“Ihr seit verruckt!” he sneered.  “You take the side of bandits.  Passt mal auf—­there will be punishment!”

The Zeitoonli were going to tie Peter Measel, but he set up such a howl that Kagig at last took notice of him and ordered him flung, unbound, into the great wooden bin in which the horse-feed was kept for sale to wayfarers.  There he lay, and slept and snored for the rest of that session, with his mouth close to a mouse-hole.

Then Kagig ordered our Zeitoonli to the roof on guard, and bade us sleep with a patriarchal air of authority.

“There is no knowing when I shall decide to march,” be explained.

Given enough fatigue, and warmth, and quietness, a man will sleep under almost any set of circumstances.  The great fire blazed, and flickered, and finally died down to a bed of crimson.  The prisoners were most likely all awake, for their bonds were tight, but only Kagig remained seated in the midst of his mess of blankets by the hearth; and I think he slept in that position, and that I was the last to doze off.  But none of us slept very long.

There came a shout from the roof again, and once again a thundering on the door.  The move—­unanimous—­that the gipsies’ right hands made to clutch their weapons resembled the jump from surprise into stillness when the jungle is caught unawares.  A second later when somebody tossed dry fagots on the fire the blaze betrayed no other expression on their faces than the stock-in-trade stolidity.  Even the women looked as if thundering on a kahveh door at night was nothing to be noticed.  Kagig did not move, but I could see that he was breathing faster than the normal, and he, too, clutched a weapon.  Von Quedlinburg began shouting for help alternately in Turkish and in German, and the owner of the place produced a gun—­a long, bright, steel-barreled affair of the vintage of the Comitajes and the First Greek War.  He and his sons ran to the door to barricade it.

“Yavash!” ordered Kagig.  The word means slowly, as applied to all the human processes.  In that instance it meant “Go slow with your noise!” and mine host so understood it.

But the thundering on the great door never ceased, and the kahveh was too full of the noise of that for us to hear what the Zeitoonli called down from the roof.  Kagig arose and stood in the middle of the room with the firelight behind him.  He listened for two minutes, standing stock-still, a thin smile flickering across his lean face, and the sharp satyr-like tops of his ears seeming to prick outward in the act of intelligence.

“Open and let them in!” he commanded at last.

“I will not!” roared the owner of the place.  “I shall be tortured, and all my house!”

“Open, I said!”

“But they will make us prisoner!”

Kagig made a sign with his right hand.  Gregor Jhaere rose and whispered.  One by one the remaining gipsies followed him into the shadows, and there came a noise of scuffling, and of oaths and blows.  As Gregor Jhaere had mentioned earlier, they did obey Kagig now and then.  The Turks came back looking crestfallen, and the fastenings creaked.  Then the door burst open with a blast of icy air, and there poured in nineteen armed men who blinked at the firelight helplessly.