Watkins mumbled something that I fear was scarcely courteous.
"You can introduce me as the Countess de Cespedes, if you like, Mr. Nash," she continued. "I wonder if you knew Cespedes, Mr. Zaranko? He was a rotten old duffer, but he took me off the stage."
"I've heard of him," said Nikka, smiling. "Didn't he leave you anything to keep you going?"
She shrugged her shoulders.
"Other girls had the pickings before I met him. There was nothing left for me but the name."
"Is that the only one you use?" asked Hugh.
"Oh, come, now," she remonstrated. "There's a flag of truce up. Really, though, if you mention our opposition, I ought to compliment you on your work so far. I believe you might elude any mob but ours."
"We'll leave the decision on that point to the future," smiled Nikka. "By the way, how did you come to get into this game?"
She shrugged her shoulders again. She was an odd mixture of Latin grace and American ease.
"It's the sort of thing I do best. My folks were Wops of some kind. I was born in New York. I went with crooks after I left school. Then I joined the Follies, and a broker cottoned to me. He educated me, music, languages, all that stuff. I went to Paris with him. When we broke off, I tried the stage there. It was just before the War. I was only a kid still, and Cespedes fell for me. After he croaked I tried a bit of everything. For a while I worked for the Austrians—"
"Spy?" questioned Nikka.
"Sure. There's no harm in mentioning it now, and anyway, I was never caught. That was how I happened to meet Serge and Sandra; they were in Toutou's mob. I needed money; he needed brains and a doll-baby face."
"You seem to have a grip on him," I said. "But I don't see how you can stand the beast. He gives me the creeps."
She eyed me curiously.
"I'm not afraid of him," she answered indifferently. "Most women are attracted by him, you know. You haven't seen his other side."
"I don't want to."
"I hope you don't," she agreed. "Say, did you know you made quite a hit with Sandra, Mr. Nash?"
Hugh and Nikka laughed. I flushed.
"Oh, you needn't flare up," she said. "I can see why you did. You boys are a good bunch of sports. I wish we didn't have to trim you."
"Why do it, then?" asked Hugh.
"I don't sell out," she answered curtly. "Get that straight, Lord Chesby. Since I was a kid, I've had to fight my own way. As near as I can make out, the kind of people who are called respectable and honest are only cleverer crooks than the rest of us. I'm out to make all I can in my own way, and I play according to the rules of my mob."
"You called us good sports," Nikka pointed out.
It was her turn to flush.
"Call it a woman's soft heart," she returned. "Honestly, I get fed up on this life once in a while. If I could have married a decent Wop back in New York, and had a few kids and worked my fingers off— Well, I wouldn't have been able to get along without corsets and put it over you the way I did in the Marseilles train the other night, Lord Chesby."
"That may be true," Hugh agreed. "You are the first—ah—"
"Crook," she flashed, with a show of white teeth.
"Thanks for the word. You are the first of your species I've had the pleasure of meetin'. I don't quite see the attraction of the life for you."
"You wouldn't," she replied. "I'm what you English call a wrong 'un. Maude Hilyer thinks that if she and Montey could cash in they would chuck this life and go straight. But I know she's dead wrong. If you're once wrong, you're always wrong. The best thing you can do is to play safe and steer clear of the cops. That's me."
"But I say!" Hugh objected. "You say everybody is crooked, and next you say—"
"Never mind what I say," she interrupted. "You aren't going to reform me. And I'm against you. And if I can trim you I'll do it, and if Toutou wants to knife you, and it won't interfere with the game, why, I'll let him go ahead. And with it all, I like you. Now, do you understand me?"
"Yes," said Hugh, smiling. "I once met a very gallant Bavarian gentleman between two sets of barbed wire to arrange about burying some dead soldiers, and we found we liked each other very much. But afterward we tried hard to kill each other, and I am afraid I succeeded."
"You've got me," she assented. "Well, you must be hungry, boys. You don't want to save a lot of trouble, and maybe your lives, by giving up that treasure secret, I suppose?"
"No, thanks, Countess," laughed Hugh. "We'll give you a bit of a run for your money yet."
She laughed back with that pleasant, well-bred trill of a carefree schoolgirl, and we bowed and left her.
The next time we saw her she was standing by the gangplank of the steamer at Brindisi.
"Aren't you going on with us?" I hailed her.
"No, Mr. Nash. I'm leaving you in competent hands. Good lord, boy, you can't dodge us. We've got a system—well, the late well-known Czar might have been proud to own it. Be good, and give up before you get hurt."
"That goes for your people, too," I replied a trifle grimly, for I was growing tired of threats.
She waved her hand impatiently, and stepped over to my side. Hugh and the others already were passing up the gangplank.
"Say, boy, I don't want you to get hurt. Neither does Sandra. If anything goes wrong, watch your step. We'll do what we can, but—"
She pivotted on her heel and melted into the crowd. I climbed the gangplank with my chin on my shoulder, and was met with a shower of joshes by Hugh and Nikka.
"Doin' a little missionary work?" inquired Hugh.
"Do you flatter yourself you're aroused the lady's disinterested affection?" asked Nikka.
"No, to both of you," I retorted. "But she—what's the words the novelists use?—oh, yes, she intrigues me."
"She'll intrigue you out of everything you know, if you're not careful," Nikka warned me.
"Remember what she did to Watty," cautioned Hugh.
"The 'ussey!" grunted Watkins, who could never bear to hear her mentioned.
Hugh predicted that we would yet meet her on board, but a diligent search of the vessel failed to reveal anyone, in or out of trousers, who remotely resembled her, and we took account of several blonde northern peasants in our canvass. Also, whoever she had delegated to watch us kept themselves severely in the background. We were not conscious of any espionage.
At Piræus we had a choice of several steamers sailing for Constantinople, none of them Greek, however, as Greece was at war with the Kemalist government which had been set up in Anatolia. Nikka pitched upon a French boat that lay across the wharf from a Greek liner plying to Salonika and the Greek islands of the Ægean. The Frenchman was sailing at dawn the next morning; the Salonika boat was due to cast off several hours later.
We booked two cabins on the Frenchman, and hired a clerk at the British consulate to reserve a cabin and passage for two on the Salonika boat. This arrangement made, we mustered our scanty baggage, and boarded the Frenchman just before dinnertime. We dined together ostentatiously in the saloon, having publicly concluded a treaty with the purser that we might spend the night on board and so avoid the inconvenience of an early morning start. And after dinner, with many yawns and protestations of weariness, we betook ourselves to bed.
Our cabins were next to each other, and as a matter of fact, we played poker until long past midnight. Then Nikka and I said good-by to Hugh and Watty, and sneaked out into the companionway. Several sleepy stewards eyed us, but there were no passengers about. The quartermaster on guard at the gangway we handed a Napoleon, telling him we were obliged to land in order to dispose of some forgotten business. The watchman on the pier was conciliated in the same way. And finally, the deck-guard of the Greek liner, once his fingers were greased and our tickets shown to him, offered no objection to escorting us to our cabin.
At dawn we were awakened by the whistling of the Frenchman as he backed out from the pier, and from a porthole we watched him disappear in the mist of the harbor. At noon theEpaminondaslikewise cast off, and Nikka and I thankfully abandoned our battles with the cockroaches that fought with us for possession of the bunks, and ascended to the deck.
