themselves unseen. The presence of these invisible beauties was indicated by the stiff, straight forms of the black eunuchs, whose faces appeared above their white cloaks like heads of ebony on statues of alabaster.

Prince Mahomet rode a horse, small but compactly built, with head and mane suggestive of the power of his well-rounded muscles; slim ankles, seemingly better adapted to carry the lighter form of a deer; jet black, in strongest contrast with the white tunic and gaily embroidered jacket of the little prince, as well as with the saddle-cloth of purple silk, in which the star and crescent were wrought with threads of gold. With merry shout the young tyrant chased the boys, who, carrying wands decorated with ribbons, ran ahead of him to clear the way.

"So it will be if he ever comes to the throne," said Selim to a comrade. "Mahomet II. would follow no one. There would be no use of viziers and generals, and he would even attempt to drive the Janizaries like his sheep. It is well that Aladdin is the elder."

"But woe to Aladdin if Mahomet lives after his brother comes to the throne," said the man addressed. "With such fire-boxes about him one could justify the practice of a sovereign inaugurating his reign by the slaughter of his next of kin."[31]

The woinaks brought in several crates, with latticed sides, containing the foxes, which, one by one, were to be let loose for the chase; the boys to act the part of hounds, and drive the game from the thickets, in which they would naturally take refuge, out into the open space, and within arrow range of the prince. Mahomet, by constant practice, had acquired great dexterity in managing his steed, and almost unerring aim in using the bow from the horse's back.

A splendid red fox was thrust out of the crate. For a moment he remained crouching and trembling in his fright at the crowd; then darted suddenly for the underbrush. The boys, imitating the sharp cry or prolonged baying of a pack of hounds, scattered in different directions; some disappearing in the copse; others stationing themselves at the openings or run-ways where they thought the animal would appear. The bugle of the white eunuch, who was constantly near the prince, kept all informed of his position, so that reynard might be driven toward him. In a few moments the arrow of Mahomet laid him low.

A second fox was liberated—like many of the Sultan's nobler creatures—only to fly to his speedy execution. The third animal was an old one, who persisted in taking the direction opposite to that in which the chasers would drive him. Again and again, as the boys closed about him, he dashed through the thickest of their legs, leaving them tumbled together in a heap. At one time he sprang through the opening at which Michael, studying the tricks of the quick-witted brute, had stationed himself. Sudden as were his movements, the young mountaineer's were not less so; for, like a veritable hound, he threw himself bodily upon the prey. Passing his right hand beneath the entire length of the animal's body from the rear, he grasped his front leg and bent it back beneath him; at the same time using his whole weight to keep the animal's head close to the ground, so as to escape his fangs. He had taken more than one beast in a similar way from the holes in the old mountain pass. In the excitement of the sport he now forgot that he was merely to enable another to get the game without effort or danger.

Prince Mahomet rode to the spot toward which the fox had turned, and, in a sudden outburst of anger at this interference with his shot, drove the arrow at the two as they were struggling on the ground. The whirring barb cut the arm of Michael before it entered the heart of the prey. The sharp cry of pain uttered by the lad recalled Mahomet from his insane rage. The rushing attendants showed pity for Michael, but no one ventured a remonstrance against this act of imperial cowardice and cruelty. A moment's examination showed that the lad's wound was not serious, being only a cut through the flesh. But as the pallor of his fright died away from his face, it was followed by a deep flush of anger. Tears of vexation filled his eyes. His glance of scorn was hardly swifter than his leap: for, with a bound, his arms were around the prince's body, while his weight dragged him from the saddle to the ground. Mahomet, rising, drew a jeweled dagger, and made several hasty passes at his assailant, who, however, dextrously avoided them. The posing of the lads would have done justice to the fame of professional gladiators. The prince pressed upon his antagonist with incessant thrusts, which, by skilful retreating and parries with his bare arm, Michael avoided; until, with a ringing blow upon Mahomet's wrist, he sent the weapon from his hand, and closed with him; the prince falling to the ground beneath the greater strength of Michael.

The spectators at this point interfered. As they rose the eunuch grasped the little victor, and shaking him, cried: "I will cut the throat of the Giaour cub of hell."

But the one hand of old Mustapha was upon the eunuch's throat, and his one eye flashed like a discharging culverin, as he cried, "Had I another hand to do it with, I would cut yours, you white-faced imbecile! Don't you know that the boy belongs to the Janizaries? and woe to him who is not a Janizary that lays a hand on him!"

"The prince's honor must be avenged," wheezed out the eunuch between the finger grips of the old soldier. "I care not for the Janizary, though you were the Aga[32] himself, instead of a mutilated slave."

The eunuch had drawn his dagger, and was working his hand into a position whence he could strike, when old Selim's hand grasped his.

"None of that treachery, or we will let out of your leprous skin what manhood is left in you, you blotch on your race! Touch one hair of Black Khalil's[33] children and you die like the dog you are. Let him go, Mustapha! His coward throat is no place for you to soil a brave hand. We will get a snake to strangle him; a buzzard to pick his grain of a soul out of his vile carcass;[34] an ass to kick him to death. We must observe the proprieties."

"Pardon my heat!" said the eunuch. "My zeal for my prince has led me too far."

"Not at all!" said Selim. "It is pleasant to see that you have some heat in your cold blooded toad nature."

"It is better for us to retire," said the eunuch to Mahomet. "I shall sound the signal for the close of the games."

Mahomet stood stubbornly for awhile; then turning to Michael said in a tone which was strangely without a shade of anger or petulance in it:

"Say, young Giaour, you and I must have this out some day."

Michael could not help a half-smiling recognition of the boyish challenge, and replied:

"I have seen more foxes than you have, and know some tricks I didn't show you to-day."

As they moved out of the park, Yusef delivered a brief lecture to his princely pupil. "Hark thee, my master. I warn thee, that thou have an eye always open and a hand always closed to the Janizaries. They have grown from being the heel to think that they are the head of the state. They dictate to thy father, the Padishah, and snub the very Vizier. I would have killed both those old imbeciles, but that it would not have been politic. I am glad, too, that thou didst not let thy dagger find the heart of the Balkan boy. That would not have been politic. For, Allah grant! thou mayest one day be Padishah. Then this day would be remembered against us."

"But, Yusef, I did not spare the boy. I think he spared me; and if I ever get to be Padishah, I will make him my vizier, for his cleverness. It would be a pity that so brave a man were elsewhere than at my right hand. Though he angered me awfully at the moment, I shall like that fellow. Did you see how he gripped the fox with his bare arms? He must teach me how to do that. Was it between the hind legs he thrust his hand, or across the beast's body? I could not see for my being so mad because he spoiled for me a fine running shot."

"Thou art a strange child, Mahomet. Thou seemest to have forgotten that the boy leaped at thy throat, and would have torn out thine eyes, but that thou wast more valiant than he."

"Well, I should despise him as white-livered and milk-galled if he had not sprung at me," said Mahomet. "Has not every noble fellow quick blood, as well as a prince, Yusef? That boy shall be mine. He shall teach me his tricks, and I shall give him all my sweetmeats; for they get none of such things in the school."

"Ah! my little prince, thy head is as full of wit as a fig is of seeds. Thou art gifted to know and use men. One that is born to rule must make his passion bend to policy. He must not allow himself the pleasure of hating those whom he can use. But take heed of this:—whom he cannot use he must not love."

"But I was not born to rule, Yusef. If so, I would have been born earlier, before my brother Aladdin cried in his nurse's arms, and would not be comforted until they had covered the soft spot on his bare head with a paper crown. Do you believe in omens, Yusef?"

"Not in such; only in dreams," said the eunuch.

"Well; I dreamed that our two heads—yours and mine, Yusef—were together on a pike-staff, grinning at Aladdin's coronation."

"Nonsense, child!" said the eunuch, his white face bleaching a shade whiter under the thought, as they passed through the gateway into the seraglio grounds.

CHAPTER XI.

The physical training of the young Janizaries consisted in such daily exercises as would develop strength and tirelessness of muscle, steadiness of nerve, keenness and accuracy of eye, as well as grace of mien. They were also taught by expert workmen all the arts of daily need; to make as well as to use the bow; to trim and balance the arrow; to forge, temper, and sharpen the sword; to shoe the horse; to make and mend their clothing and the entire trappings of their steeds; to build and manage the keelless kaiks[35] which darted like fishes through the surface of the river; to bind rafts into pontoons for the crossing of streams; to reap and grind the grain, and cook their food. Any special talent or adaptability was noted by the instructors, and the Janizaries encouraged to attain to rare expertness in single arts.

The training in arms was especially severe, and under masters in fencing, archery, riding, swimming, marching, deploying—the ablest tacticians, whose wounds or age permitted their absence from active campaigns, being found always at the head of the various departments. The Janizary, while a mere lad in years, was often more than a match in single combat for the most stalwart men in other corps, such as the Piadé and Azabs among footmen, the Ouloufedji and Akindji among troopers.

But, notwithstanding this individual prowess and ambition were stimulated to the highest degree, they were disciplined to abject obedience within the corps. Each one was as a part of some intricate mechanism, all moved by one spring, which was the will of the chief Aga. At a moment's notice they must start, in companies or alone; on military expeditions, or secret service as spies and scouts; it might be to the recesses of Asia or the upper Danube; to assail forts or to conduct intrigues; having always but one incentive, that of the common service and the common glory.

To develop in the same person these two seemingly antagonistic qualities—of intensest individuality and abject subserviency to their order—required the shrewdest manipulation of the mind and will of the cadet from his earliest enrollment in childhood. As certain expert horse-trainers control the spirit of noble steeds, without extinguishing any of their fiery ardor, and tell the secret of their power to those who come after them in the guild, so from the days of Black Khalil this marvellous system of discipline had been perpetuated among the corps, producing but rarely a weakling and as rarely a rebel.

Michael learned his first lesson in subordination upon the return from the hunt. While the Janizary officers were not displeased with the prowess the little fellow had shown, even against the prince, it was foreseen that such an impetuous nature needed the curb. For three days he was confined to a room in solitude and silence. No one spoke or listened to him. His only attendant was an old man, both deaf and dumb, who evidently knew nothing and cared nothing for Michael's offence or its punishment.

During this time the lad's suspense was terrible. Was he to be killed for having assaulted the prince? Would they take him to the torture? Perhaps this old man had been guilty of some such offence, and they had cut his tongue and bored out his ears! He had heard of the searing iron passed before the eyes, and then the life-long darkness. When he slept his overwrought imagination fabricated horrid dreams in which he was the victim of every species of cruelty. He fancied that he was being eaten by a kennel of foxes, to whom he is given every day until their hunger shall be satisfied; then taken away and reserved for their next meal. He tried to compute how many days he would last. Sometimes he imagined that he was exposed naked in the cold, and made to stand day and night on the ice of the Marissa, until he should be frozen: but his heart is so hot with his rebel spirit that it will not freeze. Once he thought that Prince Mahomet came each day and stabbed him with that pearl-set dagger he drew on him at the hunt.

His dreams were too frightful to allow him to sleep long at a time; yet, when awake, his fears were such that he longed to get back again among the terrible creatures of his fancy. Oh, that some one would speak to him, and tell him his fate! He would welcome the worst torture, if only he could be allowed to talk to the torturer.

After a while rage took the place of, or at least began to alternate with, fear. He regretted that he had not killed the impudent prince.

"There stands his horse," he would say to himself—marking a line on the wall—"now I leap; seize his dagger; strike him to the heart; and, before they can stop me, plunge it into my own heart, so! Ah! when I am out of this place I will kill him! I will! and go down to hell with him!" And the little frame would swell, and the eyes gleam with demoniacal light through the dusky chamber.

There are deep places even in a child's soul—ay, bottomless depths—which, when unfretted by temptation, are so tranquil and clear that the kindliness and joy of heaven are reflected in them, warranting the saying of the old Jewish Rabbis, "Every child is a prophet of the pure and loving God." But when disturbed by a sense of wrong and injury, these depths in a child's heart may rage as a caldron hot with the fires of hell; as a geyser pouring out the wrath and hatred which we conceive to be born only in the nether world.

After a time Michael's fury died away. Another feeling took its place—the crushing sense of his impotence. His will seemed to be broken by the violence of its own spasm. He was stunned by his realization of weakness. He fell with his face to the cold stones of the floor, moaning at first, but soon passing into a waking stupor in which only consciousness remained: hopeless, purposeless, without energy to strive, and without strength to cry—a perfectly passive spirit. The centipede that crawled from the dusty crevice of the walls, and raised half his body to look at the strange figure lying there, might have commanded him. The spider might have captured him, and spun about his soul a web of destiny, if only he could have conveyed a thought of it from his tiny eyes. For, as the body faints, so also does the spirit under the pressure of woe.

The old mute brought in the meal on the third day, placed it beside him, and retired. An hour later he returned and found the bread untasted; the child in the same attitude, but not asleep. He touched him with his foot, but evoked no sign that his presence was recognized. He gazed for a few moments; then shook his head like an artisan who, upon inspecting some piece of work he has been making, is not satisfied with it.

He summoned Selim. The old soldier, finding that his entrance did not arouse the lad, crossed his legs upon the floor beside him, and waited. The light from the high window of the room fell upon Selim's wrinkled face. But it seemed as if another light, one from within, blended with it. His harsh features were permeated by a glow and softness, as he gazed upon the exhausted child. His eyes filled with tears; but they were speedily dried by the stare with which he turned and looked first at the blank walls, and then, following back the ray of light, to the window and beyond; his soul transported far away over lands, through years, to a cottage on the banks of the Grau. He saw there a face so beautiful! was it really of one he once called "Mother?" or a dim and hazy recollection of a painting of the Christian Madonna he had seen in his childhood? Happy groups of village children were playing down among the lilies by the water's edge, and over the hills gently sloping back from the river's bank. Their faces were as clear cut there against the blue sky beyond the window, as once—sixty years ago—they were against the green grass of the meadow. He heard again the sweet ring of the chapel bell echoing back from the ragged rocks of the opposite shore. And now the midnight alarm! A fight with strange looking turbaned men! Flames bursting from the houses of the hamlet! Men shrieking with wounds, and women struggling in the arms of captors! And a little child, ah, so lonely and tired with a long march! and that child—himself!—His eyes rested as fondly upon Michael as did ever a father's upon his boy.

But as the wind extinguishes a candle, a movement of Michael sent all the gleams gathered out of former days from old Selim's features. Severity, almost savageness, took the place of kindliness among the wrinkles of his countenance, as naturally as the waters of a rivulet, held back for a moment by a child's hand, fill again their channels.

The boy raised his head. His face was pale; the eyes sunken; their natural brilliance deepened, but as that of the flashing waters is deepened when it is frozen into the glistening icicle. Or shall we say that the dancing flames of the child's eyes had become the steady glow of embered coals;—their life gone out, but the hot core left there, not to cheer, only to burn. Those three days of silence, with their successive dramas of mystery, terror, rage and depression, had wrought more changes in him than many years of merely external discipline would have done.

The close searching glance of Selim detected all this; and also that the child was in a critical condition. The will was broken, but it was not certain that this had not been accomplished by the breaking of the entire spirit; instead of curbing, destroying it: not taming the tiger's daring, but converting it into the sluggishness and timidity of the cat.

"Michael!" cried he.

There was no response except the slight inclination of the head indicating that the word had been heard.

"Follow me!"

The lad rose mechanically, showing no interest or attention beyond that required for bodily obedience.

Pausing at the door-way the old man put his hand upon the boy's shoulder and said sternly, yet with a caution ready to change his tone—

"Do you know that we have power to more severely punish you?"

The words made no impression upon the child.

"The bastinado? The cage?" The boy raised his face, but upon it was no evidence of fear; perhaps of scorn. He had suffered so much that threats had no power over him.

Selim was alarmed at these symptoms. His experience with such cases taught him that this lethargic spell must be broken at whatever cost. Feeling must be excited; and if an appeal to the child's imagination failed, physical pain must be inflicted. Something must rouse him, or insanity might ensue.

A peculiar instrument of torture was a frame set with needles pointing inwards. Into this sometimes a culprit was placed, and the frame screwed so close about the person that he could not move from a fixed position without forcing the needles into his flesh. This frame was put about the boy. He stared stupidly at the approaching points, but did not shrink. Selim pressed one of the needles quickly. Instantly the boy uttered a cry of pain. His face blanched with fright. The tears sprang to his eyes, and through them came an agonizing look of entreaty.

Selim's whole manner changed as suddenly. Schooled as he was to harshness; to strike one's head from his shoulders at the command of the Aga without an instant's hesitation; to superintend the slow process of a "discipline" by torture, without a remorseful thought;—yet this was not his nature. And now that better, deeper, truer nature, hitherto unexercised for years, asserted itself. His heart went out to Michael the instant there was no further necessity for its restraint.

"Bravo! my little hero," cried he, catching him to his arms. "You are of the metal of the invincibles, and henceforth only valiant deeds, bright honors and endless pleasures are to be yours. You shall lodge with me to-night."

CHAPTER XII.

Selim's apartment was off from the common barracks of the Janizaries. It was luxuriantly furnished in its way. Elegant rugs lay upon the marble floor. A divan, with silken covering, filled one end of the room. The walls were hung with a variety of richly wrought weapons and armor:—short swords, long crescent-shaped cimeters, spears of polished wood headed with glistening steel, helmets, breastplates, greaves. Badges and honorary decorations shone among costly robes which had accumulated since the days when he had been a page to the Sultan Amurath I.

Upon a low table, reaching to the edge of the divan, had been placed salvers holding cups and open dishes of silver. A woinak entered with basins of scented water in which to wash the hands and bathe the face.

Selim placed his little guest by his side upon the divan. Mustapha also appeared, and, removing his shoes, made a profound and dignified salâm—quite in contrast with his usual rough and badgering manner when with Selim—then placed himself beside his comrade upon the cushions. An excellent repast was served. There was hare's flesh chopped and rolled with rice into balls, made more savory with curry sauce. Sweet cakes, pastry of figs and candied orange blossoms excited a thirst for the sweetened water, which was so strongly flavored with the juices of fruits that the more scrupulous Moslems refused to drink it, lest they should disobey the command of the Koran prohibiting the use of wine.

