As the time wore on, Curtis found himself leaning forward in the darkness, listening for the sound of distant shots. He wondered if the Turks would attack that night and if he could hear the shots if they did.
He went to the door and called to an old man who was talking in a low tone, but excitedly, to the woman across the way. The babe had been put to bed. They both came running, and he asked them, framing his sentence with much care:
"Has the fighting begun? Can the guns be heard from here?"
They replied in concert, volubly and at great length. Then they held a conference and withdrew.
"That's the trouble with a foreign tongue," mused Curtis. "You can talk to them all right, but they talk so fast that you can't understand what they say to you. Now, I said it correctly," and he repeated the sentence.
After about half an hour the old man returned, bringing some bread, cheese, _halva_ and a glass of dark wine. Curtis repeated the Greek word for "thank you" half a dozen times, and then fell upon the food voraciously. "The more I see of these people, the better I like them," he muttered. "Now, I call that thoughtful of the old man."
After he had finished eating he tried his foot, bearing his weight on it until he could endure the pain no longer.
"I believe it's better," he soliloquized, and then cried inconsequentially:
"By Jove! I wonder if that old blockhead thought I was asking for something to eat? Panayota would have understood me in a minute. Why, she and I get along all right together in Greek. But then, I mustn't judge the rest of these people by her."
He wound up his watch at ten o'clock, and lay down upon the divan.
"There's going to be no fight to-night," he muttered. "And, at any rate, it wouldn't be my fight if there was."
He fell asleep, and dreamed of Panayota, gigantic in size, standing on a cliff by a wan, heaving sea. She was hurling jagged pieces of rock down at a line of ant-like Turks, crawling far below. The wind was blowing her hair straight out from her forehead, and he could only see her mouth and chin, but he knew it was Panayota. He ran to help her, when the demarch seized him to hold him back. He awoke, and found that an old man was shaking his arm and crying excitedly in Greek, "Fire! fire!"