Nikka sniffed the air as we stepped from the saloon companionway.
"It's good to be out of that stink below," I remarked with feeling.
"I am trying to smell an enemy," he answered curtly.
"To smell—" I hastily checked my temptation to ridicule him, remembering that occasionally Nikka was startlingly metamorphosed in to a creature of primordial instincts. "Oh," I said lamely, "and—er—do you?"
"No," he said seriously. "It is as Hugh said. We have split the scent. They are at fault."
At Salonika we entered a Europe which was new to me, if an old story to Nikka, a Europe which was blended with the life and color and form of the Orient. Tall minarets like fingers of doom pointed skyward over bulbous domes, and driving to the railroad station through blocks of shabby houses that had replaced an area ravaged by fire, we heard the high-pitched, wail-call of the muezzin.
Jews in long, black gaberdines; Albanian Arnauts, Tosks, Ghegs and Malissori tribesmen, stately and savage; Greek mountaineers in the dirty, starched fustenella; tall Serb peasants, with the bearing of nobles and the faces of poets; Bulgars, stolid, imperturbable and level-eyed; hawk-nosed Ottoman Turks in tasseled fezzes; Armenians, fawning and humble; lank, hungry Syrians; treacherous-looking Greeks of the Peninsula; Greeks of the Islands, beautiful as statues by Phidias; Roumanians, with heavy black brows and the stocky build of Trajan's legionaries; Tziganes, lean and gaudily dressed; Kurds with cruel eyes and the bow-legs of a race of horsemen;—all the races of the Near East swarmed and crowded and cursed and pushed along the untidy sidewalks.
"This is No Man's Land," said Nikka as our dilapidated automobile forced a slow progress through the congested traffic. "All races here hate one another. We are two hundred years behind western Europe. Here treachery is the rule. Might is right. The strong hand takes all. Women are inferior beings—save amongst my own race."
His thin face lit with a smile.
"Many things can be said against my people, but we give our women freedom. Yet over us, as over all the other peoples, still hangs the shadow of Islam, shutting out the sun, denying culture, restricting thought."
At the railroad station we fought for places in a first-class compartment, which had room for six and must accommodate eight. The second and third-class cars were jammed to the doors. Women wept, children howled and men swore and struck each other and their women indiscriminately. In the midst of it all, with one warning whistle-blast, the train lunged out of the station, shaking off superfluous passengers as it jolted over the switch on to the main line.
That was a dreadful journey, not long as regards distance, but tediously protracted in time. The country grew steadily more mountainous as we left the coast. The engine panted and heaved; the cars rattled and shook. At frequent intervals we stopped by some station, and the scenes of our departure from Salonika were repeated according to scale. But the engine toiled on, and in the full tide of hours we crawled over a mountain-ridge and saw the sun rising in the east beyond the close-packed roofs of Seres.
It was a town that seemed to huddle together as though in fear, and there were great gashes and gaps in its lines of white-washed house-walls, relics of three wars, each of which had taken toll of its citizens. Here and there a church or a mosque, a school or a government building, rose above the level of two-story dwellings. But it had none of the teeming squalor and gorgeous conflict of colors that made Salonika so effective a gateway.
Nikka commandeered a fiacre in the station-square.
"Do you know the house of Kostabidjian the moneylender?" he asked the driver in Greek that sounded more than passable to me. "Very well, then, drive us there."
"Who is Kostabidjian?" I inquired as the driver whipped up his small horses.
A dour, secretive look had settled on Nikka's face in the last two days. His eyes had narrowed, and their gaze was fixed upon the far horizon when they were not shrewdly surveying the appearances of people around him.
"He is the agent of the tribe," he replied shortly. "It was through him I sent word to my uncle."
I held my peace after that. We drove for half an hour into the northeastern suburbs, where the houses became little villas, with courtyards and small gardens, and sometimes orchards behind. At last we stopped at a gateway overhung by olive-trees, and the driver got down to pull the bell-wire which protruded from an opening by the gate. The solemn clangor echoed faintly, and was succeeded by shuffling foot-steps. A wicket opened, and a dark, bewhiskered face was revealed. Nikka ejaculated a single sentence in the Gypsy dialect that Toutou's gang sometimes used, and the gate swung ajar. I gave the driver of the fiacre a couple of drachmas, and followed Nikka inside.
The individual with the whiskers, a dried-up, elderly man, quickly fastened the gate again, with a sidewise look at Nikka, half respect, half fear. The courtyard was empty, save for some ponies and mules under a shed at the rear, and the custodian motioned to us to follow him to the house.
At the door, he stood aside and ushered us into a parlor furnished in the French style. Off it opened a dining-room. A stout, smooth-faced, elderly man rose from a desk as we entered. He started to salaam, thought better of it, and offered his hand, which Nikka grasped perfunctorily. Then he commenced to speak in the Tzigane dialect, and Nikka cut him off.
"Speak French," said Nikka curtly. "I have no secrets from my friend, Mr. Nash." And to me: "This is Monsieur Kostabidjian."
Kostabidjian bowed to me.
"My poor home is honored, indeed, by two such distinguished guests," he protested. "Monsieur Zaranko, it is many years now since I had the pleasure of meeting you, but you will find that I have executed all your commissions faithfully."
Nikka smiled sarcastically.
"You would not be alive and whole if you had not," he commented.
"Surely, you do not mean that you think I would do anything else," cried Kostabidjian.
"I mean I am sure that you do as I command," returned Nikka impatiently. "Also, that I feel I do not have to rely upon your honesty in the matter. Now, what news have you for me?"
Kostabidjian—he was an Armenian of uncertain parentage, I afterwards discovered, with the ingrained servility pounded into that unfortunate race by centuries of oppression—drew up chairs for us.
"The telegram was forwarded at once to the Chief," he answered. "But Wasso Mikali sent back word yesterday that he would be delayed in waiting upon you in consequence of a caravan of cartridges which the band are running into Albania. It is an affair which has attracted his attention for the past month, and he dares not trust the work to another."
"Does he, himself, go to Albania?"
"No, Monsieur Zaranko. But the starting of the caravan, and the paying of the purchase-price—"
"In advance?"
"Of course."
"Good," said Nikka. "When will he be here?"
"He spoke of to-morrow—"
"Then serve us food, and lead us to a room where we may rest."
The Armenian clapped his hands, and the old man with the whiskers—who was dumb in consequence of having had his tongue cut out in one of the Turkish massacres of the red past—returned and carried word in his own fashion of our wants to the kitchen. Presently we sat down in the dining room to a hot meal of pilaf, with chicken, dough cakes and coffee, which Kostabidjian pressed upon us officiously.
"It has been a hard year for the tribe, Monsieur Zaranko," he purred, rubbing his hands together. "I don't know what they would have done without your aid."
"The subject is not for discussion," rapped Nikka.
"Oh, ah! Certainly!"
And he was quiet for a few minutes. Then his loquacity gained the better of him, and he burst forth:
"It's not as it used to be in the Balkans, gentlemen! The law doesn't run any stronger. I'll say that. And boundaries are still vague, for all that the great ones in Paris decided. But people are poor as Hajji Achmet after he'd been to Mecca. They earn nothing, and have nothing—and therefore there's nothing to take or to steal. Hee-hee-hee!"
