In one way and another she made opportunities to talk with the Englishman and to inquire of others about his career.  She presently discovered that he was the champion who had beheaded three Turkish warriors, one after another, before the walls of the besieged city Regall.  She made up her mind that when she was old enough to control her own fortune, which would be in the not very distant future, she would set him free and marry him.  Such things had been done in Constantinople, and doubtless could be done again.

But meantime Charatza’s mother, learning that her daughter had been talking to a slave, was not at all pleased and threatened, since he was no nobleman and would not be ransomed, to sell him in the market.  Charatza was used to having her way sooner or later, and managed to have him sent instead to her brother, a pacha or provincial governor in Tartary.  She sent also a letter asking the pacha to be kind to the young English slave and give him a chance of learning Turkish and the principles of the Koran.

This was far from agreeable to a brother who had already heard of his sister’s liking for the penniless stranger,—­especially as he found that the Englishman had no intention of turning Moslem.  The slave-master was told to treat him with the utmost severity, which meant that his life was made almost unbearable.  A ring of iron, with a curved iron handle, was locked around his neck, his only garment was a tunic of hair-cloth belted with undressed hide, he was herded with other Christian slaves and a hundred or more Turks and Moors who were condemned criminals, and, as the last comer, had to take the kicks and cuffs of all the others.  The food was coarse and unclean, and only extreme hunger made it possible to eat it.

John Smith was not the man to sit down hopelessly under misfortune, and he talked with the other Christians whenever chance offered, about possible plans of escape.  None of them saw any hope of getting away, even by joining their efforts.  It may be that some of this talk was overheard; at any rate Smith was sent after a while to thresh wheat by himself in a barn two or three miles from the stone castle where the governor lived.  The pacha rode up while he was at work and began to abuse him, taunting him with being a Christian outcast who had tried to set himself above his betters by winning the favor of a Turkish lady.  The Englishman flew at him like a wildcat, dragged him off his horse and broke his skull with the club which was used instead of a flail for threshing.  Then he dressed himself in the Turk’s garments, hid the body under a heap of grain, filled a bag with wheat for all his provision, mounted the horse of his late master, and rode away northward.  He knew that Muscovy was in this general direction, and coming to a road marked by a cross, rode that way for sixteen days, hiding whenever he heard any sound of travelers for fear the iron slave-ring should betray him.  At last he came to a Russian garrison on the River