Page:Talbot Mundy - Eye of Zeitoon.djvu/188

170 Will had evidently given her a pretty complete synopsis of our adventure while I was outside talking with Arabaiji. It is always a mystery to the British that Americans should hold themselves a race apart and rally to each other as if the rest of the Anglo-Saxon race were foreigners, but those two had obeyed the racial rule. They understood each other—swiftly—a bar and a half ahead of the tune.

"This old castle is no good!" she went on, not raising her voice very high, but making it ring with the wholesomeness of youth, and youth's intolerance of limits. "The Turks could come to this place and burn it within a day if they chose!"

"The Turks won't trouble. They'll send their friends the Kurds instead," Fred assured her.

"Ah-h-h-gh!" growled the Armenians, but she waved them back to silence.

"How much food have you? Almost none! How much ammunition?"

"Ah-h-h-h!" they chorused in a very different tone of yoice.

"D'you mean you've got cartridges here?" Fred demanded.

"Fifty cases of cartridges for government Mauser rifles!" bragged the man who was nearest to Will.

"Gee! Kagig 'ud give his eyes for them!" (Will devoted his eyes to the more poetic purpose of exchanging flashed encouragement with Gloria.)

"Men, women and children—how many of you are there?"

"Who knows? Who has counted? They keep coming."

"No, they don't. You've set a guard to keep any more