"You talk nonsense," said Nikka savagely. "Am I to be annoyed by such as you?"
No prince could have been more arrogant; no lackey could have succumbed more completely.
"P-p-par-d-dd-don!" The Armenian's teeth rattled.
"You may go. I will summon you if I have need."
The man went like a whipped dog, and cowered over his mysterious accounts at the desk in the next room.
Nikka sat through the meal with a black frown on his face. He was plainly out of sorts, and while I could understand his aversion to Kostabidjian, I was secretly amazed by the constantly growing change in his manner, for he was normally of a uniformly pleasant disposition. But it was not until we had been shown to a bedroom on the upper floor that he unmasked his feelings. I began to undress, but he paced the floor restlessly from wall to wall. Suddenly he turned on me:
"Jack, I hope I haven't insulted you in the past twenty-four hours."
"I'm not aware of it, if you have," I returned cheerfully.
"I'm having a hell of a time," he groaned. "The two selfs in me are wrenching at my soul. There's Nikka, the Gypsy freebooter, who has been dead for years, and against him fights Nikka, the artist and man of the town. Neither of them owns me. Until the other day—except now and then when the old self reared its head temporarily—I thought I had thrust the Gypsy behind me. But I was a fool to think so, Jack. God, what a fool! Why, the music in me always was Gypsy!
"But I thought I had submerged it, drowned it. I thought I was like you and Hugh. I know better now. Since we started east I have felt these half-dead instincts rising up in me, clutching at my soul, tormenting my intelligence. The hunger for the open road, contempt for order and law, the mastery of my own will, all these things call to me. And yet, Jack, I feel ashamed! I feel ashamed to bring you here, to have you meet the fellow downstairs, who, when all is said and done, is the agent through whom my people dispose of what they steal and smuggle.
"For that's the truth, Jack! My people are not like Toutou's gang. But they are Gypsies. They live by their own hands, and every man's hand is against them. They make their own laws, and abide by their own customs. They take what they need, and consider it their due. Kostabidjian spoke of my uncle's running cartridges to Albania. I know what it means. After the War there were vast stocks of ammunition scattered all over the Balkans, treasure trove to such wild peoples. The Allies ruled that it should be surrendered or destroyed. But do you suppose it was? Never!
"It was stolen, hidden and smuggled. I would swear that my tribe have sold it to Kemal Bey, to the Russian Soviets. Now, the Greeks and the Serbs are pressing down on the Albanians, and my uncle sells to the Albanians. If he can, too, he will sell to the Greeks and the Serbs; and he will take—steal, if you like—whatever of value he can get from all three of them.
"I tell you all this, because I don't want to fly false colors with you. I lived that life when I was a boy. But I should like to make you understand that in some way, by some esoteric, involved, well-nigh impenetrable process of psychology, it is not stealing in the sense that Toutou steals. My people have been outcasts for centuries; they have been bred up in this way of life. It is as natural for them to take what they need, and thrive on other people's needs, as it is for the Arabs to practice the same methods in battling the hardships of the desert.
"It isn't wrong in their eyes. Put it that way. And I—I can see it both ways, Jack. I can see how wrong it is, and I can see how right it seems to them."
I dropped my hand on his shoulder.
"You don't need to say all this to me," I told him. "Why, Nikka, it's—it's—"
"It's what? Hard to understand!"
"Easy to understand," I corrected. "Hard to phrase. But I know you too well to worry about you. As for the wrench, I'm beginning to feel it myself."
Nikka resumed his restless pacing.
"I don't mind anything so much as that oily Armenian downstairs," he insisted. "He—he is dishonest. And we make him dishonest. Not that I've used him so, Jack. Most of what I earn goes to my people, who need it, poor souls, especially since the War laid its blight on all south-eastern Europe. Kostabidjian is one of the agents I employ to distribute my funds. I use him because of his connection with my uncle's tribe."
"Most of us have to use dishonest helpers occasionally," I said. "I'd hate to have to guarantee every business associate of mine. But can we trust this man, Nikka? If he's all you indicate him, isn't he likely to sell us out?"
"He'd sell us out in a minute, if he dared," rejoined Nikka, with a tight-lipped smile. "But he knows that if he did he would get a knife in him. It would be only a question of time."
"Nice company you've dragged me into," I grumbled. "Well, let's catch up on our sleep."
His outburst had eased Nikka's nervous tension, and he soon dozed off. For a while I watched the afternoon sunlight outside the windows, then the weariness of our travels overcame me, and I, too, slept.... I woke abruptly, feeling a light blazing in my eyes. My first thought was of Toutou and Hélène de Cespedes, and I dived under the pillow for my automatic and sat up at the same time.
A man was standing in the doorway of the room, with a kerosene lamp in his hand, a tall man, with the proud face of an eagle. Wisps of silver-white hair escaped from the varicolored turban that wrapped his brows, but he held himself with the erect poise of youth. He was dressed in tight breeches of brown cloth, and a blue shirt and short red jacket. Flat sandals of bull's-hide, sewed to a point at the toes, were laced over his bare feet by straps that wound across his insteps and above his ankles. Around his waist was twisted a heavy sash, bristling with knives and pistols.
As I prodded Nikka awake, he closed the door behind him and set the lamp on a table, calmly ignoring my pistol. Nikka, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, took one look at the apparition and jumped from the bed.
"Wasso!" he cried.
The stranger raised fingers to lips and breast in a graceful salaam, and replied in the Gypsy patois, a cadenced, musical speech when used by those to whom it was a mother-tongue. Nikka grasped his hand, and exchanged a rapid-fire of question and answer, then called to me:
"This is my uncle. He arrived sooner than he expected. He guessed my need was great, and traveled without respite. Come and meet him."
Wasso Mikali rendered me a salaam and a handshake. His bright eyes surveyed my face, and he made a comment which drew a laugh from Nikka.
"My uncle thinks you have the look of one who likes to know how many cartridges his enemy carries," Nikka translated.
The old Gypsy sank to his haunches on the bare floor, with a sweeping gesture of invitation to both of us to join him.
"No, no," exclaimed Nikka as I started for a chair. "He has never sat on a chair in his life. Do as he does or he will think you are trying to demonstrate how different you are."
So I crouched cross-legged beside them—it seemed to be easy enough for Nikka to resume the ways of his boyhood—and concealed my discomfort as stoically as I could. It was close to midnight when we were awakened, and the talk with Wasso Mikali lasted for several hours. First, Nikka explained to him the circumstances of our trip to Constantinople, and the old man's eyes glistened at the mention of the treasure. He interrupted with a liquid flow of polysyllables.
"He says," Nikka interpreted, when he had finished, "that he has heard about it. It is just as I told you and Hugh, the tradition is known all through the Balkans. He says that the treasure is concealed in an ancient palace in Stamboul which has been inhabited longer than men can remember by a tribe of Gypsies whose chief is one Beran Tokalji. He says that this Tokalji is a great thief—" Nikka grinned ruefully—"that comes well from my uncle, Jack, and that there is a rumor amongst the tribes that he, Tokalji, is an ally of a group of Frank thieves. There is a tradition in Tokalji's tribe that their forefathers believed the treasure ultimately would go to them."
