Monty seemed to be listening to the noise of battle—­Kagig to think of nothing but his loss.  He pointed at Mahmoud, who was eying Monty curiously.

“See the prisoner!” he said.  “Ha!  I would give a hundred of him a hundred times for Monty, my brother!”

Monty turned his head to see Mahmoud, and appeared partly satisfied.

“You hold the key,” he said painfully.  “Mahmoud will make terms.  But it will take time to stop the fighting.  You must send down reserves to Fred and Rustum Khan—­that is where the strain is—­you must see that surely—­the enemy from below will be trying to come forward, and those in the trap to return.  Fred and Rustum Khan are bearing all the brunt.  Relieve them!”

It did not look good to me that Will should leave Gloria again; and Kagig must surely stay there to do the bargaining.  So I took Monty’s hand to bid him good-by, and limped off through the dark to try to find men who would come with me to the shambles below.  It wag Kagig and Will together who overtook me, picked me off my feet, and dragged me back, and Will went down alone, with a wave of the hand to Gloria, and a laugh that might have made the devil think he liked it.

Then began the conference, I holding a mere watching brief with a pistol reasonably close to Mahmoud’s ear.  And for a time, while Monty lived, the elders supported Kagig and insisted on the full concession of his demands.  But Monty, with his head on Gloria’s lap, died midway of the proceedings; and after that the elders’ suspicion of Kagig reawoke, so that Mahmoud took courage and grew more obstinate.  Kagig called them aside repeatedly to make them listen to his views.

“You fools!” he swore at them, cracking his knuckles and twisting at his beard alternately.  “Do you not realize that Mahmoud is ambitious!  Do you not understand that he must yield all, if you insist!  Otherwise we hang him here to a tree in sight of the burning castle and his own men!  No ambitious rascal is ever willing to be hanged!  Insist!  Insist!”

“Ah, Kagig!” one of them answered.  “Speak for yourself.  You would not like to be hanged perhaps!  But we must concede him something, or how shall he satisfy ambition?  He must be able to go back with something to his credit in order to satisfy the politicians.”

“Oh, my people!  Oh, my people!” grumbled Kagig.  “Can you never see?”

But they went back to Mahmoud with a fresh proposal, milder than the first; and eventually, after yielding point by point, until Kagig begged them kindly to blow his brains out and bury him with Monty, they reached a basis on which Mahmoud was willing to capitulate —­or to oblige them, as he expressed it.

He won his main point:  Zeitoon was to accept a Turkish governor.  They won theirs, that the governor was to bring no troops with him, but to be contented with a body-guard of Zeitoonli.  For the rest:  Mahmoud was to go free, taking his wounded with him, but surrendering all the uninjured Turkish soldiers in the trap as hostages for the release of all Armenian prisoners taken anywhere between Tarsus and Zeitoon.  It was agreed there were to be no subsequent reprisals by either side, and that hostages were not to be released until after Mahmoud’s army corps should have returned to whence it came.