rejoined His Eminence, turning his horse away.

"Hold! Cardinal," replied the king. "I am surprised at that speech from you. You have tried to teach me by lectures for a fortnight past that Rome has temporal as well as spiritual authority, all power on earth as well as in heaven. Now, by Our Lady! you ought to help this good man over his earthly way towards God's gate, as well as wish him luck when he gets there. But the priest preaches, and leaves the laity to do the duties of religion. Credit me with a good Christian deed to balance the many bad ones you remember against me, Cardinal, and I will help the man. The golden hair of the child against the old man's head were as good an aureole as ever a saint wore. And that Holy Peter knows, if the Cardinal does not. Ho, Olgard! Take the lass on the saddle with you. And, old man, if you will keep close with your daughter, you will find as good provision behind the gate of Philippopolis as that in heaven, if report be true. And, by Saint Michael! if we go dashing down the mountain at this rate we will vault the walls of that rich Moslem town as easily as the devil jumped the gate of Paradise."

Kabilovitsch trudged by the side of Olgard, who held Morsinia before him. It was hard for the old man to keep from under the hoofs of the horses as the attendant knights crowded together down the narrow and tortuous descent. Suddenly the girl uttered a cry, and, clapping her hands, called,

"Constantine, Constantine!"

The missing lad, emerging from a copse, stood for an instant in amazement at the apparition of his little playmate; then dashed among the crowd toward her.

"Drat the witch!" said a knight—between the legs of whose horse the boy had gone—aiming at him a blow with his iron mace. Constantine would have been trampled by the crowding cavalcade, had not the strong hand of a trooper seized him by his ragged jacket and lifted him to the horse's crupper.

"So may somebody save my own lad in the mountains of Carpathia!" said the rough, but kindly soldier.

"Ay, the angels will bear him up in their hands, lest he even dash his foot against a stone, for thy good deed," exclaimed a monk, who, with hood thrown back, and almost breathless with the effort to rescue the lad himself, had reached him at the same moment.

"Good Father, pray for me!" said the trooper, crossing himself.

"Ay, with grace," replied the monk, extricating himself from the crowd, and hasting back to the side of a wounded man, whom his comrades were carrying on a stretcher which had been extemporized with an old cloak tied securely between two stout saplings.

As night darkened down, the plain at the base of the mountain burst into weird magnificence with a thousand campfires. The Turks were in full retreat toward Adrianople, and joy reigned among the Christians. It was the eve of Christmas. The stars shone with rare brilliancy through the cold clear atmosphere.

"The very heavens return the salutation of our beacons," said King Vladislaus.

A trumpet sounded its shrill and jubilant note, which was caught up by others, until the woods and fields and the mountain sides were flooded with the inarticulate song, as quickly as the first note of a bird awakens the whole matin chorus of the summer time.

Cardinal Julian, reining his horse at the entrance to the camp, listened as he gazed—

"'And with the angel there was a multitude of the heavenly host praising God!' Let us accept the joy of this eve of the birth of our Lord as an omen of the birth of Christian power to these lands, which have so long lain in the shadow of Moslem infidelity and Greek heresy. Our camps yonder flash as the sparks which flew from the apron of the Infant Jesu and terrified the devil.[12] Sultan Amurath has been scorched this day, though the infernal fiend lodge in his skin, as I verily believe he does."

"Amurath was not in personal command to-day. At least so I am told," replied Vladislaus. "He is occupied with a rebellion of the Caramanians in Asia. Carambey, the Sultan's sister's husband, led the forces at the beginning of the fight. He was captured in the bog, and is now in safe custody with the Servian Despot, George Brankovich. Hunyades and the Despot have been bargaining for his possession. But the real commandant, as I have learned from prisoners—at least he was present at the beginning of the fight—was Scanderbeg."

"Scanderbeg?" exclaimed Julian with great alarm. "What! the Albanian traitor, Castriot?—Iscariot, rather, should be his name—This then, Your Majesty, is no night for revelry; but for watching. The flight of the enemy, if Scanderbeg leads them, is only to draw us into a net. What if before morning, with the Balkans behind us, we should be assaulted with fresh corps of Turks on the front? There is no fathoming the devices of Scanderbeg's wily brain. And never yet has he been defeated, except to wrest the better victory out of seeming disaster. Does General Hunyades know the antagonist he is dealing with? that it is not some bey or pasha, nor even the Sultan himself, but Scanderbeg? I have heard Hunyades say that since the days of Saladin, the Moslems have not had a leader so skilful as that Albanian renegade: that a glance of his eye has more sagacity in it than the deliberations of a Divan:[13] and that not a score of knights could stand against his bare arm. We must see Hunyades."

"I confess," replied King Vladislaus, "that I liked not the easy victory we have had. I would have sworn to prevent a myriad foes climbing the ice road we travelled yesterday, if I had but a company of pikemen; yet ten thousand Turkish veterans kept us not back; and they were led by Scanderbeg! There is mystery here. Jesu prevent it should be the mystery of death to us all! Let's to Hunyades! If only your wisdom or prayers, Cardinal, could reclaim Scanderbeg to his Christian allegiance, I would not fear Sultan Amurath, though he were the devil's pope, with the keys of death and hell in his girdle."

Hunyades was found with the advance corps of the Christians. But for his white armor he could scarcely be distinguished from some subaltern officer, as he moved among the men, inspecting the details of their encampment. The contrast of the commander-in-chief with the kingly and the ecclesiastical soldier was striking. He listened quietly to their surmises and fears, and replied with as little of their excitement as if he spoke of a new armor-cleaner:

"Yes! we shall probably have a raid from Scanderbeg before morning. But we are ready for him. Do you look well to the rear, King Vladislaus! And do you, Cardinal, marshal a host of fresh Latin prayers for the dying; for, if Scanderbeg gets among your Italians, their saffron skins will bleach into ghosts for fright of him."

The cardinal's face grew as red as his cap, as he replied:

"But for loyalty to our common Christian cause, and the example of subordination to our chief, I would answer that taunt as it deserves."

CHAPTER IV.

The company which Kabilovitsch and the children had joined was halted at the edge of the great camp. Other peasants and non-combatants crowded in from their desolated homes; but neither Milosch's face, nor Helena's, nor yet little Michael's, were among those they anxiously scanned. The command of King Vladislaus secured for the three