"Will he help us?" I asked eagerly.
Nikka gave me an odd look.
"His tribe are mine. My wish is their wish. How can they refuse?"
"Yes," I insisted, "but how much will they want? Is it safe to tell him all this?"
Nikka's face flushed purple. For a moment I thought he would strike me. Then he turned, and shot a question at the old Gypsy, who replied with an amused grin.
"I did not repeat your second question," said Nikka coldly. "He would not have taken it in good grace even from me. But I did tell him your first. Do you want to know just what his answer was?"
"Yes," I said, "and I say, Nikka, don't be uppish because I don't know the ropes about your damned family. Man dear, this is all new to me!"
Nikka relented at once.
"My fault," he apologized, slightly shamefaced. "This Gypsy complex I told you about plays funny tricks with me. But—" and his grin duplicated Wasso Mikali's—"My uncle's precise answer to your first question was that he would consider 'the spittle of his sister's son ample payment for whatever he could do.' He meant it, too."
Wasso Mikali was a very wise man. He questioned Nikka closely concerning our situation, and this was his verdict:
"When you fight with thieves you must use thieves' tricks. You did right to come to me. Now I will secure fitting garments for you, my sister's son, and for your Amerikansky friend, Jakka. For him also I will brew a dye of walnut bark and chestnut leaves that will make him as dark as our people, so that men will not turn and stare at him on the road.
"After that I think we had best go away from this place as soon as possible. You have traveled rapidly and shaken off your enemies' pursuit. It is well to take every advantage of an opportunity. Moreover, we must go across the Rhodopes to the place where the tribe have hidden some horses we got from a Roumanian boyar. We will collect the horses, together with some of my young men who can handle a knife, and go on to Stamboul. All men go to Stamboul, and who will notice a Tzigane band?"
"But it was not my thought that you should abandon the affairs of the tribe, and come and fight with me," remonstrated Nikka.
"Are you not the son of my sister?" rejoined the old Gypsy. "If you had not elected to go to Buda with your violin would you not be chief of the band? Do I not stand in your place? Well, then, light of my eyes, we will do for you all that we may."
And he produced a battered silver tobacco box, and rolled himself a cigarette, sitting back on his haunches with the lithe grace of a cat. Nikka flung me a proud glance as he translated the pledge.
"It's all right," I admitted with due humility. "And I was all wrong, but I didn't know the Middle Ages were still with us."
Nikka laughingly repeated my remark, and his uncle's twinkling eyes and mocking smile conveyed his retort before it was translated:
"Say to my young friend Jakka that if a tribe cannot stand by their own then these days are worse than the old times."
With that he left us, and Nikka and I secured another hour's sleep. When he returned he was accompanied by a younger edition of himself, who carried two bundles which were disclosed as complete suits of Tzigane dress. He, himself, carried a pot of warm, brown liquid, and he proceeded to apply the stain to me with a small paintbrush. Hair, mustache, face and body were darkened to a mellow brown. The stuff dried quickly, and I was soon able to pull on the strange garments, which Nikka showed me how to adjust and fasten.
I could not help laughing at my reflection in the mirror of the cheap French bureau de toilette. The tight trousers, the short jacket and the big turban increased my height, and the gaudy colors of turban and waist-sash gave me a bizarre appearance that was startlingly unfamiliar. I felt uncomfortable, as though I had dressed for a fancy-dress ball, and overdone the part. But there was none of this effect in Nikka's get-up. With the donning of his Gypsy costume he discarded his last visible link with the West. He looked the Gypsy, the Oriental, a kingly vagabond.
"You belong," I said. "But I feel like an imposter."
"You'll grow used to it," he answered, folding in the ends of his sash. "Did they give you a knife?" I exhibited the horn-handled, eight-inch blade, with its sheath hooked to a leather belt that encircled my waist beneath the sash. "Good! Got your automatic and spare clips?"
"And these clothes?"
I pointed to the civilized garments we had discarded.
"Kostabidjian will send them on to Constantinople in a few days." He sighed. "Personally, Jack, I don't care if I never wear them again. I can earn a thousand dollars an hour with my fiddle, but what's it worth compared with this? Rawhide on your feet that flexes with your soles; clothing that covers you, but doesn't bind; and the open road ahead! Civilization is a fraud, Jack. I was a fool ever to quit the Gypsy life.'
"Well, you're back in it again," I replied, "and perhaps you'll be feeling you were a fool to return to it. I know I feel like a fool. Let's go."
It was still dark when we left the house. Kostabidjian and his servant were awaiting us in the courtyard. They had saddled two horses, and a mule was loaded with bulky packs, food, and blankets, tarpaulins and several cooking utensils. The Armenian kept himself in the background. He seemed in deadly fear of Wasso Mikali, who treated him as though he was a cur to be kicked into the gutter if he interfered. And indeed, there was something singularly imposing about the old Tzigane, who strode around with the air of one used to taking as he desired and giving as he pleased.
But just as we were leaving, the dumb servant having swung open the outer door, Kostabidjian mustered sufficient courage to press to Nikka's side.
"Everything was satisfactory?" he inquired timidly. "I have served—"
"Well enough," returned Nikka, swinging into the saddle of one of the horses, "except that you talk too much. Guard your tongue if you would keep it. Your servant there—"
He shrugged significantly. Even by the starlight I could see the pallor that blanched the Armenian's face. He took the threat in sober earnest.
"You shall have no cause to blame! All shall be as you wish. I will remit the charges for the last distribution. Take your horse, Monseigneur, both horses—the mule! Take all!"
Nikka gave him a single look, and he subsided.
"Heidi, Jakka!" called Wasso Mikali.
"Mount, Jack," added Nikka. "The other horse is for you. We must hasten. My uncle does not like to be seen entering or leaving the town."
We rode out in single-file, first Wasso Mikali, then Nikka, then myself, last the young Tzigane, leading the pack-mule. The Gypsies set a pace that made the horses trot to keep up with them, a long, slack-kneed shamble, ungainly in appearance, but tremendously effective. By sunrise we had left the town behind the first mountain-ridge, and were heading north towards the waste of mountains that fringed the Bulgarian frontier. Hour after hour we plodded along. More than once I suggested a rest, for I knew our escorts had been afoot all night. But they would not hear of it. Neither would they consent to sharing the horses with us turn-about, and in this Nikka upheld them.
"Our feet are soft," he pointed out. "We could never maintain such a speed, and it is best to put as long a distance as possible between us and Seres, lest our trailers should pick up the scent."
During the early part of the day we passed frequent villages, melancholy collections of hovels that had been scorched by the awful visitation of wars the Balkans had known for a decade. But in the afternoon we departed from the main road, and struck off across the hills. Occasionally we saw farmhouses or sheepfolds, but when night came we made camp in a lonely ravine with the stars for roof. There was not a light on the horizon, not even the barking of dogs to indicate a human habitation.
The next day it was practically the same. The trail we followed was a mere trace that sometimes disappeared. Toward evening we entered a vast forest, and finally halted on the banks of a stream where a campfire blazed. Against the flames showed gaunt, turbanned figures.
"Are these our friends?" I asked.