The two old men vied with each other in telling thrilling stories of adventure in battle and on secret service; of the romance of castles and courts; of how they won their honors and got their scars; of the favors of princes and princesses; and of exploits in which, though the rules of their order forbade their marrying, they retaliated the captivity of the maiden's eye by capturing her person. The burden of every story was the praise of the Janizary organization, which alone enabled them to attain such glories and joys. The close brotherhood, which gave to each the help of all the ten thousand, was commended by incidents illustrating it. They told of their Aga or chief, who was more powerful than the Grand Vizier—for sultans made these latter by a word, and unmade them with equal caprice, often with the stroke of the sword; but to touch a hair of the Aga would be for the Sultan to lose the favor of the entire band, whom he regarded as the main support of his throne, as their hands had won it for his fathers. Did not the word of Mustapha and Selim, at the fox-hunt, cow the pride of Yusef, who was next to the Capee Aga or chief of the white eunuchs? Yet Selim and Mustapha were but captains in the Janizaries. No general in any other arm of the service would have dared to antagonize the eunuch as they did.

As Michael listened, his cheeks flushed and chilled by turns with the excitement of his martial ambition. The dreams he used to have in his mountain home, of being a soldier and coming back covered with badges of honor to claim Morsinia as his bride, seemed to be dissolving into the reality. Nor was his ardor damped when he learned from Selim that the first step toward all this was the total surrender of himself to the service of the brotherhood, in pledging and keeping obedience to its rules; as a part of the body, like the hand, must never be severed from the rest, but keep the contact perfect in every muscle and nerve, in order to have the strength which only the health of the whole body can give to it. Selim explained to him how wrong it had been for him to seize the fox, no matter how excited he was, or how much daring it showed to do so, since he had not been ordered to seize, but only to turn the beast toward the Prince. Besides, to raise a hand against the prince was treason—unless it were ordered by the chief of the Janizaries. Therefore he had been punished according to the Janizary discipline; though they would not have allowed any one else to touch him—no not even the Padishah himself.

Michael's spirit was fully healed with such words. His depression gave way to a hotter ambition and pride of expectation than he had ever felt before, when Selim put upon his head the whitish gray cap, like that worn by the dervishes, and differing from it only in having upon the back a strip of wool which the old man thus explained, as he told the story of the organization of the Janizary corps.

"The death angel, Azrael, has reaped the earth more than five times since the mighty Othman,[36] who founded our empire, entered paradise. His queen, Malkhatoon, the most beautiful of women, had given him two sons. Never since Khalif Omar followed the Prophet was nobler successor than would have been either Alaeddin or Orchan to Othman. The stars shone not with deeper lustre than did the wisdom of Alaeddin. The storm never burst more resistlessly on your Balkan mountains than did the bravery and strength of Orchan beat down the foe. To Orchan the empire came by will of Allah and Othman. But to Alaeddin the new king said, 'Thou art wise, my brother, above all men. Be thou the eyes of the throne, and I will be its arm!' So Alaeddin was the great minister of the mighty Orchan. To Prince Alaeddin we owe our best laws, our system of drilling and marching in all the Ottoman armies.

"But two lights are better known than one. And in a dream the Angel Gabriel, who knows the secrets of Allah regarding men, said to Alaeddin, 'Go look into the eyes of Kara Khalil Tschendereli. We have given him a thought for thee and thy people.' And Kara Khalil said, 'Know, O wise and virtuous Prince Alaeddin, I have been permitted in my dreams to stand upon the wall Al Araf, that runs between paradise and hell. In the third story of the seven which divide perdition I saw the ghosts of the Giaours. But while I watched their torments the spirit of Othman, the Blessed, came to me, and, pointing to a gate in the wall, said, in a voice so sweet that all the birds in paradise echoed it, but so strong that it shook the mighty wall Al Araf as if it would fall, "I charge thee, as thou art a true believer in Mahomet, open that gate that some of the believers in Jesu, Son of Mary, may escape into paradise."

"'"What power have I for such a miracle, O Othman," I cried. But Othman said:

"'"Thou shalt save the souls of the boys among the captives Allah gives thee in battle. Is it not written in the Koran that all the children are at their birth gifted with the true faith. Believe this, and teach the captive boys to trust the Prophet, to breathe the holy Islam of Father Abraham, and to draw the sword for Allah. So shalt thou be a saviour of many souls. And such valor will Allah send these rescued ones, and such blessings shall follow them, that the Giaour children shall conquer for thee the Giaour nations."'

"And so, Michael," added Selim, "the wisdom of earth and heaven appointed our order. We are still the Yeni Tscheri,[37] though a century has gone by since we were founded; for the vigor of perpetual youth is ours.

"When Orchan, at such advice of Alaeddin and Kara Khalil enrolled the first of the new troop—bright Christian boys like yourself, Michael—they were led to the old dervish, Hadji Beytarch, whose sanctity was as the fragrance of paradise itself. The face of the holy man caught the lustre of the prophecy from heaven. As he drew the sleeve of his mantle over each bowed head—and the strip of wool on our cap is the sign of his sleeve—he uttered this benediction: 'Thy face shall be white and shining; thy right arm shall be strong; thy sabre shall be keen; and thine arrows sharp. Thou shalt be fortunate in fight, and thou shalt never leave the battle-field save as a conqueror.'"

"And have they never been conquered?" asked Michael with incredulity.

"Never!" cried Selim.

"Except," added Mustapha, "that they might prepare themselves for some greater victory. Allah sometimes makes known to us his will that we should retreat; then we take up our kismet as joyfully as we would shout the advance. That we may make sure of Allah's will, before retreating we always assault the enemy thrice. If at that sacred number we cannot conquer we know that the victory has been reserved, still held for us, but in the closed hand of Fate."

"But what of those who were killed? I certainly saw many Janizaries lying dead in the snows of the Balkans the day of the fight. Are they not conquered?" asked the boy.

"Nay, more than conquerors," said Mustapha. "If one falls in battle paradise flings wide its gates, and troops of angels and houris come to lead his soul in a triumphal procession into that beautiful land where the earth is like purest musk, and where the great Tuba tree grows—a branch of which shades the kiosk of every believer, and bends down to place its luscious fruit into his hand, if he so much as desires it; where are grapes and pomegranates, and such as for spicy sweetness have never been tasted on earth; where are streams of water and milk and wine and honey, whose bottoms are pebbled with pearls and emeralds and rubies; where the houris, the fairest of maidens, dwell close beside the believer in pavilions of hollow pearls, and serve every wish of the faithful even before he can utter it."[38]

But Michael's eyes were heavy; and as the old veterans diverted the conversation to some matter of business between them, his excited imagination reproduced the description of paradise in his dreams. Only, the pavilion of pearl was shaped like good Uncle Kabilovitsch's cot on the mountains, and the houris were all fair-haired Morsinias.

CHAPTER XIII.

Weeks and months passed away, during which the physical exercises of the lads in the Janizary school were varied with lessons in the Turkish language; and, in the case of a select number, in the Arabic, mastering it at least sufficiently to read the Koran, large sections of which they were compelled to commit to memory.

The teachers in the Janizary schools were far from ordinary men. They were highly learned, and, like most Orientals of education, gifted with great eloquence. After the daily tasks had been accomplished the boys were gathered in a semicircle upon the floor about the instructor, who sat cross-legged among them, and narrated in glowing language the history of the Prophet and his successors in the khalifate; inflaming their young minds with the most heroic and romantic legends of Arabia and Egypt, Algiers and Granada, where the Koran had conquered the faith of the people whom the swords of the true Moslems had subdued. Wild stories of the early days of the Turks, before Ertoghral,[39] "The Right-hearted Man," led the tribes from the banks of the Euphrates; and earlier still when Seljuk[40] led his people from north of the Caspian; of the settlement of their remote ancestors in Afghanistan, where the great chief was first called Sultan;[41] of how they had once held the religious faith of Zoroaster. Indeed, myths from the very dawn of known history, when the Turkius did all sorts of valiant deeds in far-off China.[42]

The Christian books were made to appear to the young proselyte as but imperfect suggestions of the completed teaching of the book of Mahomet; while the peculiar dogmas of the Christians were restated with such shrewd perversion that to the child's judgment they seemed puerile or untrue.

"Behold the sky!" one would exclaim. "Is it not one dome, like the canopy of one mighty throne? Behold the light! Does it not pour from one sun and fill all space with one flood? Breathe the air! Is it not the same over all lands and in all lungs? Do not all birds fly with one mechanism of wings? and all men live by the same beating of the heart? How then can there be three Gods, Allah, and Jesu and Mary, as the Christians teach?[43] What does reason say? What does the universe testify? What says the true and wise believer?"

"There is one God and Mahomet is His Prophet," would be the response of the pupils, bowing their heads to the floor.

"Can the less contain or give out the greater? Can a stone bring forth the orange tree? Can a stick give birth to the eagle? A worm be the father of a man? How, then, can we say with the Christians, that Mary of Bethlehem is the mother of God? What says the faithful and wise believer?"

"There is one God, and Mahomet is His prophet," would be the choral response.

"Is God weak? Can men thwart His plans? Shall we then believe that the infidel Jews crucified the Son of God?"

"God is great, and Mahomet is His Prophet," would roll up from the lips of the scholars.

"Shall we, then, kiss the toe of the pope because he calls himself the grand vizier of Allah, when our Janizaries can cut the throats of his soldiers, as our brethren of Arabia destroyed the crusaders? Or shall we kiss the hand of the patriarch of the Greeks, who claims supremacy in the name of Allah, when already our arms have shut up the whole Greek empire within the walls of Constantinople? What says the faithful and wise believer?"

"God is great, and Mahomet is His Prophet," is the reply.

"Who would cringe and beg forgiveness at the feet of a dirty priest, when the sword of every Janizary may open for him who holds it the gate of paradise?"

Not only such arguments, but every event of the day that could emphasize or illustrate the superiority of the Moslem faith, was skilfully brought to bear upon the susceptible minds of the youths. And within the first year of Michael's cadetship one such significant event occurred.

In the year of the Hegira 822,[44] six months after the flight of Scanderbeg, it was solemnly agreed between Christian and Moslem that the sword should have rest for ten years. A stately ceremony was made to seal the compact. Vladislaus of Hungary represented in his person the pledge of kingly honor. Hunyades gave the sanction of a soldier's word. And Cardinal Julian was supposed to have added to the treaty the confirmation of all that was sacred in the religion of which he was so exalted a representative. On behalf of the Christians, the concord was signalized by an oath upon the Gospels. On the other side, Sultan Amurath, in the presence of his generals and the holiest of the Moslem dervishes, swore upon the Koran. This compact, guarded by all that men hold to be honorable on earth and sacred in heaven, lulled the suspicions of the Turks. The rigid drill, the alert espionage, the raids along the border gave way to the indolence of the barracks and the pastimes of the camp. Thousands of horses and their riders were returned to till the fields in the Timars, Ziamets and Beyliks[45] scattered throughout distant provinces. The Sultan retired to meditate religion, or devise the things belonging to permanent peace, in his secluded palace at Magnesia in Asia Minor. The death of his eldest son, Prince Aladdin, led him to put the crown of associate Padishah upon the brow of the young Mahomet that in these quiet times the prince might learn the minor lessons of the art of ruling.

But this sense of security among the Turks offered too strong a temptation to the cupidity of the Christian leaders. King Vladislaus opposed conscientious objections to any breach of the compact. Hunyades maintained his personal honor by at first refusing to draw his sword. But Cardinal Julian stood sponsor to a breach of faith, and announced that principle which has, in the estimate of history, made his scarlet robe the symbol of his scarlet sin—that no faith need be kept with infidels; and, in the name of the Holy Father, granted absolution to the chief actors for what they were about to do.

Without warning, the tide of Christian conquest poured from Servia eastward until it was checked in that direction by the Black Sea. The hordes of Europe then turned southward, seized upon Varna, and pitched their camps amid the pennants of their ill-gotten victory near to its walls. To human sight no power could avert irrevocable disaster to the arms, if not the subversion of the entire empire of the Ottomans in Europe.

In their extremity the lands of the Moslem made their solemn appeal to Allah. Every mosque resounded with reiterated prayers. The camps echoed the pious invocations with loud curses and the rattle of the preparation of armor. Scurrying messengers flew from the centre to the circumference of the Ottoman domain, and hastily gathered legions concentrated for one supreme blow in retaliation for the grossness of the insult, and in vindication of what they believed to be the cause of honor and truth, which, in their minds, was one with that of Allah and the Prophet.

The Sultan hurried from his retreat, and with marvellous celerity marshalled the faithful against the invaders at Varna. Riding at the head of the Janizaries, he caused the document of the violated treaty to be held aloft on a lance-head in the gaze of the two armies, and with a loud voice uttered this prayer—a strange one for a Moslem's lips—

"O, Thou insulted Jesu, revenge the wrong done unto Thy good name, and show Thy power upon Thy perjured people!"

Victory hovered long between the contending hosts, but at last rested with the Moslems. To make the intervention of Allah more apparent, it was told everywhere, how, when Amurath believed that he was defeated, and had given the order for retreat, a soldier seized the bridle of the Sultan's horse and turned him back again toward the enemy. The very beast felt the inspiration of heaven, and led the assault upon the breaking columns of the Christians, until the victors returned, bearing upon spear-points the heads of Cardinal Julian and King Vladislaus; while Hunyades fled in disgrace from the field.

It is not to be wondered at that such an event, which led many whole communities to renounce their alliance with the Christian powers, and many of the chiefs of Bosnia and Servia to accept the Moslem faith, should have rooted that faith more deeply in the hearts of those who already held it. A flame of fanaticism ran throughout the Mohammedan world. The most rabid sects increased in the number and fury of their devotees. Many who were engaged in useful occupations left them to became Moslem monks, spending their lives in meditation, if perchance they might receive more fully the blessings which heaven seemed ready to pour upon every true believer; or to become preachers of the jehad—the holy war against the infidels.

In the schools of the Janizaries the fanaticism was fed and fanned to a flame of utmost intensity. The square court within their barracks was transformed into a great prayer place of the dervishes. Here the Howlers formed their circles, and swaying backward and forward with flying hair and glaring eyes, grunted their talismanic words from the Koran, until they fell in convulsions on the pavement. And the Wheelers spun round and round in their mystic motions until, full of the spirit they sought, they dropped in the dizzying dance. Learned sheiks preached the gospel of the sword, and the imams watered the seed thus sown with fervent prayers, until the ardent souls of the youth seemed to have lost their human identity, and to be transformed into sparks and flashes of some celestial fire which was to destroy the lands of the Christians.

Michael's mind was not altogether unimpressed by the religious fanaticism that raged around him. While in quiet moments he was troubled with what he heard against the Christian faith which he had been taught in his mountain home, at other times he was caught in the tide of the general enthusiasm and felt himself borne along with it, swirled around in the rings of the mad maelstrom; not unwilling to yield himself to the excitement, and yet by no definite purpose committing himself to it. If it requires all the strength of an adult mind, with convictions long held and character well formed, to maintain its faith and principles against the attrition of daily temptation in a Christian land, we must not be surprised if the child gave way to the incessant appeal of the Moslem belief, accompanied as it was by extravagant promises of secular pleasure, and counteracted by no word of Christian counsel.

But the spiritual impulse in Michael was less active than the martial instinct; and this latter was stimulated to the utmost by the associations of every day and hour. The battles which were fought on the great fields were all refought in the vivid descriptions of the Janizary teachers, and sometimes in the mimic rencounters of the playground. Michael rebelled against his childish years which prevented his joining some of the great expeditions that were fitted out;—against the Greeks of the Peloponnesus, the Giaour lands to the north, and the Albanians on the west, who, under Scanderbeg, had become the chief menace against the Ottoman power.

CHAPTER XIV.

The career of Scanderbeg, or Castriot, as the Albanians love to call their great national hero, makes one of the most illustrious pages in history, whether we look for the display of personal courage, astute generalship, or loftiest patriotism. His military renown, already so wide-spread as the commander of the Turks, became universal through the almost incredible skill with which, for many years, his handful of patriots held the mountains of Albania against the countless armies of the Sultan. His superlative devotion to his country, was maintained with such sacrifices as few men have ever rendered to the holiest cause. He resisted the bribes of riches, power and splendor with which the Sultan, baffled by his arms, attempted to seduce his honor. These things went far to atone for the treachery of his defection from the Turkish service.

Upon his arrival in Albania, the citadel of Croia was given into his hands by the commandant, who was either unsuspicious of the false order that was sealed by the now dead hand of the Sultan's secretary, or who had found that the wily Albanians had already access to its gates. Sfetigrade and other prominent fortresses fell rapidly, won by strategy or by the valorous assault of the patriots. The Albanians had been almost instantaneously transformed into an invincible army by the electric thrill which the coming of Castriot had sent everywhere, from the borders of Macedonia to the western sea; and by the skill with which that great captain organized his bands of Epirots and Dibrians. An army of forty thousand Turks was at one time divided by his masterly movements, and slain in detail. A second army met a similar fate. The great Sultan himself attempted the capture of this Arnaout "wild beast," as he had learned to call him. One hundred and fifty thousand men, supplied from the far-reaches of Asia where the Ottoman made most of his levies, swarmed like a plague of locusts through the valleys of Epirus. By sheer momentum of numbers they pressed their way up to the fortress of Sfetigrade.

The defence of this place is one of the most heroic in the annals of war or patriotism. As the glacier melts at the touch of the warm earth in the Alpine valleys so the mighty army of Amurath dissolved in blood as it touched the beleaguered walls. At the same time Scanderbeg, adopting some new expedient in every attack, made his almost nightly raids through the centre of the Turkish host, like a panther through the folds of the sheep, until Amurath cried in sheer vexation among the generals, "Will none of you save us from the fury of that wild beast?" The incessant slaughter that broke the bewildered silence of the generals was the only response.

