LITMIR.BIZ

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up stones and flung them at the trespassers, sending them flying over the low stone wall. Then, the Englishman's joy of battle waking in him, he gave chase as fast, or faster, than his limbs would carry him.

      He heard the others crying out to him; but he thought they were encouraging his efforts. Even when they came running up with evident intent to stop him, he thought they were only afraid he would do himself harm. But at last the youngest son of Hohannes caught him bodily in his arms, shook the stones out of his hand, and cried breathlessly, "You must not! You must not!"

      Jack had a good deal of Armenian by this time. "Inchu? Inchu?—Why? why?" he gasped; "they were destroying your vines."

      The young man, by name Avedis, or "good tidings," looked sadly at the injured trees, but only said, "Those goats belong to the Kourds."

      Jack stammered in his eagerness to find the words he wanted. "What has that to do with it?" he got out at last. "What right have the Kourds to spoil your vines?"

      "Don't you know, Yon Effendi, that if we dare to stop them doing it, or even to drive their sheep and goats out of our fields and vineyards, they think a great deal less of stabbing or shooting one of us than you would of killing a cat?"

      "But then they would be hanged for it!" cried Jack. "Have you no—oh, what is the word for it?—have you no—police?" He said the word in English, and a rush of old, new thoughts and impressions came crowding into his brain.

      "Police?"

      "The men who keep order, and take people to prison."

      "Do you mean the zaptiehs? They are worse than the Kourds. The Turk and the Kourd are the upper and the nether millstone, grinding us to powder. If one of us is fool enough to complain of a Kourd or a Turk, the Kamaikan—the governor, I mean—says he will enquire into the matter. And he does. He sends for the man who has complained, throws him into a dungeon, and keeps him there till he confesses all the wrong is on his own side; or perhaps until his people pay a sum of money. Or perhaps he may be never heard of again at all."

      Avedis did not say this with fierce looks and indignant gestures, but in a calm, matter-of-fact way, as if such things were part of the everlasting order of nature, which has been from the beginning and will be until the end. Jack did not follow every word; but one thing he understood very clearly: they must all stand still and see their beautiful vines destroyed. There was no remedy—why? Because this was not England. England! Now he knew everything. He was an English boy, left alone here in this strange land. And his father—where was his father? "Where is my father?" he cried aloud in English.

      "What is that you say?" asked Avedis.

      Jack repeated his question in Armenian.

      "Come and sit down under the tree," said Avedis.

      Jack obeyed, silent and trembling. Avedis stood, looking at him sadly. "Tell me, where is my father?" Jack repeated with pleading eyes, into which a new expression was dawning slowly.

      "You know, Yon Effendi, you have been very ill," Avedis said. "Your father, a great English Effendi, very wise and good, was ill too. You recovered; your father did not recover. He is gone to God. Do you understand me, Yon Effendi?"

      Jack understood so well that he flung himself face downwards on the ground, and burst into a passion of weeping. In vain Avedis tried to comfort him. "God forgive me," he thought, "I ought not to have told him. I fear I have killed him." And he certainly had not acted up to the meaning of his name. The rest of the family blamed him severely, when they heard what he had done. It was the custom of their country for the bearer of sad tidings to go about his task with great circumlocution, carefully "breaking" them, as we say in England.

      Yet the shock, instead of killing John Grayson, brought him back to his true life. Up to this there had been a serious danger that his brain would never wholly recover the shock of that long and terrible illness; and that, if he lived, he might go through the future years as one whose mind had an important leaf left out of it. But that day's agony of weeping, and the days and nights of distress that followed it, meant that he would either die, or else recover wholly, and claim his intellectual inheritance in the present and the past. This full recovery, however, might well be an affair of time—perhaps of a long time.

      Old Hohannes heard with the rest that the English youth knew now that his father was dead, and that he was weeping and refusing comfort, in a manner very likely to make him ill again. "We will take him back to the town," he said; and so they did the next day.

      The following morning Hohannes took him by the hand, led him into a low, dark room on the ground-floor, where bulghour and rice were stored, and shut and barred the door.

      "Sit down," he said. Jack did so; and looked on wonderingly while the old man dug a hole in the ground with some implement resembling a trowel.

      At last he grew impatient, and asked, "Will you not tell me about my father?"

      Hohannes looked up. "There is not much to tell," he said. "Feeling himself, no doubt, very ill, the English Effendi sent for me, and I came. He asked me to take care of you, and if you should recover to try and send you back to your friends in England. And he gave me, to use for you as I thought best, the things I have kept hidden here. He spoke somewhat also of certain papers, but before he could finish what he wanted to say, the fever increased upon him, and his mind began to wander. As to the papers, we never got them. They were stolen away, with his other baggage, by the two Syrian servants, who were brothers, and precious rascals. But these I have." He stooped and took out of the hole something wrapped in a skin and tied with cords. These he carefully unfastened, took off the skin, and revealed two books and a belt of chamois leather. The books he gave to Jack, who recognised, with a thrill of joy and a pang of sorrow, the pocket Bible his father always carried with him, and the note-book in which he used to see him write. "Keep these thyself," said Hohannes. "This," holding up the belt, "I must keep still. There is gold in it." Instinctively his voice dropped lower, though there was none to hear the dangerous word.

      "I am very glad of it," Jack said frankly, as, for the first time, it occurred to him that these people, upon whom he had no claim, had been providing for all his wants. "Father Hohannes, you and yours have fed and tended me all this time like a child of your own. It ought to be all yours!"

      "You have a generous heart, Yon Effendi. And, in fact, I have used it for you as far as was necessary and just. There were medicines and other things when you were ill, and there was the tax to pay for you."

      "The tax for me?" Jack repeated. "What tax?"

      "Know you not we have to pay, year by year, every man and boy among us, for breathing the air? Even for the new-born babe the Turk exacts it. So your tax had to be found along with our own, and will be next year also. Moreover I own, a piece or two went to the Kourds as backsheesh, that they might let our cattle alone."

      "Indeed, father," Jack said again, "I wish you would take it all; it is yours by right."

      Hohannes shook his head. "And what, then, if you should want to go home?" he said; "or if any way for your doing it should open? Moreover we dare not, for our lives, let any one know we have so much gold in the house. The Kourds would come down from the mountains and rob us, or the Turks would take it from us on pretence of arrears of taxes. It is best for me to keep it here for you. You see where I put it?"

      "Yes, Father Hohannes; it is all right," said Jack.

      He was longing to go away somewhere by himself, and feast his eyes on his father's handwriting, and on the printed words he loved so well. But, as he was going, a thought came to him that made him turn again. Things which he had heard Kevork say as he began to get better, and which at the time he had scarcely noticed, came to his mind with a sudden inspiration.

      "Father Hohannes," he said, "Kevork, your grandson, longs sore to go to Aintab, to the great school the Americans have set up there for your people. Kevork loves learning very much. May he not take some of this gold and go?"

      Again Hohannes shook his head. "Kevork is a foolish boy," he said. "The cock

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