"They are Pomaks," said Nikka.
He spat contemptuously.
"What—"
"Moslems! Swine!"
While Wasso Mikali and the young Tzigane, whose name was Sacha, made the fire under a bowlder, Nikka and I led our tired animals down to the stream to drink. Several of the Pomaks, dirty, shifty-eyed fellows in the same gaudy raiment that the Tziganes affected, lounged up to us. One of them stepped in Nikka's path, and Nikka promptly kicked him. The man turned like a flash, his knife out, and Nikka dropped the bridle he was holding, and closed with him. Two of the Pomaks jumped for me, knives wheeling.
I did what I had done in the fight in the Gunroom, hit out with my fists. The first man I knocked into the water, and the second yelled for help, circling me cautiously the while. Nikka, after one click of blades, stabbed his man in the shoulder, and we stood back to back, half a dozen Pomaks pelting up from their fire.
"Wait," said Nikka, as I drew my automatic.
There was a scurry in the shadows, and Wasso Mikali thrust his way into the group surrounding us. He said nothing, but stood there where they could see him in the firelight, and they muttered together and slunk away, the man Nikka had wounded clutching his bloody arm.
"What is your uncle? A justice of the peace?" I inquired facetiously.
"He is Wasso Mikali," answered Nikka, wiping his knife-blade on the grass. "Now I feel better, Jack. It is still the same. The Pomak curs crawl to heel when the Gypsy speaks. I wondered if it could be just as in my boyhood, after all that has happened in the world."
"If you ask me," I returned, "I don't believe anything has happened in this world of yours."
"Much has happened. But the Gypsy is always the same—and so likewise, it seems, is the Pomak. God, but it felt good to kick that pig!"
I regarded my friend with a recurrence of that amazement which he had stirred in me several times before. The quiet, self-contained musician, the artist, the efficient subaltern of the Foreign Legion, the cultured man-about-town had been replaced by an arrogant forest princeling, savagely contemptuous of all but his own kind.
The Pomaks gave us a wide birth, and early as we were afoot in the morning, they were off before us; but we heard from them again. We were threading a forest defile, where the pine-trees grew thick to the cliff edges, when we heard a shout overhead, I looked up at a stocky man in a brown uniform, with a round fur cap, emblazoned with a rampant lion. He held a rifle in his hands.
"A Bulgarian forester," muttered Nikka.
Wasso Mikali climbed up to the forester's perch, and held a brief conversation with him, at the conclusion of which he dug something bright out of his sash and dropped it in the forester's hand. Then he slid down into the ravine again, and we resumed our journey. The Pomaks had complained to the forester that we were smuggling rose-water essence, but he readily admitted that we were going the wrong way to be handling such a traffic. The lefa piece in his hand was to salve his conscience for not reporting the stabbing of the Pomak by Nikka.
As we progressed that day the mountains became wilder and more barren. Once we saw a lumber-camp on the lower slope of a ridge we traversed. Again, in the early afternoon, I saw what I took to be a castle perched atop of a huge crag miles away across a tumbled mass of peaks. But Nikka explained that it was one of those fortified monasteries which kept the fires of learning alight during the gloomy centuries when the Turk's rule ran as far as the Danube.
The path we followed was eccentric in the extreme. In fact, there was no path. We climbed a succession of gullies and ravines opening out of one another, and at dusk emerged upon a sheltered valley, buried deep between precipitous slopes draped in a virgin covering of conifers, chestnut and beech. A little rivulet foamed down the middle, dammed at the foot by a crude barrier of rocks. Horses and mules and a few sheep and goats grazed on the banks. Against the mountain-wall on either side were built a number of rough log-shelters, part houses, part caves. Children, naked for the most part, played about. Women were washing in the brook or tending several open fires. A dozen men were lying or sitting on the ground.
"They don't seem surprised to see us," I commented to Nikka, whose brooding eyes were drinking in the picture.
"They know we must be friends," he answered. "Else the lookouts down the path would have signaled them we were coming—and we should not have come," he added with a flitting smile.
"Do you know this place?"
"As well as—how shall I put it?—As well as Hugh knows Castle Chesby. No, I was not born here. My mother lay on the floor-boards of a caravan-cart in the Bukowina. My father was looking for likely ponies to trade with Bulgarian officers. But they brought me back here, and here I grew to boyhood. Do you see that first hovel on this bank? That was where I was taught to fiddle. And there—"
Wasso Mikali, striding in front of us, raised his voice in a great shout, and the men by the houses jumped to their feet and crowded toward us. The old Gypsy added something in which Nikka's name was repeated two or three times, and they cried out in astonishment. In the next moment they were swarming around us, and sinewy hands were clasping ours, rows of white teeth were gleaming in welcoming smiles, and Nikka was being greeted with a heart-warming mixture of affection and respect.
Once they discovered I could not talk their language they let me alone, but Nikka they plied with questions until the women summoned us to the fires for the evening meal. Their attitude toward him was extraordinary. He was one of themselves—several were his cousins, most of them were related to him in some remote degree of consanguinity; he had lived amongst them for years. Yet to them, as to the rest of the world, he was also the great master, the violinist who could charm multitudes, upon whose bounty, too, they and others like them had been sustained in periods of want.
While the women served us with stew and bread, Nikka introduced me to them, and they promptly manifested a naïve interest in my person and career. They all called me Jakka. They were amazed to learn that I made my living by drawing plans of houses for people. Who, they inquired with frank disbelief, needed to have somebody draw for him the plan of his house? It was absurd. You simply took logs and boards or bricks and stone, if you were in a city, and you put them together. They even insisted upon dragging me away from the fire to the nearest house to illustrate what they meant. They were determined to convince me how superfluous was my profession.
I, in my turn, was surprised by the idyllic security of this retired valley, and I asked them, through Nikka, if it had never been penetrated even in wartime. No, they replied, only once a party of Franks in pot-hats—by which, it seemed, they meant Germans—had come upon it by accident, and of the Franks not one had escaped. Of course, occasional attempts had been made to drive them out by other outlaw bands; but none had ever succeeded, in consequence of the vigilance of their watch and the tortuous approach through a network of defiles.
Their community persisted in defiance of civilization, an anomalous relic of the stone age, of nomad barbarism; and they assured me that here and there all over the Balkans other similar Gypsy communities still held out, in spite of the havoc of destruction wrought by the War.
We remained in the valley for one day, just long enough for Wasso Mikali to pick the six men he intended to take with him, select horseflesh for ostensible trading purposes, and made the necessary arrangements for leaving the tribe so long without his guidance. It interested me that he appointed as sub-chief his wife, a wrinkled old beldame, who boasted a complete mouthful of yellowed teeth and rolled cigarettes with one hand. And it was significant of the conditions under which they lived that we stole away by twilight, so that our exit might not be observed by chance spies of rival bands, who would thus learn of the reduction of their garrison.
Two days' journey to the east carried us into the colorful stream of traffic on a main-traveled highway. Caravans of pack-ponies jingled along. Bands of itinerant Gypsies like ourselves; camel trains, endless processions of ox-carts, and very rarely, an automobile or a fiacre, moved in both direction. Monks from the mountain monasteries looked askance at Pomak and Tzigane. The Balkan races in their varied garb jangled and wrangled by. But not too close to the Greek frontier we swerved into a byway, and gave the custom houses a safe margin.