Thus passed some six years since the time when our story opens; years which, had they stood by themselves, and not been followed by fifteen years more of equal prowess, would have won for Scanderbeg the unstinted praise of that distinguished writer who enrolls him among the seven greatest uncrowned men of the world's history.[46]

During these years Castriot had studied with closest scrutiny the character of his nephew, Amesa. His natural discernment, aided by his long observation of human duplicity while among the Turks—and, indeed by his own experience, as for many years he had masked his own discontent and ultimate purpose—gave him a power of estimating men which may be called a moral clairvoyance. He discovered that in his nephew which led him to credit the story of Kabilovitsch—as the forester Arnaud was still called, although some more than suspected his identity. The chief saw clearly that Amesa's loyalty would be limited by his selfish interests. Those interests now led him to most faithful and apparently patriotic devotion. Besides, the loss or alienation of so influential a young voivode, involving a schism in the house of the Castriots, might be fatal to the Albanian cause. The general, therefore, fed the ambition of his relative, giving him honorable command, for which he was well fitted by reason of both courage and genius. Nor did Amesa disappoint this confidence. His sword was among the sharpest and his deeds most daring. The peasant soldiers often said that Amesa was not unworthy the blood of the Castriots. To Sultan Amurath's proposal of peace on condition of Scanderbeg's simple recognition of the Ottoman's nominal suzerainty, allowing him to retain the full actual possession of all his ancestral holdings, Amesa's voice joined with that of Moses Goleme and the other allied nobles in commending the refusal of their chief.

Amesa's courage and zeal seemed at times to pass the control of his judgment. Thus, in a sharp battle with the Turks, during the temporary absence of Castriot, who was resisting an encroachment of the Venetians on the neighboring country of Montenegro, the fiery young voivode was seized with such blind ferocity that he knew not where he was. He had engaged a group of his own countrymen, apparently not discerning his mistake until he had unhorsed one of them, whom he was on the point of sabering, when his arm was caught by a comrade. The endangered man was Kabilovitsch, who saw that there was a method in Amesa's madness which it behoved him to note.

It was evident to Kabilovitsch not only that he was recognized by Amesa, but also that the young voivode was more than suspicious of the former forester's knowledge of the affair by which the magnificent estate of De Streeses had passed into his hands. The good man's solicitude was intense through fear that Amesa had become aware of the escape of the child heir, and might discover some clue to her whereabouts. Several times Milosch had visited the camp inquiring for Kabilovitsch; and Constantine had made frequent journeys carrying tidings of Morsinia's welfare. Had neither of these been spied upon? Did no one ever pass the little hamlet where she was in covert who recognized in the now daily developing womanly features the likeness of her mother, Mara De Streeses?

A little after this assault of Amesa upon Kabilovitsch, came news which startled the latter. To understand this the reader must penetrate a wild mountainous district a double score of miles from the camp of Castriot.

CHAPTER XV.

Out of a broad valley, through which lies the chief highway leading to the north-west of Albania, there opens a narrow ravine which seems to end abruptly against the precipitous front of a mountain range. But, turning into this ravine, one is surprised to find that it winds sharply, following a swift stream, and climbing for many miles through the mountain, until it suddenly debouches into a picturesque valley, which affords grazing space for sheep and enough arable land to sustain the peasants who once dwelt there.

A hamlet nestled in this secluded vale. No road led beyond it, and it was approached only by the narrow and tortuous path we have described. A rude mill sentineled a line of three houses. These dwellings, though simple in their construction, were quite commodious. A room of ample dimensions was enclosed with walls of stone and loam, supporting a conical roof of thatch. On three sides of this room and opening into it were smaller chambers, having detached roofs of their own. The central apartment was the common gathering place for quite an extensive community, consisting of a family in three or four generations; for each son upon marrying brought his wife to the paternal homestead, and built a new chamber connecting with the central one. The three houses contained altogether nearly a hundred souls. The last of these dwellings was of ampler proportions than the others, and was occupied by a branch of an ancient family to which the inhabitants of the other houses were all of kin. By reason of its antiquity as well as the comparative wealth of its occupants, it was regarded as the konak, or village mansion; and the senior member of its little community was recognized as the stargeshina, or chief of the village.

It was the latter part of April; the day before that upon which from time immemorial the peasants among these mountains had observed the festival of Saint George, which they devoted to ceremonies commemorative of the awakening summer life of the world.

It was still early in the afternoon, though the high mountain wall on the west had shut out the sun, whose bright rays, however, still burning far overhead, dropped their benediction of roseate shadows into the valley they were not permitted to enter; loading the atmosphere with as many tints as there were in Buddha's bowl when the poor man threw in the bud of genuine charity, and it burst into a thousand flowers.

A group of maidens gathered at the little mill, each holding an earthen bowl to catch the glistening spray drops which danced from the edge of the clumsy water-wheel. When these were filled they cast into the "witching waters" the early spring flowers, anemones and violets and white coral arbutus, which they had picked during the day. It was a pleasing superstition that the water, having been beaten into spray, received life from the flowers which the renewed vitality of the awakening spring spirit had pressed up through the earth; and that, if one should bathe in this on St. George's day, health and happiness would attend him during the year.

"What is it?" cried one as a crackling in the bushes far above their heads on a steep crag was followed in a moment by the beat of a pebble, as it glanced from ledge to ledge almost to their feet.

"The sheep are not up there!" said another.

"Perhaps the Vili!"[47] suggested a third, "for I am sure that I have seen one this very day."

"What was he like?" exclaimed several at once, while all kept their eyes upon the cliff above.

"There! there! Did you see it?" Several avowed that they saw it stealing along the very brow of the hill; but all agreed that it passed so swiftly that they could not tell just what they saw.

"It was just so with the one I saw to-day," said the former speaker. "I was on the ledge by the old eagle's nest, gathering my flowers. A tall being passed below me on the path, dressed so beautifully that I know it was none of us, and had dealings with none of us. It seemed anxious not to be seen; for my little cry of surprise caused it to vanish as if it melted into the foam of the stream as it plunges into the pool."

"That was just like the Vili," interposed one. "They live under the river's bank. They talk in the murmur of the streams. Old Mirko, who used to work much in the mill, learned to understand what they said. Did this one you saw have long hair? The Vili, Mirko said, always did."

"I cannot say," replied the girl, "for its head was hidden in a blossoming laurel bush between it and me."

"It was one," cried another, "for there are no blossoming laurels yet. It was its long white hair waving in the wind, that you saw."

"Let us go down to the pool!" proposed one, "maybe we can see it again."

"No! No!" cried the others, in a chorus of tremulous voices.

"No, indeed," said one of the larger girls, "for it might be they are eating, or they are dancing the Kolo—which they always do as the sun goes down, and if any body sees them then they get angry, and will come to your house and look at you with the evil eye."

Hasting home with their bowls of water crowned with flowers, they told their story to the stargeshina.

The old man laughed at their credulity:—

"Girls always see strange things on the eve of Saint George."

At the evening meal in the great room of the first house, the patriarch, taking his cue from the story the girls belonging to that household had told of their imagined vision, repeated legend after legend about those strange beings that people the unknown caverns in the mountains, and rise from the brooks, leaving the water-spiders to mark the spot where they emerged so that they may find their way back again, and of the wjeshtiges, who throw off their bodies as easily as others lay aside their clothes, flit through the fire, ride upon the sparks as horses, float on the threads of white smoke—all the time watching the persons gathered about the blazing logs, that they may mark the one who is first to die. "This doomed person," the old man said, "they visit when he has gone to sleep, and, with a magic rod, open his breast; utter in mystic words the day of his death; take out his heart and feast upon it. Then they carefully close up the side, and, though the victim lives on, having no heart, no spring of life in him, sickens and droops until the fatal day; as the streams vanish when cut off from the fountains whence they start."

These stories were followed by songs, the music of which was within a narrow range of notes, and sung to the accompaniment of the gusle—a rude sort of guitar with a single string. The subjects of these songs and the ideas they contained were as limited in their range as the notes by which they were rendered; such as the impossible exploits of heroes, and improbable romances of love. The merit of the singing generally consisted in the additions or variations with which the genius of the performer enabled him to adorn the hackneyed music or original narrative.

"Let Constantine take the gusle, and sing us the song about the peasant maid who conquered the heart of the king," said the stargeshina.

"Constantine is not here," replied a clear and sweet, but commanding sort of voice. "He went out as it began to darken, and has not returned."

The speaker rose as she said it, and went toward the large door of the room to look out. She was a young woman of slender, but superb form, which the costume of the country did not altogether conceal. She was tall and straight, but moved with the graceful freedom of a child, for her straightness was not that of an arrow—rather of the unstrung bow, whose beauty is revealed by its flexibility. Her limbs were rounded perfectly to the feminine model, but were evidently possessed of muscular strength developed by daily exercise incident to her mountain life. A glance at her would disprove that western theory which associates the ideal of female beauty only with softness of fleshly texture and lack of sinew. Her face was commanding, brow high, eyes rather deep-set and blue, mouth small—perhaps too straight for the best expression of amiability—chin full, and suggestive of firmness and courage. As she gazed through the doorway into the night a troubled look knit her features—just enough, however, to make one notice rather the strong, steady and heroic purpose which conquered it. When she turned again to the company the firelight revealed only a girlish sweetness and gentleness of face and manner. She took the gusle and sang a pretty song about the dancing of the witches; her merry voice starting a score of other voices in the simple chorus. Then followed a war song, in which the daughter of a murdered chieftain calls upon the clan to avenge her father, and save their land from an insulting foe. It was largely recitative, and rendered with so much of the realistic in her tones and manner as to draw even the old men to their feet, while, with waving hands and marching stamp, they started the company in the refrain.

Milosch set the example of retiring when the evening was well advanced. Though Constantine was still absent, it gave his father no anxiety, for the boy was accustomed to have his own private business with coons in the forest, and the eels in the pool, and, indeed, with the stars too—for often he would lie for hours looking at them, only Morsinia being allowed to interrupt his conference with the bright-eyed watchers above.

CHAPTER XVI.

Constantine, who was now a manly fellow of nearly eighteen years, had left the house when it grew dark. The night was thick, for heavy clouds had spread their pall over the sky. A little space from the house was the kennel. A deep growl greeted his approach to it.

"Still, Balk!" muttered he, as he loosed an enormous mastiff, and led the brute toward the side of the house on which the clijet, or chamber, occupied by Morsinia was located.

"Down, Balk!" he said, as again and again the huge beast rose and placed his paws upon his master's shoulders. Balk was tied within a clump of elder-bushes a little way from the house, and at the opening of a foot-path ascending the mountain. The young man lay down with his head upon the mastiff. Nearly an hour passed; the silence unbroken except by a querulous whine of the dog as his comrade refused to indulge his playful spirit. Suddenly Balk threw up his head and sniffed the air nervously. Yet no sound was heard, but the soughing of the winds through the budding trees, and the murmur of the brook. The animal became restless and would not lie down except at the sternly whispered command.

Leaving him, Constantine opened the shutter of the clijet occupied by his father and himself, and quietly entered. Though in the dark, he strung a strong bow, balanced several arrows in his hand to determine the best, saying to himself as he did so, "I can send these straight in the direction of a sound, thanks to my night hunting!" A dagger was thrust into the top of his leather hose. He wound his head in the strooka—the cloth which answers for both cap and pillow to those who are journeying among those mountains and liable to exposure without bed or roof at night.

The noise though slight awakened Milosch, who had fallen into a light sleep.

"Where now, my boy? No coon will come to you such a night as this."

"Father, I did not tell you, because you laugh at my fears," said Constantine in a low tone. "But the anxiety of Uncle Kabilovitsch and the great captain, too, when I went to camp last week, makes me more cautious about Morsinia. The Vili are about, as the girls said."

"Nonsense, you child! It's a shame that a boy of your years should believe such stuff. Besides what have the Vili to do with our daughter?"

"Look here, father; when I was searching for a rabbit's burrow this afternoon I saw the footprint of one of them, and it wore a soldier's shoe too. That is the sort of Vili I believe in."

"Why, boy!" said Milosch, "your head is so full of soldiering that rabbits' burrows look like soldiers' feet. Or your head is so turned with love for our girl, that you must imitate the Latin knights, and go watch beneath the shutter of your lady's castle. Go, along, then, and let the night dews take the folly out of you. Foolish boy!" added he, as he turned toward the wall.

Constantine went back to the dog. The huge beast had thrust himself as far as the cord would allow him in the direction away from the house, and stood trembling with excitement as he peered into the black shadows which lay against the mountain. Constantine could detect no unusual sound save the creaking of the gigantic limbs of the trees as they rubbed against each other in the rising wind, the sharpening whistle of the breeze, and the crackle of the dead brushwood. Yet the mastiff's excitement increased. He strained the rope with his utmost strength, but the hand of his master upon his neck checked the whining growl.

A branch snapped on the hillside in the direction of the path.

"No wind did that," muttered he. A stone rolled down the declivity.

"No foot familiar with that path did that. You are right, Balk!" and by main strength he pressed the mastiff's head to the ground, and, with his arm about his neck, kept him crouching and silent.

Stealthy steps were heard.

"One! Two!" counted the boy. "You and I are enough for them, eh, Balk?"

The dog licked the face of his master in token that he understood, and would take his man if Constantine would do equally well.

"Three! Four! Five! A large band! Too many for us, Balk! We must rouse the village——"

But at the moment he would have started, his attention was arrested by low voices almost at his side.

"The clijet nearest. When she is taken I will sound the bugle call—the Turkish call, so that your dash through the village will be thought to be one of their dashes. Do as little real damage as you can, keeping the appearance of a genuine raid; but no matter if you have to cut the throats of a half-dozen or more; especially the red-headed fellow you have seen in camp, and the old devil with the paralyzed arm. I and Waldy will carry the girl, and wait for you by the horses on the open road. Let's inspect!"

Two dusky outlines moved toward the house. Constantine cut the rope, and, at a push of his hand the dog crawled a few feet until he was clear of the copse; then sprang into the air. There was a hardly audible exclamation of surprise and terror; a low growl of satisfied rage, as when a tiger seizes the food thrown to him in his cage. One man is down in death grapple with his strange assailant whose teeth are at his throat. A sharp whiz and a cry of pain tell that the arrow of Constantine has not missed its mark.

A second whiz, and the form topples!

The boy stood stupefied with the reaction of the moment. But the multiplying footfalls along the ledge aroused him. He darted into the house, swinging the great bar that turned on a peg in the door post across the entrance, and thus securing it behind him. To arouse the household was the work of a moment. A word explained all. Arms were seized, not only by the men, but also by the women: for even to this day a marauder will meet no more skilful and brave defenders of the villages of Albania than the wives and daughters who encourage the men by their example as well as by their words. Their hands are trained to use the sword, the axe, the dagger; and the cry of danger transforms the most domestic scene into an exhibition of Amazons.

The expected attack was delayed. Fears were excited lest the raiders were about to set fire to the house. If such were the case, the policy of the inmates was to sally forth and cut their way through the assailants, at whatever cost. Some one must go out. It might be to meet death at the door. Standing in a circle they hastily repeated the Pater Noster, each one giving a word in turn; the one to whom the "Amen" came accepting the appointment as directly from God. With drawn weapons they gathered at the door, which was opened suddenly. No enemy appearing, it was closed, leaving the new sentinel without.

After going a few paces the guard stumbled over the dead body of the dog, by the side of which a man was vainly struggling to rise. Drawing his dagger he would have completed the work of the mastiff's fangs,—when he checked the impulse by better judgment—

"No, it's better to have him along with us. He'll come handy before we get through this job!"

So, grasping the two arms of the wounded man in such a way as to prevent his using a weapon, if strength enough should remain, he swung the helpless hulk upon his back, as he had often carried the carcass of a wolf down the mountain; and, giving the preconcerted signal at the door, was instantly re-admitted.

The wounded man wore the Turkish uniform, and was evidently the officer in charge of the raiding party. This fact sufficiently explained the delay in following up the attack, for doubtless his men were still waiting for the order which he would never give.

"We must rouse our neighbors," said the old man, who was recognized as the commandant of the dwelling, and obeyed as such with that reverence for seniority which is to this day a beautiful characteristic of the Albanian people.

Constantine held a hurried, but confidential talk with Milosch, who proposed that Constantine and his sister should undertake the hazardous venture of alarming the next house. All remonstrated against Morsinia's venturing, the patriarch refusing to allow it. Milosch persuaded him with these words, which were not overheard by the others—

"She is the chief object of attack; this I have discovered. If she remains in the house she will be captured. Her only safety is to leave it, and disappear in the darkness. Once out there she can hide near by, or can thread her way up among the crags, where no stranger's foot will ever come. She knows every stone and tree in the dark as well as a mole knows the twists and turns of his burrow."

Morsinia caught at once the spirit of the adventure, and in her eagerness preceded Constantine to the doorway. The thrill of fear on her account gave way to a thrill of applause for her as she stood in readiness. She had donned a helmet of thick half-tanned hides, and a corsage of light iron links, looped together and tied with leathern thongs, about her person. Her arms were left free for the use of the bow and stock which swung from her shoulder, and the klaptigan, or short dagger, which hung in the plaits of her kilt.

"The Holy Virgin protect her!" was the prayer which came from all sides as she flung her arms about the neck of Milosch, and as she afterward bowed her head to receive the kiss of the patriarch upon her forehead. The light in the room was extinguished that their exit might not be noted by any without when the door should open.

For a moment Constantine and Morsinia stood close to the door which had closed behind them. Their keen hearing detected the fact that the house was surrounded, though by persons stationed at a distance, chiefly upon the higher slopes of the hills. The road to the next house was evidently guarded.

