they curled up about the engine-room gratings—­for it was cold that night—­yet there was no complaint.  A tired sigh now and then, a moan of weariness, and the soldier wrapped his army overcoat a little closer about him, curled up like a dog on a door-mat, and left the rest to fate.  A big, round, yellow moon climbed up out of Asia and poured its silver down on them and on the black hills and water, still as some inland lake.

The side-wheeler tied up at Ak-Bash for the night, and it was not until the middle of the next morning that it was decided that she should cross and leave her wounded at Lapsaki instead of going on up to Constantinople.  We lugged our baggage off and hunted up our old friend, the Hamburg-American captain, to see what might be done till some other craft appeared.  He finally put us aboard a sort of enlarged tug which might be going up that afternoon or evening.

It was about midday.  The sun blazing down on the crowded fiat; on boxes, sacks, stevedores wrapped up in all the variegated rags of the East shuffling in and out of the ships; on gangs digging, piling lumber, boiling water, cooking soup; on officers in brown uniforms and brown lamb’s-wool caps; on horses, ox-teams, and a vast herd of sheep, which had just poured out of a transport and spread over the plain, when from the hill came two shots of warning.  An enemy aeroplane was coming!

The gangs scattered like water-bugs when a stone is thrown into the water.  They ran for the hill, dropped into trenches; to the beach and threw themselves flat on the sand; into the water—­all, as they ran, looking up over their shoulders to where, far overhead, whirred steadily nearer that tiny, terrible hawk.

A hidden battery roared and—­pop!—­a little puff of cotton floated in the sky under the approaching flier.  Another and another—­all the nervous little batteries in the hills round about were coming to our rescue.  The bird-man, safely above them, drew on without flinching.  We had looked up at aeroplanes many times before and watched the pretty chase of the shrapnel, and we leaned out from under the awning to keep the thing in view.  “Look,” I said to Suydam; “she’s coming right over us!” And then, all at once, there was a crash, a concussion that hit the ear like a blow, a geyser of smoke and dust and stones out on the flat in front of us.  Through the smoke I saw a horse with its pack undone and flopping under its belly, trotting round with the wild aimlessness of horses in the bull-ring after they have been gored.  Men were running, and, in a tangle of wagons, half a dozen oxen, on the ground, were giving a few spasmodic kicks.

Men streaked up from the engine-room and across the wharf—­after all, the wharf would be the thing he’d try for—­and I found myself out on the flat with them just as there came another crash, but this time over by the Barbarossa across the bay.  Black smoke was pouring from the Turkish cruiser as she got under way, and, with the shrapnel puffs chasing hopelessly after, the flier swung to the southward and out of right.