After that it was the same story for more than a week. True, when we abandoned the mountains and dipped into the rolling plains of Thrace, we left behind us the trappings of barbarism. But the air we breathed and the scenes that unrolled before us belonged to the Orient. We had occasional minor adventures, fights with keepers of roadside khans, disputes with other parties and attempts to steal our horses. But Wasso Mikali was a prince of the road. He met stealth with guile, force with nerve. He was never defeated.
Two hundred and fifty miles we traveled, south and east, and at last there came a day when we passed the Tchataldya barrier, and from a hillock caught a glimpse of a skyline of towers and floating domes and soaring minarets and beyond them to the right a hint of blue that was the meeting-place of the Bosphorus and the Marmora.
"It looks like a fairy city!" I exclaimed.
"It will stink in your nostrils," replied Nikka curtly. "It is Stamboul—the last stand of the Turk."
Until we crossed its very threshold the spell of the city held us. Not even the noisome belt of Russian refugee camps and tawdry villas and the unkempt tombs of the Hills of the Dead could shatter the illusion of that splendid skyline. The nearer we approached, the more impressive it became. The long gray line of the old Byzantine walls, the uneven lift of the roofs staggering up and down its seven hills, the swelling domes of mosque and basilica, the slender beauty of countless minarets, the faultless contour of cypress groves and the far blue gleam of the Golden Horn and the Marmora, with the dim background of the Asiatic hills, all combined to mold a picture of piercing loveliness.
But when we passed through the echoing arch of the Adrianople Gate the spell was broken. Crazy houses toppled over the filth of the streets; a dense mass of unwashed humans eddied to and fro; squalor beggaring description leered from the steep lanes and alleys that branched off from the main streets. A hundred races swarmed about us, vying with one another in wretchedness and misery. Dogs and flies fought in the gutters with children and old people. Beggars whined for baksheesh. Food venders yelled their cries and hawked their unsanitary wares. Every kind of clothing appeared, from greasy European dress to the quaint peasant costumes of south-eastern Europe and Anatolia and all the countries eastwards to the Hindoo Koosh.
It was like one's fancies of the Arabian Nights, and yet unlike them. For here was no lavishness of Oriental display, no exotic magnificence, only suffering and want and hunger and disease and smells and a dreadful ugliness that was spiritual as well as physical. It was as if a gigantic, cancerous sore, festering and gangrened through the centuries, had eaten away the vitality of what had once been the richest city in the world. And back and forth in that swarm of humanity's dregs wandered men of the civilization which had prospered outside the pale of Islam, French and British officers, bluejackets, poilus, tommies and an occasional tourist, clinging to a smirking guide.
Nikka, riding beside me, viewed the spectacle with cynical detachment.
"Seven hundred years ago," he said, "this was incomparably the stateliest, most powerful city in Christendom. It was the center of an Empire that was still able to stand alone, although it had borne the burden of resisting the Moslem attacks on the Western world for more than five hundred years. It enshrined all that was best and most worthy of the ancient Greek and Roman culture. It had a million inhabitants. It had public services, schools, posts, police, drains, water supply. Life was safe, commercial independence and prosperity assured—which was more than could be said for any other community, East or West."
"And the Turks made it what it is!" I exclaimed, as Wasso Mikali, leading our little procession, turned off the main street we had been following into one of the stinking, littered lanes that twisted down into shadowy regions of corruption.
"Not the Turks! The Turks only finished what others had begun. No, the beginning of what you see around you was made by Hugh's ancestor and his brother knights of the Fourth Crusade, who, instead of fulfilling their vows to journey to the Holy Land, voyaged to Constantinople and overpowered the feeble Emperor of that day, and then sacked and wrecked the city. It was never the same afterward. It never recovered its strength. And when the Crusades finally impelled the concentration of the Moslem power, it became only a question of time before the city must fall. Had it not been for those walls we just passed, it would have fallen a century before it did. In fact, it fell then mainly because there were not enough men to hold the defenses."
"What you say is interesting," I said. "For after all, we are coming to-day on Hugh's behalf for pretty much the same object as lured his ancestor. We are hunting the treasure of the city."
"But we shall do no harm to any one by taking the treasure," returned Nikka. "What use would it be to these people around us? Would they share it? Never! It would be employed for the pleasures of their masters. The only way to redeem Constantinople is to repopulate."
We plunged deeper and deeper into the dark byways, sometimes traversing streets so narrow that pedestrians were compelled to squeeze themselves flat against the house-walls to permit us to pass. In the twilight it was difficult to see far ahead, and at every corner Wasso Mikali raised his voice in a shout of warning. But at last we rode forth into a wider thoroughfare and stopped opposite the gate of a huge, fortress-like building, whose windowless stone walls towered above the surrounding housetops.
"The Khan of the Georgians," explained Nikka. "Here we shall be swallowed up in an army of travelers. No one would think of looking for us in such a place."
Wasso Mikali made the necessary payment to the porter at the gate, and we rode between the ponderous, steel-bound doors into a courtyard such as you find in a barracks. Around it rose three tiers of galleries, arched in stone, and below them were a succession of stables fronted by sheds and penthouses. Piles of goods lay everywhere, in the courtyard and on the galleries. Horses, mules, oxen and camels neighed, brayed, bellowed and grunted. Men talked in knots on the mucky cobbles of the court, squatted in every gallery or leaned over the railings shouting to each other. Women sat on bales and nursed their infants. Children ran about with the usual ability of children to escape sudden death in dangerous places. It sounded like a boiler factory and an insane asylum holding a jubilee convention.
But Wasso Mikali and his young men pushed through the confusion with the same bored air I would have worn in bucking the subway rush, at Grand Central. They appropriated a corner of a stable, and put up the horses, uncinched the packs and climbed a flight of stone stairs to the second floor, where the old Gypsy rented two cubicles, each lighted by a grated window two feet square and containing nothing except some foul straw, from a custodian who looked like the conception of Noah entertained by the artists of the subscription editions of the Holy Bible.
Nikka had relapsed so thoroughly to Gypsyism that he professed not to be suspicious of the straw, but at my insistance he procured a worn broom from Father Noah and we swept out the room which had been set aside for Wasso Mikali and ourselves. The six retainers in Wasso's train were given the next cubicle, and they promptly piled into it the straw which we had banished from our room, so I doubt whether our labors produced any benefit, as they spent as much time with us as in their own quarters.
Such food as we did not have with us we bought from a general store conducted in an angle of the courtyard, and the cooking was done over a brazier, which, with the necessary charcoal, we rented from Father Noah. When night fell, and the cooking fires blazed out all over the courtyard and in the galleries it was a sight worth coming to Constantinople to see. There was an acrid reek of dung in the air, the sweaty smell of human bodies, the pungent aroma of the charcoal, and an endless babble of voices in a score of tongues and dialects.