Constantine insisted upon Morsinia's concealing herself rather than attempting to go with him to the neighbors; but only after remonstrance with him did she consent to his plan. Silently crossing the road, and without so much as breaking a stick or rustling a dead leaf beneath her feet—a dexterity acquired in approaching the timid game with which the mountains abounded, and which she had often hunted—she disappeared in the dense copse.

Constantine moved cautiously by the wayside, easily eluding the notice of the men whose dark outlines were discerned by him as they stood on guard at intervals along the road. He had nearly approached the neighboring house when the still night air was rent with the shrill note of a Turkish bugle call from the direction of the dwelling they had left.

"Could it be that the captured officer had recovered sufficient reason and strength to break from his captors and give the signal?" thought Constantine. The call sounded again—it was evidently from a distance, beyond the village. A score or more dim forms at the sound gathered in the road; some emerging from the bushes near, others descending from points high up the slopes on either side—their hurried but muffled conversation showed that they were about to make the appointed dash upon the doomed dwelling. But a second blare of trumpets sounded far down toward the entrance of the valley, followed by a clanging of armor and clatter of horses' feet. Torches glared far away. A party was evidently just winding out of the defile into the open space where the hamlet stood. Rescuers doubtless! for the first party of raiders scattered to right and left, and were heard climbing again up the wooded slopes. Morsinia hastened to Constantine, and together they hurried to meet the new comers. But they were not rescuers. They attacked the house with shouts of "Allah! Allah!" They fired it with their torches. Some poured along the road toward the next house.

They were genuine Turks. Unable to conquer Scanderbeg in battle, the great army had spread everywhere to lay waste the country. In fertile meadows, along every stream, wherever a castle or chalet was known to be, raged the numberless soldiers, who, beaten in nobler fight, sought vengeance by becoming murderers of the more helpless, and kidnappers of women and children to fill their harems.

With flying feet Constantine and Morsinia outstripped the riders, alarmed the second house, and ran to the third. Behind them the crackling flames told that it was too late to return. All who could escape gathered at the great konak. Since a similar raid, some years before, this building had been converted into a rude fortification. The wall which surrounded it, as an enclosure for sheep and cattle, had been built up high and strong enough to prevent any approach to the main structure by an anticipated foe, except as the scalers of the wall should be exposed to the missiles of those within. The konak proper was pierced with loop-holes, through which a shower of arrows could be poured by unseen archers.

The court was already filled with the fugitives, while some had entered the building, when it was surrounded by the Turks. Constantine had gained from Morsinia a promise to avoid exposure; and had agreed upon a place of meeting on the mountain, in the event of their both surviving the conflict. But the eagerness of Constantine overcame his discretion, and, heading a group of peasants who had not been able to enter the konak, he mingled in a hand-to-hand fight with the assailants. Morsinia's interest led her to closely watch the fray from the bordering thicket, changing her position from time to time that she might not lose sight of the well-known form of her foster-brother. Seeing him endangered, she could not resist the vain impulse to fly to his assistance; as if her arms could stay those of the stout troopers who surrounded him; or as if a Turk could have respect for a woman's presence. Scarcely had she moved from her covert when strong hands seized her, and, by a quick movement, pinioned her arms behind her back.

"Ho! man, guard this girl! If my houri escapes, your head shall be forfeit," cried her captor, an officer, to a common soldier who was holding his horse. In a moment he was lost to sight in the struggling throng.

The wall was carried, and, though many a turban had rolled from the lifeless head of its wearer, the building was finally fired—life being promised to the women who should surrender. Some of these, who were young, were thrust from the door by their kindred, who preferred for them the chances of miserable existence as Turkish prey, to seeing them perish with themselves. Most, however, fought to the last by the side of their husbands and fathers, and were slain in the desperate attempt to make their way from the flames which drove them out.

Constantine, by strange strength and skill, extricated himself from the mêlée. A sharp flesh wound cooled his blind rage; and, realizing that another's life, as dear to him as his own, was involved in his safety, he withdrew from the danger, and sought Morsinia.

Not finding her during the night, he returned in the earliest dawn to the konak. The building was in ruins; the ground strewn with dead and wounded. With broken hearts the few who had escaped were bewailing their loved ones killed or missing. But there was no tidings of Morsinia. In vain the woods were searched; every old trysting place sacred to some happy memory of the years they had spent together—the eagle's crag, the cave in the ravine, the dense copse. But only memories were there. Imagination supplied the rest—a horrid imagination! The poor boy was maddened and crushed; at one moment a fiend; at the next almost lifeless with grief.

An examination at the lower house discovered the body of his father, Milosch. He had been killed outside the house; for his body, though terribly gashed, was not burned, as were those found within the walls of the building.

Constantine had, up to this time, regarded himself as a boy; now he felt that he was a man, with more of life in its desirableness behind than ahead of him: a desperate man, with but a single object to live for, vengeance upon the Turk, and upon those who, worse than Turks, of Albanian blood, had first attempted Morsinia's capture.

Yet there was another thing to live for. Perhaps she might be recaptured. Improbable, but not impossible! That, then, should be his waking dream. Such a hope—hope against hope—was all that could make life endurable, except it were to drain the blood of her captors.

He was driven by the poignancy of his grief and the hot fury of his rage, to make this double object an immediate pursuit. He felt that he could not sleep again until he had tasted some of the vengeance for which he thirsted.

But how could he accomplish it? He must lay his plan, for it were worse than useless to start single-handed without one. He must plot his tragedy before he began to execute it.

He sat down amid the ruins of the hamlet—amid the ruins of his happiness and hopes—to plot. But he could devise nothing. His attempts were like writing on the air. He sat in half stupor; his power to think crushed by the dead weight of mingled grief and the sense of impotency.

But suddenly he started——

"Fool! fool, that I am, to waste the moments! This very night it may be done."

He hastily stripped the body of a dead Turkish soldier, and, rolling the uniform into a compact bundle, plunged with it through the thicket and up the steep mountain side.

CHAPTER XVII.

The valley in which the little hamlet lay, as well as the ravine by which it was approached, was exceedingly tortuous. The stream which seemed to have made these in its ceaseless windings, sometimes almost doubled upon itself, as if the spirit of the waters were the prey of the spirit of the hills that closed in upon its path, and thus it sought to elude its pursuer. Though it was fully twenty miles from the demolished konak to where the narrow valley debouched into the open plain, it was not more than a quarter of this distance in a straight line between those points. The interjacent space was, however, impassable to any except those familiar with its trackless rocks. From a distance the mountain lying between seemed a sheer precipice. But Constantine knew every crevice up which a man could climb; the various ledges that were connected, if not by balconies broad enough for the foot, at least by contiguous trunks of trees, balustrades of tough mountain laurel, or ropes of wild vine. He could cross this wall of rock in an hour or two, but the Turkish raiders would occupy the bulk of the day in making the circuit of the road. Indeed they would in all probability not leave the security of the great ravine, and strike the highway, until night-fall; for the terror of Scanderbeg's ubiquity was always before the Turks. It was this thought that had prompted Constantine's sudden action when he started up from his despairing reverie amid the embers of his home.

It was still early in the afternoon when, having passed with the celerity of a goat among the crags, he looked down from the further side of the great barrier upon the Turkish company. He stood upon a ledge almost above their heads; and never did an eagle's eye take in a brood upon which he was about to swoop, more sharply than did Constantine's observe the details of the camp below him.

There were the horses tethered. Yonder was a group of officers playing at dice. In a circle of guards beyond, a few women and children; and among them—could he mistake that form?

The soldiers were preparing their mess. Some were picking the feathers from fowls; others building fires. Then his surmise had been correct, that they would not leave the valley until night.

Constantine donned the Turkish uniform he had brought with him, and climbed down the mountain. Sentinels were posted here and there upon bold points from which they might get a view of the great plain beyond. Toward this they kept a constant watch, as one of them remarked to his comrade upon a neighboring pinnacle of rock: "Lest some of Scanderbeg's lightning might be lying about loose." Posing like a sentinel whenever he was likely to be observed, Constantine passed through their lines, the guards being too far apart to detect one another's faces. Hailed by a sentinel, he gave back the playful salute with a wave of his hand.

Emboldened by the success of his disguise, he descended to a ledge so near the group of officers that he could easily hear their conversation. They did not use the pure Turkish speech, but sometimes interspersed it with Servian, for many of the officers, as well as the men, in the Sultan's armies were from the provinces where the Turkish tongue was hardly known. The common soldiers in this group Constantine observed used the Servian altogether.

"Good!" said he to himself, "point number one in my plot."

"The highest throw wins the choice of the captives," cried one of the officers. "What say you, Oski?"

"Agreed," replied the one addressed, "but she will never be your houri in paradise, Lovitsch?"

"Why not?"

"Because the Koran forbids casting lots?"

"Well," replied his comrade. "I will take my beauty now, in this world, rather than wait for the next. So here goes!"

"By Khalif Omar's big toe! You have won, Oski. Which will you take?"

"The little one with the bright black eyes," replied Oski; "unless you can prevail upon Captain Ballaban to give me his. The man who owns that girl will never have any houris in paradise. They would all die for jealousy."

"Captain Ballaban is his name," murmured Constantine to himself. "Good! Point number two in my plot."

"I would not have her for a gift," said Lovitsch, "for she has a strange eye—the evil eye perhaps—at least there is something in it I cannot fathom. She looks straight through a man. I touched her under the chin, when those gentle blue orbs burst with fire. There was as much of a change in her as there is in one of our new-fashioned cannon when it is touched off; quiet one moment, and sending a bullet through you the next. She's the daughter of the devil, sure."

"You are a bold soldier, Lovitsch, to be afraid of a girl," laughed his comrade. "I would like the chance of owning that beauty. If I could not manage her I could sell her. She would bring a bag of gold at Adrianople. Captain Ballaban will probably give her as a present to Prince Mahomet. He can afford to do so, for the prince has shown him wonderful favors. Think of a young Janizary, who has not seen nineteen summers, with a captain's rank, and commanding such greybeards as we!"

"No doubt the prince favors him," replied Lovitsch, "but that will not account for his advance in the Janizary's corps. Nothing but real grit and genius gets ahead among those fellows. The prince can give his jewels and gold, but he could not secure a Janizary's promotion to a soldier any more than he could bring him to disgrace without the consent of the Aga. No, comrade, Ballaban was born a soldier, and has won every thread in his captain's badge by some exploit or sage counsel. But I wish he was back with us. I like not being left in charge of such a motley troop as this. If Scanderbeg should close up the mouth of this ravine with a few score of his spavined cavalry, we would be like so many eggs in a bag, to be smashed together, without Ballaban's wit to get us out."

"I think the captain has returned, for, if I mistake not, I saw his red head a little while ago glowing like a sunset on the crag yonder," replied Oski, looking up toward the spot where Constantine was sitting.

——"Good! said Constantine, holding his council of war with his own thoughts. "The captain looks like me before sunset. Perhaps I can look like him after sunset. One advantage of having a head tiled in red! But I will not show it again. Point number three in my plot."——

"Quite likely the captain has returned, and is prowling about, inspecting everything, from the horses'-tails to our very faces, that he may read our thoughts. That is his way," said Lovitsch, glancing around.

"Which way did he go?"

"You might as well ask which track the Prophet's horse took through the air when he carried his rider on the night journey to heaven. A messenger from the chief Aga met him just as we were finishing the fight last night, and, with a word turning over the command to me, he mounted his horse and was off. Perhaps he heads some other raid to-night; or, for aught I know, may be conferring with Scanderbeg in the disguise of a Frankish general; for that Ballaban's brain is as prolific of schemes and tricks as this ant's nest is full of eggs"—turning over a stone as he spoke.

The afternoon waned, and, as the night fell, preparations were made for the march. When it was dark a light bugle note called in the sentinels, and the company moved forward.

CHAPTER XVIII.

In the gathering gloom Constantine approached the extreme edge of the camp, where those who were to bring up the rear had just mounted. A soldier, somewhat separated from the others, was leading several horses; either a relay in case of accident to the others, or those animals whose saddles had been emptied during the fight at the konak. Constantine's appearance was evidently a surprise to the soldier, who eyed him closely, but made no movement indicating suspicion beyond that of a rather pleased curiosity. The man made a low salâm, bowing his turban to the saddle bow, and addressed him—

"Will you not mount, Sire?" Without responding Constantine leaped into a saddle.

"You will pardon me, Captain," continued the soldier. "You are welcome back, for we are in better heart when you are with us."

"Thanks, good fellow," said Constantine, "but I have not returned yet—at least my return must not be known to the troops until the morning. We will take your tongue out if you tell any one I am back without bidding."

The man gave a quick glance as if perplexed. Constantine's hand was upon his dagger. But the soldier's doubt was relieved as he seemed to be confident of the familiar form of his captain; and he explained his apparent suspicion by quickly adding—

"You speak the Servian excellent well, Captain."

"One must get used to it, and every other tongue, in commanding such a mixed crew as the Sultan gathers into his army," said Constantine.

"You Janizaries are wonderful men," replied the soldier. "You know all languages. There was the little Aga I once"—

"No matter about that now," said Constantine, interrupting him. "I want you for a special duty. Can I trust you to do me an errand? If you do it well you will be glad of it hereafter."

"Ay, ay, Sire! with my life; and my lips as mute as the horse's."

"I captured a girl last night. She knows something I would find out by close questioning. I must have her brought to the rear."

"Ay! the girl Koremi holds?"

"Yes, tell Koremi to loiter a little with her until I come up. We must not go far from this defile before I find out what she knows, if I have to discover it with my dagger in her heart; for there are traitors among us. Last night there were Arnaouts dressed as Moslems in the fight."

"That I know," said the soldier, "for I tripped over a fellow myself, hiding in the bushes, who swore at me in as good round Arnaout tongue as they speak in hell. I ran him through and found a Giaour corslet under his jacket. If there are traitors among us we will broil them over our first camp-fire, that they may scent hell before they get there."

"You see then why I must find out what I can at once," said the assumed captain. "Some of our men are in league with the Arnaouts. I can find out from that girl every one of them. Impress this upon Koremi; and if he hesitates to let the girl drift to the rear, you can tell him that he will be suspected of being in league with the rascals."

Constantine took the ropes which held the horses the man was leading; and, bidding him to haste, but be cautious that no one but Koremi should know the message, followed slowly behind.

It was nearly an hour later when the form of the soldier appeared in the road just before him.

"Right!" said Constantine.

"Right!" was the response, first to the assumed captain, then repeated to some one behind him. Two other forms appeared; one of them a woman.

Anticipating his orders, the second trooper untied a rope from about his own waist, and handed it, together with the rein of the horse the woman rode, to Constantine. Then, making a low obeisance, the two troopers withdrew a little distance to the rear.

The other end of the rope which Constantine held was about the waist of the captive. Drawing the led horse close to his own, and dropping his turban more over his face, Constantine closely scrutinized the features of the woman. She was Morsinia. It was difficult for him to repress the excitement and delay the revelation of his true person, but the hazard of the least cry of surprise or recognition on her part nerved him to coolness.

"Where are you taking me? If you have the courage, kill me," said the girl.

Constantine replied only by whistling a snatch of an Albanian air.

"Are you an Albanian renegade?" continued the girl. "Could you not be content to sell yourself to fight for the Turk against other enemies, but must be a double traitor, and kill and kidnap your own kind?"

The whistling continued. But as the soldiers were a little removed, he said in a low voice, disguising his natural tones:

"I am an Albanian, and if you will not speak, but only obey, I can save you."

"Jesu grant you are true!" was the tremulous response.

"This will prove it," muttered he, reaching toward her, and with his knife cutting a broad strap which bound her limbs to the saddle. "If tied elsewhere, here is the knife."

The way, which had been narrowed by the projection of the mountains on either side, now widened a little. Constantine knew the spot well. There had once been a mill and peasant's hut there, and now quite a plat of grass was growing from the soft soil. The eye could not discern it, for the darkness was rayless. But Constantine remembered the grassy stretch was just round the point of rock they were passing. The horses were walking slowly, being allowed by their riders to pick their way along the stony road. As they turned the rock a strong wind rushed through the ravine, wailing a requiem over the now deserted settlement and the dead leaves of last year, which it whirled in eddies; and singing a lullaby through the trees to the new-born leaves of the spring time, which were rocked on the cradling branches. This, together with the clatter of the horses' feet before and behind them, enabled Constantine to draw the captive's horse and his own upon the soft turf without being heard. Halting them at a few yards' distance, they allowed the men who had followed them to pass by, and sat in silence until the lessening sound told them that the soldiers had made another turn in the road. Then, wheeling the horses, Constantine gave loose rein back over the track they had come. After a short ride he dismounted, and closely examining the way, led the horses to one side, up a path, and down again to a little plateau, perhaps a furlong from the main road, where a grazing patch would keep them from being betrayed by the neighing. He dreaded the fatigue of further journey to his comrade; for even his own ordinarily tireless frame was beginning to feel the drain of the terrible night and day they had passed through.

Constantine threw off his turban and stretched his strong arms to lift the captive from her horse, exclaiming with delight in his own familiar tones,—

"I am no Albanian, dear Morsinia, but—"

"Constantine!" she cried.

He laid an almost lifeless form upon the turf, for the shock of the revelation had been too much for her jaded nerves and excited brain. Unrolling the cloth of his turban he spread it over her person, while his own breast was her pillow. Slowly she recovered strength and self-command.

In a few words the mutual stories of the hours of their separation were told. Morsinia had been treated with exceeding kindness and respect, as the captive of the chief officer of the expedition, who seemed to be a person of some distinction, though she had not seen him. Constantine insisted upon his companion's seeking sleep, but by his inquiries, did as much as her own thoughts to keep her awake; so that at the dawn they confessed that the eyes of neither had been closed. The necessity of procuring food led them to start at daybreak for the nearest settlement. They descended to the road and retraced the course of the preceding night; for it was useless to return to the wrecked hamlet. They had gone but a short distance when they heard the sound of a body of cavalry directly in front of them, riding rapidly up the valley. There was no time to avoid the approaching riders either by flight or concealment. Constantine said hastily,

"Remember, if they are Turks, I too am a Turk, and you are my captive. If they are friends, all is well. Stay where you are, and I will ride forward to meet them."

