As soon as this reached Kalamata, Petrobey determined to move. The wholesale success of the patriots in the north showed that they were in no need of immediate help, and to have two different armies in the field, one driving the Turks southward, the other northward into Tripoli, the central fortress of Ottoman supremacy, was ideal to his wishes. But more than ever now soberness and strength were needed; the men hearing of the taking of Kalavryta were wild to unite with the northern army and march straight on Tripoli. But Petrobey, backed by Nicholas, was as firm as Taygetus; such a course could only end in disaster, for they were yet as ignorant as children of the elements of war, and it would be an inconceivable rashness now to venture on that which would be final disaster or the freedom of the Morea. They must learn the alphabet of their new trade; what better school could there be than their camp on the slopes of Taygetus, the lower hill-sides of which were covered with Turkish villages, and where they would not, from the nature of the ground, be exposed to the attacks of cavalry? So, after making great breaches in the walls of the citadel of Kalamata, and filling up the well, so that never again could it be used as a stronghold, they marched back across the blossomed plain and up to the hill camp below the beacon with the glory of success upon them.
Three nights later Yanni and Mitsos were sitting after supper in the open air by a camp-fire. Yanni, still rather soft from his month's fattening at Tripoli--"And, oh, Yanni," said Mitsos, "but it is a stinging affair to have fattened a little pig like you, and never have the eating of it"--was suffering from a blister on his heel, and Mitsos prescribed spirits on the raw or pure indifference.
"If you had been cooped and fattened as I, little Mitsos," said Yanni, in an infernally superior manner, "how much running do you think you could lay leg to? As it is, if you continue to eat as you eat, what a belly-man will Mitsos be at thirty!"
"Poor Mehemet!" he said, "all that for nothing. I have a fine cousin who is only just twenty, and if you said he was fat, man, you wouldn't give a person any proper notion of him."
"My blister is worse than it was yesterday," said Yanni, pulling off his shoe.