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 antic.i.p.ated 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 a.s.sailants. 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 a.s.sistance; 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 melee. 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 s.p.a.ce was, however, impa.s.sable 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, bal.u.s.trades 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 salam, bowing his turban to the saddle bow, and addressed him--

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