"You're awfully good," I said, shamefacedly. "I can't help being hungry all the time. Perhaps your father didn't know how hungry I should be when he wrote to my father asking him to let me come here to get well." Oscar laughed. "Ah, that is betters! Now you enclose yourselfs--shut ups," he added, explanatorily, "and I will make you comfortables." For two hours and a half we dawdled along in an aimless leisurely sort of way, which would have been infinitely exasperating to a man in a hurry. But I was not in a hurry. Every now and again I had a short nap, then another sandwich, and then a glance at the fertile valleys, not yet parched by the heat. As we got nearer the station for Oscar Van Heidsteyn's father's farm, I noticed the lad look to his pistols, see that his knife moved easily in its sheath, and glance carefully out of the carriage window. "We will wait, my friends," he said, as the people began to stream out of the carriages and to thank the station-master for such a prosperous journey. (We were only two hours late; but that was partly owing to a great man having planted his mounted servant on the line, and told him to stop there until it suited the great man's convenience to follow. No one dare run over the servant of a Turkish official, and so, by this simple expedient, the Pasha caught his train without hurrying.) "But why wait? And why are we in the last carriage?" Oscar smiled. "Oh, I will tell you by-and-bys. Suppose there was a man waiting in the station to stab or shoot you, wouldn't you stop here till all the peoples had gone?" "Of course." "Very well, then. The station-master will come to make his salaam; then I shall know it is all rights." "But what is 'all rights'?" "Ah-h! Brigand-d-d!" Oscar's rifle was at his shoulder as he leaped from the carriage. "There is the brother of Stefanos behind the engine-sheds. Tomasso, take care of the Effendi, and I will make the brother of Stefanos 'gits.'" He ran nimbly towards the engine-shed, but the man loitering there did not wait for his coming. By the time Oscar reached the sheds the fellow was half-way up the opposite hill. Then he stopped, flung up his long gun, and took a deliberate shot at the lad. The peacock feather in Van Heidsteyn's hat was cut in two, and the lad himself lay sprawling on the ground. Faint with horror and weakness, I tottered up against the kavasse, who caught me in his arms with a paternal smile. When I opened my eyes, Oscar was joyously regarding me. "I have hit him in the shoulders," he said, modestly. "If I had not let him fire first, for old friendship's sake, I should have killed him." "Fire? Kill who? What does it all mean?" "Oh, it is the brother of Stefanos, and he has sworn to kill me, because the Greek priest did kill his brother Stefanos, and he thinks I helped. Now we will hold you on the white pony, and you shall ride him like one Cyclops."