CHAPTER XIX.

The newcomers proved to be a detachment of Albanians. Constantine was instantly captured notwithstanding his declaration that his dress was only assumed.

"Aha! you are a Christian now in a Turk's skin, are you? But yesterday you were a Turk in a Christian's feathers," was the taunt with which he was greeted by one of the foremost riders, who continued his bantering. "Your face is honest, if your heart is not, you Moslem devil; for your ugly features will not lie though your tongue does. I would know that square jaw and red head equally well now, were it under the tiara of the pope instead of under the turban; and I would cut your throat if you carried St. Peter's key in your girdle; you change-skinned lizard!"

"Who is he?" cried the horsemen, gathering about.

"Why! the very knave who escaped us about sundown yesterday, after spying our camp; and he has the impudence to ask us to take him prisoner that he may spy us again."

"Let us hamstring him!" cried another, "and, unless St. Christopher has turned Moslem in paradise and helps the rascal, he will find no legs to run away with again."

"Set him up for a mark when we halt," proposed a third. "A ducat to him whose arrow can split his ear without tearing the cheek at forty paces!"

Constantine was helpless as they adjusted a halter about his neck, with which to lead him at the side of a horseman, the butt of the scurrilous wit and sharper spear-points of his half mad and half merry captors.

They had gone but a few paces when the colonel commanding the detachment made his way through the troopers to the front. He was a venerable man with long flowing white beard. His bodily strength seemed to come solely from the vitality of nerve and the dominance of his spirit; for he was well worn with years.

"What is this noise about?" he asked sternly.

Before any could reply he stared with a moment's incredulity and wonder at Constantine, who relieved his doubts by recognizing him.

"Colonel Kabilovitsch!" cried he, doffing his turban as if it had been a Christian cap.[48] "Your men are playful fellows, as frolicksome as a cat with a mole."

"But why are you here, my boy? and why this disguise?" interrupted Kabilovitsch.

The explanation was given in a few words;—on the one side the story of the slaughter at the village, and the adventures of Morsinia and Constantine; on the other of how the news of the Turkish raid reached the camp at Sfetigrade about noon, and the rescuing party had started at once under Kabilovitsch's command, and ridden at breakneck speed during the entire night in the hope of meeting the Turks before they emerged from the narrow valley.

Learning now that they were too late for this, Kabilovitsch halted his command, and with Constantine sought the place where Morsinia was in waiting. When the old man heard that the first assailants of the hamlet had been Albanians in disguise his rage was furious; and through his incautious words Morsinia learned more of her relation to the voivode Amesa than her reputed father had ever told her; for the mystery of her family had never been fully explained in her hearing. It had heretofore been deemed best that the girl should not be made the custodian of her own secret, lest her childish prattle might reveal it to others. Yet she had guessed the greater part of the problem of her identity. But Kabilovitsch was now led by the new curiosity which his inadvertent expressions had awakened in her, as well as by the remarkably discreet and cautious judgment she had displayed, to tell her the entire story of her own life. This was not, however, until orders had been passed through the troop for rest, and the fires hastily kindled along the roadside had prepared their refreshing breakfasts.

Removed from the hearing of all others, Kabilovitsch rehearsed to Morsinia and Constantine what the reader already knows of her extraction and early residence in Albania. He advised her to extreme caution against the slightest reference to herself as the young Mara de Streeses, and that she should insist upon her identity as the daughter of the Servian peasant Milosch and the sister of Constantine.

Morsinia buried her fair face in the gray beard of the old man, as years ago she had done when they sat upon the door-stone of their Balkan home, and sobbed as if his words had orphaned her. In a few moments she looked up into his fine but wrinkled face, and drawing it down to hers, kissed him as she used to do, and said lovingly,

"I must believe your words; but my heart holds you as my father: for father you have been to me, and child I shall be to you so long as God gives us to one another."

The old man pressed her temples between his rough hands, and looked long into her deep blue eyes, as he said slowly,

"Ay, father and mother both was I to thee, my child, from that terrible night, sixteen years ago. My rough arms have often cradled thee. But now you have a nobler and stronger protector in our country's father, the great Castriot. To him you must go; for it is no longer safe in these lonely valleys. Under his strong arm and all-watchful eye you will be amply protected. There are nameless enemies of the old house of De Streeses whom we must avoid as vigilantly as we avoid the Turks."

It was determined that Constantine should make a detour with her, and approach Sfetigrade from the south, giving out that they were fugitives from the lower country, which the enemy had also been raiding.

The colonel stated to his under officers, in hearing of the men, that the young Turk was really one of Castriot's scouts, and that the young woman was an accomplice. Borrowing from one and another sufficient Albanian costumes to substitute for Constantine's disguise, Kabilovitsch dismissed the couple.

There was no end to the badgering the officious soldier who had first arrested the scout received at the hands of his comrades. They jeered at his double mistake in taking the fellow yesterday as a Turkish spy in Albanian uniform, because he had slipped away so shrewdly, and now again being duped by him a real Albanian in Turkish disguise. Some threw the halter over the fellow's neck; others made mimic preparation for hamstringing him; while one presented him with an immense scroll of bark purporting to be his commission as chief of the department of secret service, finishing the mock presentation by shivering the bark over the fellow's head. The unhappy man contented himself philosophically:—

"No wonder General Castriot baffles the enemy when his own men cannot understand him. You were all as badly twisted by that fellow's tricks as I was. But I will never interfere with that red head again, though he wears a turban and is cutting the throat of the general himself."

Two days later a beautiful girl accompanied by her brother—who was as unlike her as the thorn bush is unlike the graceful flowering clematis that festoons its limbs, both of them in apparent destitution, refugees from near the Greek border—entered the town of Sfetigrade. By order of the general, to whom their piteous story was told by Kabilovitsch—for he had chanced, so he said, to come upon them as they were inquiring their way to the town—they were quartered with a family whose house was not far from the citadel. For some weeks the girl was an invalid. A raging fever had been induced by over excitement and the subsequent fatigue of the long journey. Colonel Kabilovitsch could not refrain from expressing his interest in the young woman by almost daily calls at the cottage where she lay. One day, when it was supposed by the surgeon that she might not live, the old man was observed to stand long at the cot upon which the sick girl was lying. A look of agony overspread his features when the surgeon, who had been feeling her pulse, laid her almost nerveless hand beneath the blanket.

"Dear, good old man," said the housewife. "I warrant he has laid some pretty one of his own in the ground. Maybe a child, or a lover, sometime back in the years. These things do come to us over and over again."

The brother of the sick girl scarcely noticed the visits of Colonel Kabilovitsch, except to respond to his questions when no one but himself could give the exact information about the patient's condition; for none watched with her so incessantly.

But her marvellous natural vitality enabled the sufferer to outlive the fever; and, as she became convalescent, the old colonel seemed to forget her. His interest was apparently in her suffering rather than in herself.

CHAPTER XX.

The battlements of Sfetigrade lay, like a ruffled collar, upon enormous shoulders of rock rising high above the surrounding country. Over them rose, like a massive head, the citadel with its bartizans projecting as a crown about the brow. The rock upon which the fortification stood was scarped toward the valley, so that it could be climbed only with the help of ladders, even though the assailants were unresisted by its defenders. The few spots which nature had left unguarded were now choked with abattis, or overlooked by bastions so skilfully constructed as to need far less courage and strength for their defence than were possessed by the bands of Dibrian and Epirot patriots who fought from behind them.

The assaults which Sultan Amurath launched against the place had been as frequent as the early summer showers, and his armies were beaten to pieces as the rain rebounded in spray and ran in streams from the rocks. The chagrin of the baffled Sultan reflected itself in the discouragement of his generals and the demoralization of their men. The presence of his majesty could not silence the mutual recriminations, the loud and rancorous strife with which brave officers sought to lay upon one another the responsibility for their defeat, rather than confess that the daily disasters were due to the superior genius commanding among their foes. Especially was the envy of the leaders of the other corps and branches of the service excited against the Janizaries, to whose unrivalled training and daring were due whatever minor victories had been won, and whatever exploits worthy of mention had been performed.

A lofty tent, whose projecting centre-pole bore the glittering brass crescent and star, and before the entrance to which a single horse-tail hung from the long spear, denoted the headquarters of a Sanjak Bey. In front of the tent walked two men in eager, and not altogether amiable, conversation. The one was the Bey, whose huge turban of white, inwound with green, indicated that his martial zeal was supplemented by equal enthusiasm for his faith; and that he had added to the fatigue of many campaigns against the infidels the toil of a more monotonous, though more satisfactory, pilgrimage to Mecca. His companion was an Aga of the Janizaries, second only in rank to the chief Aga.

The latter was speaking with a wrath which his courteous words but ill concealed—

"I do not impugn your honor or the sincerity of your motives, Caraza-Bey, in making your accusation against our Captain Ballaban; but the well-known jealousy which is everywhere manifested against our corps compels me to believe not a single word to the discredit of him or any of the Yeni-Tscheri without indubitable proof. I would allow the word of Captain Ballaban—knowing him so well as I do—to outweigh the oaths on the Koran of a score of those who, like yourself, have reason to be jealous of his superior courage."

"But your upstart captain's guilt can be proved, if not to your personal satisfaction, at least before those who will not care to ask your assent to their judgment," replied the other, not attempting to veil his hatred of the Aga, any more than his purpose of crushing the one of whom they were speaking.

"What will the lies of a whole sanjak of your hirelings avail against the honor of a Janizary?" replied the Aga. "If two horse-tails[49] hung from the standard yonder, I would not publicly disgrace Captain Ballaban by so much as ordering an inquiry at your demand. The Janizaries will take no suggestion from any but the Padishah."

"A curse on the brag of the Janizaries! The arrogancy of the Christian renegades needs better warrant than Ballaban can give it," sneered the Bey. "If you like, let the matter rest as it is. The whole army believes that one of your dervish-capped heroes—the best of the brood, I imagine—deserted his comrades in battle, and all for the sake of a captive girl."

"It is a lie!" shouted the Aga, drawing his sword upon him.

The attitude of the two officers drew a crowd, who rushed from all sides to witness the duel. Both were masters of sword play, so that neither obtained any sanguinary advantage before they were separated by the arrival of the chief Aga, who forbade his subaltern to continue the conflict. Upon hearing the occasion of the affray, the chief said:

"The trial of Captain Ballaban shall be had, with the publication of the fact that Caraza-Bey has assumed the position of his accuser; and, in the event of his charge proving false, he shall atone for his malice by submitting to any punishment the captain may indicate; and the force of the Janizaries shall execute it, though they cut the throats of his entire command in order to do it. We must first vindicate the honor of the corps, and then take vengeance upon its detractors. I demand that Caraza-Bey make good his charge to-morrow at the sixth hour, or accept the judgment of coward and vilifier, which our court shall then proclaim to the army."

At the appointed time on the day following, the tent of the chief Aga was the gathering place of the notable officers of the corps. Without, it differed from hundreds of other tents only in its size, and in the pennant indicating the rank of its occupant. Within, it was lined with a canopy of finest silk and woollen tapestries, on the blue background of which crescents and stars, cimeters and lance-heads, battle-axes, shields, turbans and dervish caps were artistically grouped with texts from the Koran, and skilfully wrought in braids and threads of gold. The canvas sides of the tent were now removed, making it an open pavilion, and inviting inspection and audience from any who desired to approach. A divan was at one side, and made a semicircle of about half the tent. Upon this sat the chief Aga, his cushion slightly raised above those at his side, which were occupied by the agas of lower rank. A group of officers filled the space beneath the tent; and soldiers of all grades made a dense crowd for several rods beyond into the open air.

The chief Aga waved his hand to an attendant, and the military court was formally opened. Several cases were disposed of before that of Captain Ballaban was called.

There was led in a stalwart soldier of middle age. Two witnesses deposed that, in a recent assault upon the enemy's works at Sfetigrade, when there was poured upon the assailants a shower of arrows and stones from the battlements above, this man, without orders from his officer, had cried, "Give way! Give way!" and that to this cry and his example were due the confusion of ranks and the retreat which followed.

The chief Aga turned and looked silently upon the man, awaiting his reply to the accusation. The accused was speechless. The chief then turned to the Aga to whose division the culprit belonged, that he might hear any plea that he should be pleased to offer for the soldier; but the Aga's face was stolid with indifference. The chief, without raising his head, sat in silence for a moment, as in solemn act of weighing the case. He then muttered an invocation of Allah as the Supreme Judge. He paused. A gleam of light circled above the man; a hissing sound of the cimeter and a thud were heard. The culprit's head rolled to the ground. His trunk swayed for an instant and fell.

This scene was apparently of little interest to the spectators. A second case only tested their patience. One was charged with having failed to deliver an order from the colonel of his orta, or regiment, to a captain of one of the odas, or companies. Both these officers testified, the one to having sent the order, the other to not having received it, and on this account to have failed to occupy a certain position with his men in a recent engagement with the enemy. The culprit alleged that it was impossible to deliver the order because of the enemy's movements at the time. The Aga of the division, being appealed to by the silent gaze of the judge, simply said:

"The man is brave;" when, by a motion of the hand, the judge dismissed the soldier together with the case.

The expectation not only of common soldiers, but also of officials, led them to crane their necks to look at the next comer. Even the ordinarily immobile features of the chief relaxed into an expression of anxiety as a young man walked down the aisle made by the reverent receding of the crowd to either side. He was not graceful in form. His body was beyond the proportion of his legs; though his arms compensated for any lack in the length of his lower limbs. His neck was thick, the head round, with full development of forehead, though that portion of his face was somewhat concealed by the short, bushy masses of red hair which protruded beneath his rimless Janizary cap. His face was homely, but strongly marked, evincing force of character as clearly as the convolutions of his muscles evinced animal strength and endurance. The brightness of his eye atoned for any lack of beauty in his features; as did his free and manly bearing make ample amends for deficiency in grace of form. Altogether he was a man to attract one's attention and hold it pleasantly.

Though he bent low to the earth in his obeisance to the chief officer of his troop, it was without the suggestion of obsequiousness, with that dignity which betokens real reverence and crowns itself with the honor it would give to another.

The chief Aga announced that, although the witnesses in this case were not of the order of the Yeni-Tscheri, and, therefore, had no claim to the consideration of the court, yet it pleased him in this peculiar case to waive the right to try the matter exclusively among themselves, that the good name of the Yeni-Tscheri might suffer no reproach. "Caraza-Bey," added the chief, "for some reason best known to himself does not accept the privilege we have extended him, to speak in our official presence what he has freely spoken elsewhere. We shall, therefore, hear any witnesses he may have sent."

One Lovitsch, belonging to the irregular auxiliary troops, testified that Captain Ballaban had organized a raid upon an Albanian village, and engaged himself and company for the venture; but had left them in the heat of the fight, not rejoining them until the second day. A common soldier deposed that the captain returned to the company early in the second evening, and induced him, the witness, and Koremi, to whom the captain had entrusted a beautiful captive, to bring the girl to the rear, under plea of getting from her information regarding the enemy; and had then mysteriously disappeared with her. Koremi corroborated this testimony.

Captain Ballaban gave a look of puzzled curiosity as he heard this; but otherwise evinced not the slightest emotion.

The crowd gazed upon the young captain with disappointment while testimony was being given. The agas present being unable to conceal the deep anxiety depicted upon their countenances, as they leaned forward with impatience to hear from his lips some exonerating statement, which, however, they feared could not be given. A few faces wore a look of contemptuous triumph. But two persons maintained composure. It might be expected that the chief Aga, from his familiarity with such scenes, if not from the propriety of his being the formal embodiment of the rigid and remorseless court of the Janizaries, whose decrees he was to announce, would show no emotion, however strong his sympathy with the prisoner.

The endangered man answered his gaze with equal stolidity when the judge turned to him for his defence; but he remained speechless. A shudder of horror ran through the crowd. The executioner stepped forward to the side of the apparently convicted person. A slight ringing sound, as the long curve of the well-tempered blade grazed the ground, sent to every heart the chilling announcement of his readiness. The chief Aga turned to the others, but sought in vain any palliatory suggestion or appeal for mercy, except in the mute agony of their looks. The chief then raised his eyes as if for the invocation of Allah's confirmation of the sentence as just. But his prayer was a strange one:—"Oh, Allah! thou hast given a wondrous spirit to this man; a courage worthy of the soul of Othman himself!" Then rising with excitement he addressed the throng in rapid speech.

"Look upon this man, my brothers of the shining face![50]

"Did he quail at the ring of the executioner's sword? Did he even change color when he heard the damning testimony? A true son of Kara Khalif is he. A word from his lips would have exonerated him, yet he would not speak it lest it should reveal the secrets of our service, which he would keep with dead lips rather than live to tell them. But I shall be his witness; and you, my brothers, shall be his judges. Captain Ballaban was recalled from the raid by our brother Sinam, aga of the division to which the captain belongs. But, alas! the sword of Scanderbeg has loosed Sinam's soul for flight to paradise, and he could not testify to this man's fidelity. But I know the order of Sinam; in this very tent it was written. And though the faithful messenger who carried it was slain in after conflict, the order was executed by Captain Ballaban to every letter: every moment of his absence from the raid is accounted for on my tablets"—tapping his forehead as he spoke.

A loud shout burst from the crowd which made the tent shake as if filled with a rising wind.

"Ballaban! Ballaban!" cried the multitude, lifting the brave fellow upon their shoulders.

"Take that for your grin when you thought he was guilty!" shouted one, as he delivered a tremendous blow upon the face of another.

"Death to Caraza-Bey! Down with the lying villain!" rose the cry, the crowd beginning to move, as if animated by a common spirit, to seek the envious commandant of the neighboring corps. But they halted at the tent side waiting for the sign of permission from their chief, who, by the motion of his hand forbade the assault which would have brought on a terrific battle between the Janizaries and their rivals throughout the army.