Afterward some men on our gallery played on bagpipes. From the courtyard came the twanging of simple stringed instruments, and nasal voices lifted in interminable melancholy songs. A woman who was no better than she should have been danced in the light of two flaring kerosene torches by the gate until she won the attention of a bandy-legged Turcoman rug-merchant. A thief attempted to pick the purse of a fat Persian. A Kurdish horse-dealer tried to knife a snarling Greek. And gradually the khan's inmates sought their sleep. Most of them lay in the courtyard or stables beside their animals and goods or else on the galleries. The snores of a score resounded into our cubicle. Yet I slept, awakening at intervals of the night when a child cried for the breast or a camel broke loose and threshed around the courtyard or a party of belated travelers stumbled over the sleepers outside our door.
We were astir early in the morning, and before eight o'clock Wasso Mikali, Nikka and I left the khan—Wasso having given strict injunction to his young men to stick to their quarters and discourage any endeavors to make them talk—to cross the Golden Horn to the European quarter of Pera. This walk was no less fascinating than our ride from the Adrianople Gate. It took us through the northeastern half of Stamboul, and after we had passed the lower bridge of boats, into the comparatively civilized conditions of the Galata and Pera areas.
But to tell the truth, once we had left Stamboul Nikka and I thought little of our surroundings. Nikka even relinquished some of the wolfish manner which his return to Gypsy life had inspired, and we discussed eagerly, and not for the first time, the possibility that harm had come to Hugh. But our fears were relieved when we came to the corner of the street opposite the hotel, for there by the entrance stood Hugh and Watkins chatting with Vernon King.
Nikka led the three of us up to the hotel, shambling ungracefully and goggling at the Western aspect of the building and the people who passed on the sidewalk.
"Anybody covering them?" he whispered.
I looked around. On the farther curbstone, smoking and pretending to be interested in the passers-by, lounged two individuals who might have been cut from the same pattern as ourselves; and I indicated them to Nikka as I offered him tobacco from the box I carried Balkan-fashion in my waist-sash.
"All right," he said, "we must be careful. We'll move up beside Hugh, and when there's nobody in earshot you say what you have to say, speaking to me."
We peered open-mouthed into the lobby, gaped at shop-windows and slowly worked to a position close by Hugh and Vernon King. I was amused to observe that Watkins confined his attention to the two spies across the street, whom he favored with a steady, malignant gaze. King, too, was immersed in the conversation. Hugh gave us one keen glance, obviously because we were Gypsies. But he did not recognize us, and indeed, in our gaudy clothes, dirty and unshaven, we looked nothing like his memory of us.
"If they don't come in the next few—" King was saying as we halted close by, staring at a Levantine lady in a Parisian frock who was entering a taxi.
"Better not," warned Hugh, with a wink toward us.
"This is one time we fooled you," I remarked, speaking in a low tone of voice at Nikka—there was nobody else within twenty feet of our groups at the moment. "Jack speaking, Hugh. You and Watty follow us. Go around the block the other way from us. We'll pick you up."
Nikka had a bright thought as we started off. The Commissionaire at the hotel entrance had been watching us with suspicion, and Nikka made a pretense of thrusting by him into the lobby. The Commissionaire grabbed him by the arm, and hustled him on to the sidewalk, and at this we all pretended uneasiness and hurried up the street. Hugh and Watkins watched us disappear, then said good-by to King, and walked down the street. They were rounding the corner of the farther side of the block as we entered it, and when we made sure they had seen us, we turned into a cross-street that led between buildings toward Galata and the Golden Horn.
Hugh's shadows had a poor time of it after that, and I believe we lost them in the maze of crooked lanes in Stamboul. At any rate, they were nowhere in sight when we dodged into the gateway of the Khan of the Georgians. Hugh was bursting to talk, but Nikka motioned to him to be silent. The appearance of two Europeans like himself and Watkins was bound to attract some attention, and we rushed them through the courtyard as rapidly as possible. Of course, everybody who noticed them at all concluded that they were up to no good, considering the disreputable company they were in.
So they panted after us up the steep stairs to the second gallery, and Wasso Mikali opened the door of our cubicle and stood aside until Watkins had entered. Then he came in, himself, and locked it and squatted down with his back against it. He was as imperturbable as Watkins, which is saying a great deal. Watkins surveyed the room with cool disfavor, drew his finger through a smudge of smoke on the wall and shook his head.
"Dear, dear, gentlemen," he said. "They don't do very well for you 'ere, do they, now? A proper queer place, I call it. And you 'ave changed, too, if I may say so. Mister Jack, sir, you must let me draw you a 'ot tub, and I'll give Mister Nikka a shave."
We shouted with laughter.
"That is supposed to be a disguise, Watty," exploded Hugh. "My word, it's a good one! You lads had me fooled completely. I looked at you just as I've looked at scores of rascals like you, and King and I went on wondering what had become of you. I say, who's the old gent?"
Nikka introduced his uncle, and Wasso Mikali met Hugh with the unstudied courtesy that made it so difficult to remember that he knew nothing of what we call manners or the gentler aspects of life.
"I wish you'd tell him how much I appreciate his assistance," said Hugh. "And I shall be very glad to—"
"Hold on, Hugh," I interrupted. "Remember, he's Nikka's uncle. And besides, he's a king in a small way on his own."
Hugh turned squarely on Nikka.
"My mistake, old man," he said. "I apologize for what I didn't say. But will you please give him my thanks, all the same."
Wasso Mikali's bright eyes, eyes that sparkled with vitality, took on a humorous gleam.
"He says," Nikka translated, chuckling, "that he appreciates your thanks, but he never does anything for thanks. He is here because I am interested and there is a chance of fighting, and he never loses an opportunity to draw his knife, if there is loot to be won or a friend to be aided."
"He's a sportsman," approved Hugh.
"And there are six more like him in the next room," I added.
"I say, Nikka, you brought a feudal levy—what?" Hugh exclaimed delightedly. "Well, we shall need them. This is going to be a tight job, if you ask me."
"Is Toutou here?"
"I think not. So far as we have observed, none of the headliners has appeared on the scene, but the underlings are very efficient. Vernon King and I have been over the ground rather thoroughly. He's been a priceless help, Jack. Don't know what Watty and I would have done without him. He saved us from having to rely on a guide to learn the city. And Betty—she's the most enthusiastic worker on our side."
"She would be," I agreed. "But you don't mean to say that you and she have really done any work?"
"Oh, come, now," he expostulated. "What do you take me for? We have worked a lot. Betty has a motor-launch her father chartered so they could run up and down the coast on his archæological trips, and we used that to mark down the house where we think the treasure is located."
Nikka and I both forgot our Gypsy stoicism, and hitched forward. We were sitting on the floor; Hugh and Watkins, in recognition of their clean clothes were perched on two packs.
"Have you really got a line on the site of the Bucoleon?" asked Nikka.
"Yes," said Hugh. "Matter of fact, that was comparatively easy, thanks to Vernon King. You see, he knows his Constantinople of old; and after consulting with some other learned Johnnies out at Robert College and several ancient Greeks of the Syllogos, the Historical Society, you know, he was able to point out quite accurately the general site of the Great Palace. When we had gone so far, it became a case of picking out the building within that area that held our prize.
"In that we were helped by knowing that it was occupied by a band of Gypsies, who had lived there a long time. The Phanariots, Greeks of the Syllogos, I mean, picked out the building like a shot. To verify it, we watched it from the street and also from the motor-launch. There isn't any doubt about it. It's in what they call Sokaki Masyeri, a mean little street in a mean quarter that skirts the old sea-walls beyond the railroad tracks.
