The young man, leaning carelessly on his lance, replied, laconically:—
"From Van."
"What is the news, and where are you going?"
"I am going to Bash-Kala. I am carrying a letter from the pasha[1] to the mudir.[2]"
The Kurds looked at each other significantly.
"And where are you going?" asked the young man, without seeming to notice their glances.
"Against the infidels," said one. "The Sheikh has called us out. We are going to fight."
"You seem to have exercised your valor first upon those miserable rags," said the young man with a sarcastic laugh.
"That was a small prey which fortune threw in our way. Our brothers had burned an Armenian village, but the women had fled to the mountain, and—"
"Fled from their hands and fell into yours," said the young man, interrupting the Kurd.
One of them asked suspiciously:—
"Where are you from?"
"From the Siban mountains. I belong to the Haydaran tribe," answered the young man in the accent peculiar to that tribe.
"Will not the Haydarans go to war?"
"They will go under the leadership of their own Sheikh. The Haydarans never mingle with the Shigags, Ravants and Bilbasds, who follow Sheikh Jelaleddin."
Though the words of the proud Haydaran wounded the feelings of his hearers, who were of the Ravant tribe, yet looking on him as an official personage who was carrying a letter from the pasha to the mudir of Bash-Kala, they swallowed his insulting speech and said nothing.
The young man, changing the subject, said, as if speaking to himself,—
"What a poor country this is! It is the first time I have been here, and I am almost starved. One finds nothing to eat