"We shall deal with Caraza-Bey hereafter, if his shame does not send him skulking from the camps," said the chief, resuming his sitting posture, and restoring order about him.

"Summon the witnesses again," he proceeded.

"You Lovitsch testified truly as to Captain Ballaban's absence, and may go. But you twin rascals who swore to his escape with the girl, your heads shall go to Caraza-Bey, and your black souls to the seventh hell.[51] Executioner, do your office!"

"Hold!" cried Ballaban, as the man drew his cimeter. "Upon my return to the company I found my fair captive gone, and under such strange circumstances that I can see that these good fellows may be honest in what they have stated. I bespeak thy mercy, Sire, for them."

"Captain Ballaban's will shall be ours," replied the chief, with a wave of his hand dismissing the assemblage. As the crowd withdrew, he said, "My brothers, the agas, will remain, and Captain Ballaban."

The sides of the tent were put up. The guard patrolled without at a distance of sixty paces, that no one might overhear the conversation in the council.

CHAPTER XXI.

"Has Captain Ballaban any explanation of this conspiracy against him?" asked one.

"None!" was the laconic reply. But after a moment's pause he added: "Perhaps there was no conspiracy, except as our jealous neighbors are willing to take advantage of every unseemly circumstance that can be twisted to point against any of the Yeni-Tscheri. This may explain something. The girl that I captured at the Giaour village was no common peasant, by the cheek of Ayesha! Her face, as lit by the blazing konak, was of such beauty as I have never seen except in some dreams of my childhood. Her voice and manner in commanding me to liberate her were those of one well-born or used to authority. It was well that I bethought me to give her into the keeping of that dull-headed Koremi, or she might have bewitched me into obeying her and letting her go. My belief is that the girl was rescued. It may be that our men were heavily bribed to give her up, or that some one personated myself and demanded her, and that the story of my return may be thus accounted for, but I cannot see any treachery in Koremi's manner. If she was of any special value to Scanderbeg he would find some way of running her off, though he had to make a league with the devil and assume my shape to do it. The Arnaouts, you know, believe that the Vili are in collusion with Scanderbeg, and that one of them, a he-vili, Radisha, or some such sprite, is his body servant. That will account for it all," added he, laughing at the conceit.

"But," said the second Aga, "Caraza-Bey's insult was none the less, if your surmise be true. We must wash it out in the blood of a hundred or so of his hirelings to-morrow."

The chief shook his head.

"But," continued the second Aga, "the jealousy of our corps must be punished. You see how near it came to losing for us the life of one of our bravest. Caraza-Bey must fight me to-morrow."

"Bravo!" cried all; while one added, "And let the challenge be public, that the entire force of the Yeni-Tscheri be on hand and all the troops of the Beyler Bey of Anatolia, and—" lowering his voice— "we can manage it so that the fight become general, and teach these reptiles of Asiatics that the Yeni-Tscheri are the right hand and the brain of the empire."

"Ay, are the empire!" said another. "Let us have a scrimmage that will be interesting. The war with Scanderbeg is getting monotonous. One day he comes into our camp, like a butcher into a slaughter pen, and the next day we are marched out to him, to be slaughtered elsewhere. It requires one to be full of Islam, the Holy Resignation, to stand this sort of life. Yes! let's do a little fighting in our own way and get rid of some of this soldier spawn which the Padishah has brought with him from across the Bosphorus!"

"But you forget, my brothers," said Ballaban, "that this fight with the Sanjak Bey does not belong to any one beside myself. His lie was about me. I then am the man to take off his head; and I think I can do it with as good grace as the executioner was nigh to taking off mine just now."

"No, Captain!" said the chief. "Your rank is as yet below the Bey's, and he would make that an excuse for declining the gage. Besides," said he, lowering his voice, "I have special service for you elsewhere, which cannot be delayed."

When the agas, making the low courtesy, retired, the chief walked with Ballaban.

"Captain, I have heard no report of the errand upon which you were sent."

"No, Sire, I was arrested the moment I returned to camp."

"You succeeded, I know, from the movements of the enemy: although the slowness of the Padishah in ordering an advance, when Scanderbeg was diverted by your ruse, prevented our taking advantage of it."

"Yes," said Ballaban, "I succeeded as well as any one could, not being seconded from headquarters. But I did some service incidentally, and picked up some helpful information. The night after leaving the hamlet we fired, I fell in with a company of Arnaouts who were coming to the rescue. They would have got into the narrow valley before our men got out, had I not managed to trick them. I was in disguise and readily passed for an Arnaout lout, giving them false information about the direction our party had taken, and so lost them an hour or two, and saved the throats of Lovitsch's fellows, a mere rabble, good enough for a raid, but not to be depended upon for a square fight. But we must have no more raids. Scanderbeg has means of communication as quick and subtle as if the clouds were his signals and the stars were his beacons.

"I then came upon a Dibrian settlement, pretending to be a fugitive from the valleys to the north; and entertained the villagers with bug-a-boo stories about the hosts of men with turbans on their heads and little devils on their shoulders who had destroyed all that country, and were now pouring down toward the south.

"By the way," continued Ballaban laughing, "there was an old fellow there, very lame, with a patch over one eye, who could hardly stand leaning on his staff, he was so palsied with age. But the one eye that was open was altogether too bright for his years; and his legs didn't shake enough for one who rattled his staff so much. So I put him down as one of Scanderbeg's lynxes—they are everywhere. I described to him the Moslem movements in such a way as to let a trained soldier believe that we had entirely changed front, with the prospective raising of the siege of Sfetigrade and alliance with the Venetians for carrying the war farther to the north. The old codger took the bait, and asked fifty questions in the tone of a fellow whose head had been used for a mush-pot instead of a brain-holder; but every question was in its meaning as keen as a dagger-thrust into the very ribs of the military situation. Well! I helped him to all the information he wanted; when with a twinkle in his eye, he hobbled away, as wise as an owl when a fresh streak of day-light has struck him: and before night the whole country to the borders of Sternogovia was alive with Scanderbeg's scouts; and every cross-path was a rendezvous of his broken-winded cavalry.

"I saw one thing which gave me a hint I may use some day. At a village the women were carrying water from a spring far down in a ravine, though there was a fine flowing fountain quite near them. It seems that a dog had got into the fountain about a month before, and was drowned. These Dibrians believe that, if any one should drink the water of such a spring before as many days have passed as the dog has hairs on his tail, the water will make his bowels rot, and his soul go into a dog's body when he dies.

"The next night I spent inside the walls of Sfetigrade."

"No!" cried the chief. "Why, man, you must fly the air with the witches!"

"Not at all, I have some acquaintances in that snug little place; and when they go to bed they hang the key of the town on a moonbeam for me. If it is not there, I have only to vault over the walls, or sail over them on the clouds, or burrow under them with the moles, or hold my breath until I turn into a sprite, like the wizards on the Ganges, and lo! I am in. Well! that night I lodged with a worthy family of Sfetigrade, pretending that I was a poor fugitive from the very town we had raided a few nights before. And, by the hair of the beautiful Malkhatoon![52] I saw there the very captive I had taken. She lay asleep on a cot just within a doorway—unless I was asleep myself and dreaming, as I half believe I was."

"Yes, it was a dream of yours, no doubt, Captain," said the chief, "for when a young fellow like you once gets a fair woman in his arms, as you say you had her in yours the night of the raid, she never gets out of the embrace of his imagination. He will see her everywhere, and go about trying to hug her shadow. Beware illusions, Captain! They use up a fellow's thoughts, make him too meek-eyed to see things as a soldier should. The love passion will take the energy out of the best of us, as quickly as the fire takes the temper out of the best Damascene blade."

"I thank you for your counsel, Aga," replied Ballaban, his face coloring as deep as his hair. "But there was one thing I saw with a waking eye."

"And what was that?"

"That there was but one well of water in the town of Sfetigrade; the one in the citadel court. But another thing I didn't see, though I searched the place for it;—and that was a dog to throw into the well; or I would have thirsted the superstitious garrison out. They have eaten up the last cur."

"Then the surrender must come soon," said the Aga.

"No," replied Ballaban, "for the voivode Moses Goleme came into the town as I was leaving, driving a flock of sheep which he had stolen from us; for he had cut off an entire train of provisions which had been sent to our camp from Adrianople."

"Then I must have you off at once on another errand, Captain. You see yonder line of mountains off to the northwest. It may be necessary to shift the war to that region for a while. Ivan Beg,[53] the brother-in-law of Scanderbeg, has raised a pack of wild fiends among those hills of his, and is driving out all our friends. Nothing can stand against him unless it be the breasts of the Yeni-Tscheri. Scanderbeg may compel us to raise the siege of Sfetigrade, for he bleeds us daily like a leech. A diversion after Ivan Beg will at least be more honorable than a return to Adrianople. Now I would know exactly the passes and best places for fortification in Ivan's country; and you, Captain, are the man to find them out. You should be off at once. Take your time and spy thoroughly, making a map and transmitting to me your notes. And while there feel the people. It is rumored that the young voivode, Amesa, is restless under the leadership of Scanderbeg. If a dissension could be created among these Arnaouts, it would be well. Amesa has a large personal following in that north country; for his castle is just on the border of it."

"But," replied Ballaban, "I must first pluck the beard of that cowardly Caraza-Bey!"

"No! I forbid it. Your blood is worth more in your own veins than anywhere else. I should not consent to your risking a drop of it in personal combat with any one except Scanderbeg himself."

The fight between the second Aga and Caraza-Bey did not take place. That worthy was conveniently sent by Sultan Amurath, who had learned of the feud, to look after certain turbulent Caramanians; and leaving behind him a wake of curses upon all Janizaries from the chief to the pot-scourers, he took his departure for the Asiatic provinces.

Had he remained, the Turks would have had enough to occupy them without this gratuitous mêlée. For during the night scouts brought word that Scanderbeg had massed all his forces, that were not behind the walls of Sfetigrade, at a point to the right of the Turkish lines. Hardly had the army been faced to meet this attack, when scouts came from the left, reporting serious depredations on that flank. Amurath, in the uncertainty of the enemy's movement, divided his host. The Asiatics were given the northern and the Janizaries the southern defence; either of them outnumbering any force Scanderbeg could send against them. But, as a tornado cuts its broad swath through a forest, uprooting or snapping the gigantic trees, showing its direction only by the after track of desolation, which it cuts in almost unvarying width, while beyond its well defined lines scarcely a branch is broken or a nest overturned among the swaying foliage—so Scanderbeg swooped from east to west through the very centre of the Turkish encampment, gathering up arms and provisions, and strewing his track with the bodies of the slain. By the time that the Moslems were sufficiently concentrated to offer effective resistance the assailants were gone.

At the head of the victorious band Scanderbeg rode a small and ungainly, but tough and tireless animal—like most of the Albanian horses, which were better adapted to threading their way down the pathless mountain sides, than to curveting in military parade—their lack of natural ballast being made up by the enormous burdens they were trained to carry.

The figure and bearing of Scanderbeg, however, amply compensated the lack of martial picturesqueness in his steed. He was in full armor, except that his sword arm was bared. His beard of commingled yellow and gray fell far down upon the steel plates of his corselet. A helmet stuck far back upon his head, showed the massive brow which seemed of ampler height, from the Albanian custom of clipping short, or shaving the hair off from the upper forehead.

Wheeling his horse, he engaged in conversation with a stout, but awkward soldier.

"You and your beast are well matched, Constantine. You both need better training before you are fit to parade as prisoners of Amurath. You sit your horse as a cat rides a dog, though you do hold on as well with your heel as she with her claws. Your short legs would do better to clamp the belly of a crocodile."

"Yes, we are both accustomed to marching and fighting in our own way, rather than in company," replied Constantine. "But the beast has not failed me by a false step; not when we leaped the fallen oak and landed in the gulch back yonder. The beast came down as safely and softly as on the training lawn."

"And you have done as well yourself," replied the general. "That was a bad play though you had with the Turk as we cut our way through the last knot of them. But for a side thrust which I had time to give at your antagonist, while waiting for the slow motions of my own, I fear that your animal would be lighter now by just your weight. You strike powerfully, but you do not recover yourself skilfully. A good swordsman would get a response into your ribs before you could deal him a second. Here, I will show you! Now thrust! Strike! No, not so; but hard, villainously, at me, as if I were the Turk who stole your girl! So! Again! Again!—Now learn this movement"—pressing his own sword steadily against his companion's, and bending him back until he was almost off his horse. "And this," dealing so tremendous a slash with the back of the sword that Constantine's arm was almost numbed by the effort to resist it.—"And this!" transmitting a twisting motion from his own to his opponent's weapon, so that for one instant they seemed like two serpents writhing together; but at the next Constantine's sword was twirled out his hand.

"You will make a capital swordsman with practice, my boy. And the girl? Keep a sharpened eye for her; and tell me if so much as a new spider's web be woven at her door."

A peasant woman stood by the path as they proceeded, holding out her hand for alms, as she ran beside the general's horse. He leaned toward her to give something; but, as his hand touched hers, she slipped a bit of white rag into it:

"The map of the roads, Sire, twixt this and Monastir!"

"And your son, my good woman?" inquired the general kindly.

"Ah! the Virgin pity me, Sire, for he died. We could not stop the bleeding, for the lance's point had cut a vein. But I have a daughter who can take his place. She knows the signals—for he taught them to her—and can make the beacon as well as he; and is as nimble of foot to climb the crag. But please, Sire, the child did not remember if the enemy going west was to be signalled by lighting the beacon before or after the bright star's setting."

"Just after, good mother. If they go to the east and cross the mountain, fire the beacon just before the star sets. And the brightest of all stars be for your own hope and comfort!"

"And for dear Albania's and thine own!" replied the woman, disappearing in the crowd, as a man dashed close to Scanderbeg on a well-jaded steed.

"The Turkish auxiliaries will be at the entrance to the defile in thirty hours."

"Your estimate of their number, neighbor Stephen?"

"From three to five thousand."

"Not more?"

"Not more in the first detachment. A second of equal size follows, but a day in the rear."

"Good! Take with you our nephew, Musache de Angeline, and five hundred Epirots each. This will be sufficient to prevent the first detachment getting out of the pass. I will strike the second from the rear as soon as they enter the pass. They can not manœuvre in that crooked and narrow defile, and we will destroy them at our leisure. Strike promptly. Farewell!"

"Miserable sheep!" he muttered, "why will these Turks so tempt me to slaughter them?"

CHAPTER XXII.

Upon the southern slope of the Black Mountain—that is, on the rising uplands which lead from Albania to Montenegro—lay the ancient and princely estates of the De Streeses. A dense forest of pines spread for miles, like a myriad gigantic pillars in some vast temple. They seemed to support, as it were, some Titanic dome surrounded with pinnacles and turrets, a huge cluster of jagged rocks, which was called by those who gazed upon it from leagues away "The Eyrie." In the midst of these great monoliths, and hardly distinguishable from them, rose the walls of the new castle which the voivode Amesa had built upon the ruins of that destroyed at the time of the massacre of its former possessor.

The horse of the voivode stood within the court, his head drooping, and the white sweat-foam drying upon his heated flanks. His master paced up and down the enclosure, engaged in low but excited conversation with a soldier.

The voivode was of princely mien; tall, but compactly built; face full in its lower development, and somewhat sensual; eyes gray and restless, which gave one at first a sharp, penetrating glance, and then seemed to hide behind the half-closed lids, like some wild animal that inspects the hunter hastily, then takes to covert.

"You are sure, Drakul, that the party which drove you from the hamlet were Turks, and not Arnaouts in disguise, like yourselves?"

"I could not mistake," said Drakul, a hard-faced man, one of whose eyebrows was arched higher than the other, and whose entire countenance was distorted from the symmetrical balance of its two sides, giving an expression of duplicity and cruelty. "I could not mistake, noble Amesa, for I have too often eyed those rascals over the point of my sword not to know a Turk in the dark. But all the fiends combined against us that night. We left our two best men dead, and the two we wanted, the boy and the girl, escaped us. The she-witch did not come back to the village the next day; but the red-headed imp did, and raved like a hyena when he found the girl missing. I watched him as he suddenly went off, doubtless, to some spot they both knew of. The young thief stole the clothes off a dead Turk. The next day we spied him again; this time with that Arnaud-Kabilovitsch, Albanian-Servian, forester-colonel, or whatever he may be, who came back when Castriot did. The fellow escaped us a second time."

"Track him! track him!" cried Amesa spitefully. "I will make you rich, Drakul, the day you bring me that fox's brush of red hair from his head."

"I have tracked him and could take you to the very spot where he and the girl are to-day," said the man. "Come this way, my noble Amesa,"—leading him to the side of the court commanding a far stretch of country to the north-west. "Now let your eye follow Skadar[54] along the left shore: then up the great river.[55] Not two leagues from the mountain spur that bends the stream out of your sight, at the hamlet just off the road into your Uncle Ivan's country—"

"The stargeshina has a red goitre like a turkey cock? I know every hut in the hamlet," interrupted Amesa. "But why think you she is there?"

"Why? I have seen her, and him with her. I followed the fellow day after day. Once I saw him yonder on the spur. He clipped the bark of a tree, and in the smoothed spot cut a line. A little beyond he did the same thing again. He spied this way and that way with all the pains one would take to pick a way for an army. Then he took a roll of paper from his bosom, and marked down something for every mark he had made upon the trees. And when he was out of sight I took the range of his marks, and by St. Theckla! they pointed straight to a path which led down the mountain to the ford in the great river that is opposite the old turkey cock's konak."

"But you may have mistaken the man," suggested Amesa.

"Not I, Sire. I know his head as well as a bull knows a red rag; and his duck legs, and his walk like an ambling horse."

"It is he," submitted Amesa. "But how know you that the girl was there in the hamlet?"

"Did I not see her, my noble Amesa? And could I not know her from the look of her father? If I could forget him living, I have never passed a night without seeing his face as it was dead, when we dragged him to the burning beams of the old house that stood on this——"

"Silence!" cried Amesa in a sudden burst of rage. "How dare you allude to my uncle's death without my bidding?"

There was a pause for a few moments, during which Amesa stamped heavily upon the stone pavement of the court as he walked, like one endeavoring to shake off from his person some noisome thing that troubled him. The man resumed—

"Besides, the children of the village said she was a stray kid there, and not of kin to anybody. And while I was there the same stump-headed fellow who marked the direction came to the hamlet."

"Be ready to accompany me to-morrow, Drakul. You can say that we are scouting."

CHAPTER XXIII.

The lake of Skadar lay like an immense lapis lazuli within its setting of mountains, which, on the east, were golden with the rays of the declining sun, and on the west, enameled in emerald with the dense shadows their summits dropped upon them. The surface of the water was unbroken, save here and there by black spots where a pair of loons shrieked their marital unhappiness, or a flock of wild ducks floated, like a miniature fleet, about the reed-fringed shores of some little island. Had there been watchers on the fortress of Obod, which lay on the cliff just above where the Tsernoyevitcha enters Skadar, they would have espied a light shallop gliding along the eastern bank of the lake. This contained the voivode Amesa and his attendant. Just at night-fall they reached the cavern, whose hidden recesses begot a hundred legends which the weird shadows of the cave clothed in forms as fantastic as their own, and which still flit among the hamlets of Montenegro. It was said that whoever should sleep within the cave would rest his head on the bosoms of the nymphs:—only let him take care that their love does not prevent his ever waking. Amesa and his companion were courageous, but discretion led them to wind the strooka about their heads, and seek without a couch of pine needles between the enormous roots of the trees which had dropped them.

The dawn had just silvered the east, and the coming sun transformed the cold blue tints of Skadar into amber, when they entered the river. The great stream wound through the broad lowlands of Tsetinie, girdled with rocky hills. Then it dashed in impetuous floods between more straightened banks, or lingered, as if the river spirit would bathe himself in the deep pools that were cooled by the springs at their bottoms. Though familiar with the phenomenon, they loitered that they might watch the schools of fish which were so dense in places as to impede the stroke of the oar blade, and tint the entire stream with their dull silvery gleam.[56] Emerging from a tortuous channel, through which the river twisted itself like a vast shining serpent, they came to a cluster of houses that nestled in a gorge. These houses were made of stone, and so covered with vines as to be hardly distinguishable from the dense shrubbery that clambered over the rocks about them.

Amesa was warmly greeted by the stargeshina who occupied the konak, or principal house. The older people remembered the visitor as the comely lad who, before the return of George Castriot, was almost the only male representative of that noble family left in the land. The voivode was honored with every evidence that the villagers felt themselves complimented by the visit of their guest, whatever business or caprice might have brought him thither.

A simple repast was provided, in which the courtesy of the service on the part of the stargeshina more than compensated any poverty in the display of viands;—though there were set forth meats dried in strips in the smoke of an open fire; eggs; sweet, though black bread; and wine pressed from various mountain berries, and allowed to ferment in skins. As they sat beside a low table at the doorway of the konak, the stargeshina offered a formal salâm, the zdravitsa, which was half a toast and half a prayer, and extended his hand to Amesa in the protestation of personal friendship. At the meal the glories of Castriot and Ivan Beg—or Ivo, as the peasants called him—were duly recited.

"But why," said the old man, rising to his feet with the enthusiasm of the sentiment—"Why should the country sing the praises of George Castriot, who for thirty years was willing to be a Turk and fight for an alien faith? Your shoulders, noble Amesa—Prince Amesa, my loyal heart would call you—could as well have borne the burden of the people's defence. Your arm could strike as good a blow as his for Albania. Your blood is that of the Castriots, and untainted by Moslem touch. Your estates, since you have become heir to the lands of De Streeses, make you our richest and most influential voivode."

These words made the eyes of Amesa flash, not with any novel pleasure, rather with an ambition to which he was no stranger. But the flash was smothered at once by the half-closed eyelids, and he responded—

"I ought not to hear such words, my good friend. My Uncle George is the hero of the hour. The people need a hero in whom they believe; and the very mystery of his life for the thirty years among the Turks, and the romance of his return, make him a convenient hero."

"But Sire, my noble—my Prince Amesa—do you not daily hear such words as I speak? The thought is as common as the Pater Noster, and echoes from Skadar to Ochrida. It was but a week since a young Albanian passed through this border country, whispering everywhere that the land was ready to cry Amesa's name rather than the reformed renegade, George Castriot's; that Scanderbeg, the Lord Alexander, the strutting title the Turks gave him, was an offence to the free hearts of the people."

"Ah! and what sort of a man for look was this Albanian?" asked Amesa in surprise.

"A sturdy youth of, say, twenty summers, with hair like a turban which had been worn by a dozen slaughtered Turks, so blood red is it."

Amesa gave a puzzled look toward Drakul, who was eating his meal at a little distance, but whose ears seemed to prick up like those of a horse at this description.

"It is likely that he may be again in the village this very night. Our neighbor next lodged him. I will ask him if he will return," said the stargeshina, leaving the konak for a little.

"It is he; it's that Constantine," said Drakul, coming nearer to Amesa. "The wily young devil is ready to betray your Uncle George. That will make the matter easier."

"The way is clear, then," replied Amesa. "I am glad that the raid was not successful. It might have led to further blood. With this fellow in league with us, it is straight work and honorable."

The stargeshina reported the man would probably be in again that very night, and added:

"I would you could see him; for though he is fair spoken, there is some mystery in his going day after day among these mountains, like a hound who is looking for a lost scent."

"Perhaps he is attracted here by some of the fair maidens of the hamlets," suggested Amesa, looking at Drakul, who was tearing a bit of jerked meat in his teeth, apparently intent only upon that selfish occupation.

"It may well be, for our neighbor here has harbored a bit of stray womanhood which might tempt a monk to lodge there rather than in his cell," said the old man.

A shout from above them attracted their attention to a merry company which was coming down the mountain. It was the procession of the Dodola. Drought threatened to destroy the scanty grain growing in the narrow valleys, and the vines on the terraces cut out of the steep hills. According to an ancient custom, a young maiden had been taken by her companions into the woods, stripped of her usual garments, and reclothed in the leaves and flowers of the endangered vegetation. Long grasses and stalks of grain were matted in many folds about her person, and served as a base for artistic decoration with every variety of floral beauty. Her feet were buskined in clover blossoms. A kilt of broad-leaved ferns hung from her waist, which was belted with a broad zone of wild roses. White and pink laurel blossoms made her bodice. An ivy wreath upon her brows was starred with white daisies, and plumed with the stems and hanging bells of the columbine.

The Dodola thus appeared as the impersonation of floral nature athirst for the vivifying rains. Her attendants, who led her in a leash of roses, chanted a hymn, the refrain of which was a prayer to Elijah, who, since he brought the rain at Carmel, is supposed by the peasants of Albania to be that saint to whom Providence has committed the shepherding of the clouds. As the procession wound down the terraced paths between the houses, the Dodola was welcomed by the matrons of the hamlet, who stood each in her own doorway, with hair gathered beneath a cap of coins, teeth enameled in black, fingers tipped brownish-red with henna. The maidens sung a verse of their hymn at each cottage; and, at the refrain, the housewife poured upon the head of the leaf-clad Dodola a cup of water; repeating the last line of the chorus, "Good Saint Elias, so send the rain!"

As the Dodola paused before the konak, Amesa said, quite enthusiastically, and designing to be overheard by the fair girl who took the part of thirsting nature, "If Elias can refuse the prayer of so much womanly beauty, I swear, by Jezebel, that I shall hereafter believe, with the Turks, that the austere old prophet has become bewitched with the houris in paradise, and so does not care to look into the faces of earthly damsels."

"You may still keep your Christian faith, for the Dodola has won the favor of the Thunderer,"[57] replied the stargeshina. "Listen to his love-making in response to the witchery of that wild dove! Do you hear it?"

The distant murmur of a coming shower confirmed the credulity of the peasants.

"Yes, soon the Holy Virgin will turn her bright glances upon us,"[58] said he looking at the sky.

"Who is that wild dove who acts the Dodola?" inquired Amesa.

"The one I told you of, who has come into our neighbor's cot," replied the old man. "But only the sharp eyes of the crows saw where she came from. Did she not speak our tongue and know our ways as well as any of us, I should say she was one of the Tsigani who were driven out of the morning land by Timour.[59] Yet it may be that her own story is true. She says she had two lovers in her village; and these two were brothers in God, who had taken the vow before heaven and St. John to help and never to hinder each other in whatever adventure of love or brigandage, at cost of limb or life. But as the hot blood of neither of these lovers could endure to see this nymph in the arms of the other, it was determined that she should be slain by the hand of both, rather than that the sacred brotherhood should be broken. By her own father's hearth the two daggers were struck together at her heart. But the strong arms of the slayers collided, and both blows glanced. She escaped and fled, and came hither."

"And you believe this story?" asked Amesa, with a look of incredulity mingled with triumph, as of one who knew more than the narrator.

"I believe her story, noble Amesa, because—because no one has told me any other. But—" He shook his head.

"Does not the young stranger you spoke of know something of her, that he prowls about this neighborhood?" asked the guest.

"It may be. I had not thought it, but it may well be! Hist—!"

The Dodola passed by, returning to her own cottage. As she did so her bright black eyes glanced coquettishly at the stranger from beneath her disarranged chaplet of flowers and dishevelled hair. She soon returned, having assumed her garments as a peasant maid, but with evident effort to make this simple attire set off the great natural beauty of face and form, of which she was fully conscious. Her forehead was too low; but Pygmalion could not have chiselled a brow and temples upon which glossy black ringlets clustered more bewitchingly. Her eyes flashed too cold a fire light to give one the impression of great amiability in their possessor; but the long lashes which drooped before them, partially veiled their stare so as to give the illusion of coyness, if not of maidenly modesty. Her mouth was perhaps sensuously curved; but was one of those marvellously plastic ones which can tell by the slightest arching or compressing of the lips as much of purpose or feeling as most people can tell in words:—dangerous lips to the possessor, if she be guileless and unsuspicious, for they reveal too much of her soul to others who have no right to know its secrets; dangerous lips to others if she would deceive, for they can lie, consummately, wickedly, without uttering a word. Her complexion was scarcely brunette; rather that indescribable fairness in which the whiteness of alabaster is tinged with the blood of perfect health, slightly bronzed by constant exposure to the sunshine and air—a complexion seldom seen except in Syria, the Greek Islands, or Wales. Her form was faultless,—just at that stage of development when the grace and litheness of childhood are beginning to be lost in the statelier mysteries of womanly beauty; that transition state between two ideals of loveliness, which, from the days of Phidias, has lured, but always eluded, the artist's skill to reproduce.

The girl's face flushed with the consciousness of being gazed at approvingly by the courtly stranger. But the pretty toss of her head showed that the blush was due as much to the conceit of her beauty as to bashfulness. As she talked with the other maidens, she glanced furtively toward the door of the konak, where Amesa sat. The young voivode foresaw that it would not be difficult to entice the girl herself to be the chief agent in any plan he might have for her abduction.

He needed, however, to make more certain of her identity with the object of his search. He could discern no trace of Mara De Streeses in her face; much less in her manner. Since Drakul had suggested it, he imagined a resemblance to De Streeses himself, whose bearing was haughty and his temperament fiery.

The evening brought the young man of whom the stargeshina had spoken. His resemblance to the description given him of Constantine left no doubt in Amesa's mind of his being the mysterious custodian of the heiress to his estates. The young Servian he supposed would at once recognize him as Amesa; for, as a prominent officer in the army, his face would be well known to all who had been in Castriot's camps, even if the gossip of the villagers did not at once inform him of his presence. It were best then, thought Amesa, to boldly confront him; win him, if possible, to his service; if not, destroy him.

The young stranger was at once on frolicksome terms with the village girls and lads; and Amesa thought he observed that through it all the fellow kept a sharp, if not a suspicious, eye upon him. Lest he should escape, the voivode invited him to walk beyond the houses of the village. When out of sight and hearing he suddenly turned upon the young man, and, laying a hand upon his shoulder, exclaimed,

"You are known, man!"

Upon the instant the stranger was transformed from the sauntering peasant into a gladiator, with feet firmly planted, the left hand raised as a shield, and the right grasping a yataghan which had been concealed upon his person. Amesa, though the aggressor, was thrown upon the defensive, and was compelled to retreat in order to gain time for the grip of his weapon.

The two men stood glaring into each other's eyes as there each to read his antagonist's movement before his hand began to execute it.

"I did not know that a Servian peasant was so trained," said Amesa, still retreating before the advance of his opponent, who gave him no opportunity to assume the offensive.

"For whom do you take me that you dare to lay a rough hand on me?" said the man, half in menace, and yet apparently willing to discover if his assailant were right in his surmise.

"Arnaud's man and I need not be enemies," said Amesa, seeing no chance of relieving himself from the advantage the other had gained in the sword play. "I can reward you better than he or Castriot."

A smile passed over the man's face, which Amesa might have detected the meaning of had his mind been less occupied with thoughts about his personal safety from the yataghan, whose point was seeking his throat according to the most approved rules of single combat.

"And what if I am Arnaud's man?"

As he said this the yataghan made a thorough reconnoissance of all the vulnerable parts of Amesa's body from the fifth rib upwards, followed by Amesa's dagger in ward.

"You do not deny it?" said the Albanian between breaths.

"I deny nothing. Nor need I confess anything, since you say I am known."

"Shall we be friends?" asked Amesa, cautiously lowering his arm.

"You made war, and can withdraw its declaration, or take the consequences," was the reply.

The two men put up their weapons.

"So good a soldier as you are should not be here guarding a girl," said Amesa.

"Guarding a girl?" said the man in amazement, but, recollecting himself, added, "And why not guard a girl?"

"Come," replied Amesa, "you and I can serve each other. You can do that for me which no other man can; and I can give to you more gold than any other Albanian can."

"And when you are king of Albania, Prince Amesa, you can reward me with high appointment," said the stranger with a slight sneer, which, however, Amesa did not notice, at the moment thinking of what the stargeshina had said of the man's interest in the movement against his uncle's leadership.

"You have but to ask your reward when that event comes," he replied.

"I will swear to serve Amesa against Scanderbeg to the death," said the man offering his hand.

"You know the girl's true story?" asked Amesa.

"Of course," was the cautious reply. "But of that I may not speak a word. I can leave his service whose man you say I am, but I cannot betray anything he may have told me. As you know the girl's story it is needless to tempt me to divulge it," added he, with shrewd non-committal of himself to any information that the other might recognize as erroneous.

"You speak nobly for a Servian," said the voivode.

"How do you know I am a Servian?" asked the stranger.

"Partly from your accent. You have not got our pure Albanian tongue, though it is now six years you have been talking it. And then Arnaud—Colonel Kabilovitsch—came back as a Servian. Is it not so?" asked Amesa, noticing the surprised look which the mention of Kabilovitsch's name brought to the man's face.

For a while the stranger was lost in thought; but with an effort throwing off a sort of reverie, he said:

"Pardon my silence. I have been thinking of your proposal. May I follow you to the village after a little? I would think over how best I can meet your proposition, my Prince Amesa."

"I will await you at the konak. But first let us swear friendship!" said the voivode.

"Heartily!" was the response. "With Amesa as against Scanderbeg."

"You will induce the girl to go with me to my castle. She will fare better there than here, playing Dodola to these ignorant peasants."

"It is agreed."

As Amesa disappeared, the man sat down upon a huge root of a tree, which for lack of earth had twined itself over the rock. He buried his face in his hands—

"Strange! strange! is all this. Kabilovitsch? the girl? Not my little playmate on the Balkans—sweet faced Morsinia. The Dodola here is not she. If Uncle Kabilovitsch is Colonel Kabilovitsch, or this Arnaud he speaks of, then this treacherous Amesa is on the wrong track. Can it be that Constantine—dear little Constantine—is in Albania, and that I am mistaken for him? No, this is impossible. But still I must be wary, and not do that which would harm a golden hair of Morsinia's head, if she be living, or Constantine's, or Uncle Kabilovitsch's. There's some mystery here. Only one thing is certain—Amesa mistakes this pretty impudent Dodola girl for somebody else. To get her off with him may serve that somebody else: for the voivode is a villain: that much is sure. The cursed Giaour serpent! I will help him to get this saucy belle of the hamlet, and so save somebody else, whoever she may be who is the game for which he lays his snares."

An hour later the Dodola, whose name was Elissa, passed Amesa and blushed deeply.

The family at whose house the girl was living made no objection to Amesa's request that she should be transferred to the protection of the voivode. The elders of the village acquiesced; for, said one,

"We do not know who she is, and may get into difficulty through harboring her."

Another averred his belief that she was possessed of the evil eye; for he had observed her staring at the olive tree the day before it was struck by lightning; and he declared that half the young men of the hamlet were bewitched with her.

A sharp-tongued dame remarked that some of the older men would rather listen to the merry tattle of the sprite than to the most serious and wholesome counsel of their own wives.

CHAPTER XXIV.

"Do you know the mind of Gauton who commands at the citadel in Sfetigrade?" asked Amesa of his new confederate, as they parted.

"I have talked with him," replied the man. "He is very cautious."

"Discover his opinion on the matter of my advancement," said Amesa.

"Send him some gift," suggested the man, "I will take it to him. He is very fond of dogs, and I learn that he has just lost a valuable mastiff. Could you replace it from your kennels at the castle?"

"No, but I have a greyhound, of straight breed since his ancestors came out of the ark. His jaws are as slender as a heron's beak: chest deep as a lion's: belly thin as a weasel's: a double span of my arms from tip to tail. To-morrow night meet me at the castle. Should I not have arrived, this will give you admission," presenting him with a small knife, on the bone handle of which was a rude carving of the crest of Amesa. "Give it to the warden. He will recognize it."

Long before the arrival of Amesa and Drakul at the castle in company with Elissa, the stranger, whom the reader will recognize as Captain Ballaban dressed as an Albanian peasant, had been admitted. He had wandered about the court, mounted the parapet, inspected the draw-bridge and portcullis, clambered down and up again the almost precipitous scarp of the rock, and asked a hundred questions of the servants regarding the paths by which the castle was approached. The old warden entertained him with stories of Amesa's early life, his acquisition of the estate, and his prowess in battle; in all of which, while the warden intended only the praise of his master, he discovered to the attentive listener all the weaknesses of the voivode's character.

Upon Amesa's arrival late in the day, Ballaban avoided much intercourse with him, except in relation to the selection of the dog. To Elissa he gave a few words of advice, to the effect that she was now the object of the young lord's adoration; and that, in order to secure her advantage, she should make as much as possible a mystery of her previous life. With this council—which was as much as he dared to venture upon in his own ignorance of the exact part he was playing—Ballaban departed, leading a magnificent hound in leash. A little way from the castle he sat down, and drawing from his breast a roll of paper, added certain lines and comments, as he muttered to himself,—

"I have made neater drawings than this for old Bestorf in the school of the Yeni-Tscheri, but none that will please the Aga more. There is not a goat path on the borders that I have not got. A sudden movement of our armies, occupying ground here and here and here, where I have blazed the trees, would hold this country against Ivan Beg and Scanderbeg. And with this black-hearted traitor, Amesa, in my fingers!—Well! Let's see! I will force him into open rebellion against Scanderbeg, unless he is deeper witted than he seems. But which plan would be best in the long run?—to stir up a feud between him and Scanderbeg, and let them cut each other's throats? Or, inveigle him to open alliance with our side, under promise of being made king of Albania? That last would settle all the Moslem trouble with these Giaours. And it could be done. The Padishah offered Scanderbeg the country on condition of paying a nominal tribute, and would offer the same to Amesa. And Amesa would take it, though he had to become Moslem. I will leave these propositions with the Aga," said he, folding up the papers, and putting them back into his bosom. "In either case I shall keep my vow with Amesa to help him against Scanderbeg. But the devil help them both!"

Whistling a snatch of a rude tune, part of which belonged to an Albanian religious hymn he had heard in his rambles, and part to a Turkish love song—swinging his long arms, and striding as far at each step as his short legs would allow him, he went down the mountain.

CHAPTER XXV.

"Who comes here?" cried the sentinel at the bottom of the steep road which led up to the gate at the rear of the town of Sfetigrade.

The man thus challenged made no reply except to speak sharply to a large hound he was leading, and which was struggling to break away from him. In his engrossment with the brute he did not seem to have heard the challenge. As he came nearer the sentinel eyed him with a puzzled, but half-comical look, as he soliloquized,—

"Ah, by the devil in the serpent's skin, I know him this time. He is the Albanian Turk we were nigh to hamstringing. If I mistake that red head again it will be when my own head has less brain in it than will balance it on a pike-staff, where Colonel Kabilovitsch would put it if I molested this fellow again. I'll give him the pass word, instead of taking it from him; that will make up for past mistakes."

The sentinel saluted the new comer with a most profound courtesy, and, shouldering his spear, marched hastily past him, ogling him with a sidelong knowing look.

"Tako mi Marie!"[60]

"Tako mi Marie!" responded the man, adding to himself, "but this is fortunate; the fellow must be crazy. I thought I should have had to brain him at least."

As he passed by, the sentinel stood still, watching him, and muttered,

"How should I know but Castriot himself is in that dog's hide."

The dog turned and, attracted by the soldier's attitude, uttered a low growl.

"Tako mi Marie! and all the other saints in heaven too, but I believe it is the general in disguise," said the sentinel.

"Tako mi Marie!" said the stranger saluting the various guards, whom he passed without further challenge, through the town gates and up to the main street.

The great well, from which the beleaguered inhabitants of Sfetigrade drew the only water now accessible, since the Turks had so closely invested the town, was not far from the citadel. It was very deep, having been cut through the great layers of rock upon which the upper town stood. Above it was a great wheel, over the outer edge of which ran an endless band of leather; the lower end dipping into the water that gleamed faintly far below. Leathern sockets attached to this belt answered for buckets, which, as the wheel was turned, lifted the water to the top, whence it ran into a great stone trough. The well was guarded by a curb of stones which had originally been laid compactly together; but many of them had been removed, and used to hurl down from the walls of the citadel upon the heads of the Turks when they tried to scale them.

The dog, panting with the heat, mounted one of the remaining stones, and stretched his long neck far down to sniff the cool water which glistened a hundred feet below him. The man shouted angrily to the beast, and so clumsily attempted to drag him away that both dog and stone were precipitated together into the well.

"A grapple! a rope!" shouted the man to a crowd who had seen the accident from a distance. "Will no one bring one?" he cried with apparent anger at their slow movements—"Then I must get one myself."

The crowd rushed toward the well. The man disappeared in the opposite direction.

It was several hours before the dead dog was taken from the polluted water. The Dibrian soldiers refused to drink from it. The superstition communicated itself like an epidemic, to the other inhabitants. For a day or two bands sallied from Sfetigrade, and brought water from the plain: but it was paid for in blood, for the Turkish armies, aware of the incident almost as soon as it occurred, drew closer their lines, and stationed heavy detachments of Janizaries at the springs and streams for miles around. The horrors of a water-famine were upon the garrison. In vain did the officers rebuke the insane delusion. The common soldiers, not only would not touch the water, but regarded the accident as a direct admonition from heaven that the town must be surrendered. Appeals to heroism, patriotism, honor, were less potent than a silly notion which had grown about the minds of an otherwise noble people—as certain tropical vines grow so tough and in such gradually lessening spirals about a stalwart tree that they choke the ascending sap and kill it. They who would have drunk were prevented by the others who covered the well with heavy pieces of timber, and stood guard about it.

CHAPTER XXVI.

In vain did Castriot assault the Turks who were intrenched about the wells and springs in the neighborhood. Now and then a victory over them would be followed by a long procession from the town, rolling casks, carrying buckets, pitchers, leather bottles and dug-out troughs. The amount of water thus procured but scarcely sufficed to keep life in the veins of the defenders: it did not suffice to nourish heart and courage. It was foreseen that Sfetigrade must fall.

Constantine was in the madness of despair about Morsinia. Her fate in the event of capture was simply horrible to contemplate. Yet she could hardly hope to make her way through the Turkish lines. Constantine was at the camp with Castriot when it was announced that the enemy had at length got possession of every approach to the town, so that there was no communication between the Albanians within and those without, except by signaling over the heads of the Turks. Castriot determined upon a final attack, during which, if he should succeed in uncovering any of the gates of the town, the people might find egress.

Constantine begged to be allowed the hazardous duty of entering, by passing in disguise through the Turkish army, and giving the endangered people the exact information of Castriot's purpose. Taking advantage of his former experience, he donned the uniform of a Janizary, easily learned the enemy's password, and at the moment designated to the besieged by Castriot's signal—just as the lower star of the Great Dipper disappeared behind the cliff—he emerged from the dense shadows of an angle of the wall. He was scarcely opposite the gate when the drawbridge lowered and rose quickly. The portcullis was raised and dropped an instant later, and he was within the town.

Throwing off his disguise, he went at once toward the commandant's quarters to deliver despatches from Castriot. But a shout preceded him—

"The destroyer! The destroyer! Death to the destroyer!"

Multitudes, awakened by the shouting, came from the houses and soldiers' quarters. Constantine was seized by the crowd, who yelled:

"To the well with him! Let the dog's soul come into him!"

He was borne along as helplessly as a leaf in the foaming cataract.

"To the well! To the well with the poisoner!"

The cry grew louder and shriller; the multitude maddening under the intense fury of their mutual rage, as each coal is hotter when many glow with it in the fire. Women mingled with soldiers, shrieking their insane vengeance, until the crowd surged with the victim around the well. The planks were torn off by strong hands. The horror of the deed they were about to commit made them pause. Each waited for his neighbor to assume the desperate office of actually perpetrating what was in all their hearts to do.

At length three of the more resolute stepped forward as executioners of the popular will. The struggling form of Constantine was held erect that all might see him. Torches waved above his head. One stood upon the well curb, and, dropping a torch into the dark abyss, cried with a loud voice—

"So let his life be put out who destroys us all!"

"So let it be!" moaned the crowd; the wildness of their wrath somewhat subdued by the impressiveness of the tragedy they were enacting.

The well hissed back its curse as the burning brand sunk into the water.

But a new apparition burst upon the scene. Suddenly, as if it had risen from the well, a form draped in white stood upon the curb. Her long golden hair floated in the strong wind. Her face, from sickness white as her robe, had an unearthly pallor from the excitement, and seemed to be lit with the white heat of her soul. Her sunken eyes gave back the flare of the torches, as if they gleamed with celestial reprobation.

"The Holy Virgin!" cried some.

"One of the Vili!" cried others.

The crowd surged back in ghostly fear.

"Neither saint nor sprite am I," cried Morsinia. "Your own wicked hearts make you fear me. It is your consciences that make you imagine a simple girl to be a vengeful spirit, and shrink from this horrid murder, to the very brink of which your ignorance and wretched superstition have led you. Blessed Mary need not come from Heaven to tell you that a man—a man for whom her Son Jesu died—should not be made to die for the sake of a dead dog. I, a child, can tell you that."

"But the well is accursed and the people die," said a monk, throwing back his cowl, and reaching out his hand to seize her.

"And such words from you, a priest of Jesu!" answered the woman, warding him off by the scathing scorn of her tones. "Did not Jesu say, 'Come unto Me and drink, drink out of My veins as ye do in Holy Sacrament?' Will He curse and kill, then, for drinking the water which you need, because a dog has fallen into it?"

These words, following the awe awakened by her unexpected appearance, stayed the rage of the crowd for a moment. But soon the murmur rose again—

"To the well!"

"He is a murderer!"

"It is just to take vengeance on a murderer!"

The woman raised her hand as if invoking the witness of Heaven to her cause, and exclaimed—

"But I am not a murderer. A curse on him who slays the innocent. I will be the sacrifice. I fear not to drink of this well with my dying gasp. Unhand the man, or, as sure as Heaven sees me, I shall die for him!"

A shudder of horror ran through the crowd as the light form of the young woman raised itself to the very brink of the well. It seemed as if a movement, or a cry, would precipitate her into the black abyss. The crowd was paralyzed. The silence of the dead fell upon them, as she leaned forward for the awful plunge.

Those holding Constantine let go their grip.

At this moment the commandant appeared. He had, indeed, been a silent witness of the scene, and was not unwilling that the superstition of the soldiers should thus have a vent, thinking that with the sacrifice of the supposed offender they might be satisfied, and led to believe that the spirit of the well was appeased. He hoped that thus they might be induced to drink the water. But he recoiled from permitting the sacrifice of this innocent person, lest it should blacken the curse already impending.

"I will judge this case," he cried. "Man, who are you?"

"I bear you orders from General Castriot," replied Constantine, handing him a document.

By the light of a torch the officer read,

"In the event of being unable to hold out, signal and make a sally according to directions to be given verbally by the bearer. Castriot."

Turning to the crowd, the commandant addressed them.

"Brave men! Epirots and Dibrians! We are being led into some mistake. My message makes it evident that on this man's life depends the life of every one of us——"

His voice was drowned by wild cries that came from a distant part of the town. The cries were familiar enough to all their ears; but they had heretofore heard them only from beneath the walls without. They were the Turkish cries of assault. "Allah! Allah! Allah! Allah!" rolled like a hurricane along the streets of Sfetigrade. The gates had been thrown open by some Dibrian, whom superstition and a thirst-fevered brain had transformed into a traitor.

"Quick!" cried Constantine. "Fire three powder flashes from the bastion, and follow me."

"Brave girl!" said he to Morsinia, grasping her hand and drawing her toward the citadel.

"It is too late!" replied the commandant. "All the ports are occupied by the enemy. We can but die in the streets."

"To the north gate, then! Burst it open, and cut your way to the east. Castriot will meet you there. I will to the bastion."

"We must go with them," said Morsinia. "Better die in the streets than be taken here."

"No, you shall not die, my good angel. I have prepared for this. First, I will fire the signal." In a few seconds three flashes illumined the old battlements.

Returning to Morsinia, he said quietly, "I have prepared for this," and unwound from about his body a strong cord, looped at intervals so that it could be used for a ladder. Fastening this securely, he dropped the end over the wall. Descending part way himself, he opened the loops one by one for the feet of his companion; and thus they reached a narrow ledge some twenty feet below the parapet. From this to the next projection broad enough to stand upon, the rock was steep but slanting; so that, while one could not rest upon it, it would largely overcome the momentum of the descent. Fastening a cord securely beneath the arms of Morsinia, he let her down the slope to the lower ledge. Then, tying the rope to that above, he descended himself to her side. From this point the path was not dangerous to one possessed of perfect presence of mind, and accustomed to balance the body on one foot at a time. Thanks to her mountain life, and the strong stimulus to brain and nerve acquired by her familiarity with danger, Morsinia was undizzied by the elevation. Thus they wound their way toward the east side of the wall; and, as they neared the base of the cliff, sat down to reconnoitre.

Above them frowned the walls of the citadel. Just beneath them were many forms, moving like spectres in the darkness which was fast dissolving into the gray morning twilight. The voices which came up to their ears proved that they were Turks. For Morsinia to pass through them without detection would be impossible. To remain long where they were would be equally fatal.

But their anxiety was relieved by a well known bugle-call. At first it sounded far away to the north.

"Iscanderbeg! Iscanderbeg!" cried the Turks, as they were deployed to face the threatening assault. But scarcely had they formed in their new lines when the sound, as of a storm bursting through a forest, indicated that the attack was from the south.

Taking the Turks who were still outside the walls at a disadvantage, Castriot's force made terrible havoc among them, sweeping them back pell-mell past the eastern front and around the northern, so as to leave the north gate clear for the escape of any who might emerge from it.

But, alas, for the valor of the commandant and the noble men who followed him! few succeeded in cutting their way through the swarm of enemies that had already occupied the streets of Sfetigrade.

This movement, however, enabled Constantine and Morsinia to descend from their dangerous eyrie. The apparition of their approach from that direction was a surprise to the general.

"Why, man, do you ride upon bats and night-hawks, that you have flown from yonder crag? I shall henceforth believe in Radisha and his beautiful demon. And may I pray thy care for myself in battle, my fair lady?"

CHAPTER XXVII.

The fall of Sfetigrade, while a material loss to the Albanian cause, served rather to exalt than to diminish the prestige of their great general. The fame of Scanderbeg brightened as the gloomy tidings of the fate of the stronghold spread; for that event, due to a circumstance which no human being could control, gave his enemies their first success, after nearly seven years of incessant effort, with measureless armaments, innumerable soldiery and exhaustless treasure.

The adversity also developed in Scanderbeg new qualities of greatness, both military and moral. As the effort to drain a natural spring only evokes its fuller and freer flow, so disappointment augmented his courage, impoverishment in resources enlarged the scheme of his projects, and the defeat of one plan by circumstances suggested other plans more novel and shrewd. The sight of the Turkish ensign floating from the citadel of Sfetigrade disheartened the patriots. The tramp of fresh legions from almost all parts of the Moslem world was not so ominous of further disaster as were the whispers of discontent from more than one who, like Amesa, had ambitions of their own, or, like brave Moses Goleme, were discouraged regarding ultimate success. But the great heart of Castriot sustained the courage of his people, and his genius devised plans for the defence of his land which, for sixteen years yet, were to baffle the skill and weary the energies of the foe.

The chief gave orders that Morsinia, having eluded capture, should occupy for the day his own tent; for the Albanian soldiers, as a rule, were destitute of the luxury of a canvas covering. Returning toward the middle of the morning, and having need to enter, he bade Constantine call her. No response being given, Castriot raised the curtain of the tent. Upon a rude matting, which was raised by rough boards a few inches from the earth, her limbs covered with an exquisitely embroidered Turkish saddle cloth, Morsinia lay asleep. Her neck and shoulders were veiled with her hair, which, rich and abundant, fell in cascades of golden beauty upon the ground.

The great man stood for a moment gazing upon the sleeping girl. His ordinarily immobile features relaxed. His face, generally passionless, unreadable as that of the sphinx, and impressive only for the mystery of the thoughts it concealed, now became suffused with kindly interest. His smile, as if he had been surprised by the fairness of the vision, was followed by a look of fatherly tenderness. The tears shot into his eyes; but with a deep breath he dropped the curtain, and turned away. Of what was he thinking? Of little Mara Cernoviche, his playmate far back in the years? or of himself during those years? Strange that career among the Turks! and equally strange all the years since he had looked upon the little child asleep by the camp fire at the foot of the Balkans! One who gazed into his face at that moment would have discovered that the rough warrior spirit was an outer environment about a gentle and loving nature.

He was interrupted by officers crowding about him, bringing intelligence of the enemy, or asking questions relative to the immediate movements of their own commands. These were answered in laconic sentences, each one a flash of strategic wisdom.

In the first leisure he put his hand fondly upon Constantine's head, and said quietly as he seated himself upon a rock near the tent door—

"Tell me of last night."

As Constantine narrated what the reader is already familiar with, dwelling especially upon Morsinia's part in the scene at the well, and her courage in the descent from the wall, Scanderbeg exclaimed eagerly—

"A true daughter of Musache De Streeses and Mara Cernoviche! The very impersonation of our Albania! Her spirit is that of our heroic people, fair as our lakes and as noble as our mountains! But these scenes are too rough for her. Her soul is strong enough to endure; but so is the diamond strong enough to keep its shape and lustre amid the stones which the freshet washes together. But it is not well that it should be left to do so. Besides, the diamond's strength and inviolable purity will not prevent a robber from stealing it. There are envious eyes upon our treasure. We had better have our diamond cut and set and put away in a casket for a while. We will send her to Constantinople. There she will have opportunity to gain in knowledge of the world, and in the courtly graces which fit her princely nature."