"This house is built right on the walls. It has a kind of battered magnificence, elaborately carven cornices and window-moldings, and it rambles over a good bit of ground, including a fairish-sized courtyard, just as you would expect of the wreck of an old palace. To be sure, it's no more than a small portion of what was the Palace of the Bucoleon. As Vernon King pointed out, the man who started out to excavate the whole site of the Palace would have to embark in the real estate business on a large scale and work with steam-dredgers."
"And you're positive about all this?" I insisted.
"Oh, lord, yes! There can't be any mistake, Jack. Why, the bird who lives in this house is the king of the Stamboul Gypsies, the chief bad man of Constantinople. He has a whole tribe of cut-throats at his beck and call. Ask anybody here about Beran Tokalji—"
Wasso Mikali leaped to his feet at sound of that name and strode over to us, his hand on his knife.
"What's the row?" inquired Hugh as the old Gypsy and Nikka engaged in a brisk exchange of sibilant phrases.
"Our friend has this person Tokalji's number," I explained. "He told us about him. He had heard about the treasure and the house."
"Then we must be right," cried Hugh.
"You're right enough," agreed Nikka, while Wasso Mikali returned to his place by the door and rolled a cigarette. "It seems, also, that this Tokalji is a particular enemy of my uncle. He was suggesting a little exterminating expedition."
"That's the last move to try," answered Hugh quickly. "We've got to be very careful. The authorities were rather puzzled to account for my continued interest in the city, at first. As it is—"
He turned brick-red to his hair.
"As it is," I grinned, "your pursuit of Bet has material advantages."
"Curse you, Jack," he retorted disagreeably, "that's not the way to put it. And anyhow, I'm not responsible for what damnfool officials think."
"You are in luck," said Nikka with a smile.
Hugh stood up, hot and exasperated.
"I didn't come here to be spoofed by a couple of idiotic rotters," he snapped. "When you find your senses, send for me."
"Oh, hang on to your temper, Hugh," I said, dropping my hand on his shoulder. "Get back to where we were. You said we must play safe. We've got six of Nikka's cousins in the next room, first-class knife-handlers, every one of them. With Wasso Mikali and us, that makes eleven."
"And Vernon King is twelve," added Hugh. "He wants to be in on the whole business. It appeals to his archæological bump, as well as to his sporting tastes. But we can't have a rough house yet. We don't know the ground well enough. We've got to determine where the treasure is in that house."
"Did you get the copy of the Instructions from Miss King?" asked Nikka.
"Yes, and had her immediately mail it to herself, Poste Restante, as we agreed. It's there now. I don't need it. I found I had memorized it perfectly. No, the next step is to get inside that house, by stealth, if possible, by force, if every other means fails."
"We ought to try to get inside Tokalji's house as soon as possible, if Toutou and Hélène and the rest of them are not here yet," said Nikka slowly. "Are you sure about that, Hugh?"
"To the extent that we haven't seen a sign of them."
"They will have been scurrying about our back-trail," I suggested. "Our disappearance must have upset their plans."
"Probably," assented Nikka. "Yes, if we are going to profit by that trick we must move soon. I don't believe either Jack or I could fool that Cespedes woman. At the same time, what Hugh says about the danger of violent tactics is very true. We should keep my uncle and his men as a reserve. If it ever comes to a cold show-down, we are going to need more than ourselves."
"King and I have talked it over frequently," said Hugh. "But we haven't been able to think of a safe way of getting inside. Of course, we could run ashore in the launch some night, and climb up the courtyard wall that fronts on the Bosphorus, but we'd certainly be discovered."
"It wouldn't work," asserted Nikka. "No, to get in and have opportunity to look around for the landmarks mentioned in the Instructions we must be accepted as friends."
"It can't be done," protested Hugh at once.
"Oh, yes, it can. Jack and I can do it—with Watkins to help us."
Watkins started up from the pack upon which he had been endeavoring to appear comfortable.
"Oh, now, Mr. Nikka! I never 'eard the like! Your ludship, I protest, I do! I wasn't cut out for a Gypsy. Can you see me in such clothes? It's not decent, your ludship, for a man of my years to be going in public dressed like a pantomime."
"We're not going to make a Gypsy out of you, Watty," returned Nikka, waving him to silence. "You are going to be the innocent victim of two outrageous bandits."
"That's worse," groaned Watkins. "I'll do my duty, your ludship, and take what comes, but there's no call for all this wild talk, if I may say so, sir, and what does it all lead to? And I'm mortal sure, your ludship, there's bugs in this room. 'Adn't we better be getting back to the 'Otel, sir?"
"Sit down," commanded Hugh. "Nobody's stuck you up yet. What's your plan, Nikka?"
"Just this. When we leave here you and Watkins head for Tokalji's house. We'll follow you at a distance. You and Watty must prowl through the street as mysteriously as you can, looking up at the house, examining its approaches, all that sort of thing. Make sure the street is empty—"
"Oh, it's always empty," interrupted Hugh. "It's crescent-shaped, with comparatively few houses opening on it, a backwater."
"That helps. Now, when you get into the street look back and you will see us lurking after you. Pretend to be scared. Then we'll go after you, knives out. Run. You get away, Hugh, but we catch Watty and throw him down—"
"Yes, it 'ad to be me, gentlemen," sighed Watkins.
"—empty out his pockets, start to cut his throat—you'd better not be wriggling about that time, Watty, or the knife might slip—and you raise a yell for the police around the corner. We change our minds, kick Watty on his way and run back. At the gate of Tokalji's house we ask for admission, claiming we fear pursuit. I think—I am quite sure—they will let us in. It is a chance we must take. They will have seen what we did, and from what you and Wasso Mikali tell me, Tokalji considers himself the chief of the local criminals. He will demand a percentage of our loot, and let it go at that."
"A nice time will be 'ad by all," commented Watkins.
"It sounds simple," I said. "But what about me?"
"You are a Frenchman, an ex-Apache and deserter from the Salonika troops. Let me do the talking. I know Gypsies. If you tell them a bold tale, and carry a high bluff, they will take you at your own valuation."
"It's a plan worth trying," agreed Hugh. "But you can't expect to stay with Tokalji forever."
"I know that. We'll do the best we can."
"Start now?"
"Wait until afternoon. That will drive your shadows insane, and they will be doubling back to the hotel on the chance of picking you up again."
We spent the balance of the time together hashing over our experiences, and horrifying Watkins by revealing to him the state of our apparel. Incidentally, we arranged to have complete changes of European clothes sent to us at the khan, so that if it became necessary we could shift rôles inside the protecting walls of the great caravanserai.
When the hour came to leave, Wasso Mikali and his young men escorted Hugh and Watkins through the courtyard, and Nikka and I followed at some distance. The Gypsies stopped in the gateway, and we strolled on alone after our friends in the direction of the Bosphorus. We had walked for upwards of an hour along the narrow lanes, up-hill and down-hill, elbowing a passage through the sordid stream of life, when from an elevation we glimpsed the sheen of water, and Hugh, a hundred feet in front of us, tossed his head as if in invitation to press on.