There in the room we sat for nearly two hours. Darkness fell; the women had ceased their gossiping, but still stood about the street and in the doorways of their houses. It was nine o’clock before matters showed any progress. Then came shouts from the road above us, the flash of torches, the tread of men’s feet in a quick triumphant march. Next the stalwart figures of the picturesque fellows, with their white kilts gleaming through the darkness, came again into sight, seeming wilder and more imposing in the alternating glare and gloom of the torches and the deepening night. The man in tweeds was no longer visible. Our innkeeper was alone in front. And all, as they marched, sang loudly a rude barbarous sort of chant, repeating it again and again; while the women and children, crowding out to meet the men, caught up the refrain in shrill voices, till the whole air seemed full of it. So martial and inspiring was the rude tune that our feet began to beat in time with it, and I felt the blood quicken in my veins. I have tried to put the words of it into English, in a shape as rough, I fear, as the rough original. Here it is: ‘Ours is the land! Death to the hand That filches the land! Dead is that hand, Ours is the land! ‘Forever we hold it, Dead’s he that sold it! Ours is the land, Dead is the hand!’ Again and again they hurled forth the defiant words, until at last they stopped opposite the inn with one final long-drawn shout of savage triumph. ‘Well, this is a go,’ said Denny, drawing a long breath. ