Page:Talbot Mundy - Eye of Zeitoon.djvu/367

Rh 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.

Kagig wrote the terms in Turkish by the light of the holocaust in Monty's ancestral keep, and Mahmoud signed the paper in the presence of ten witnesses. Rut whether he, or his brother Turks, have kept, for instance, the last clause of the agreement, history can answer.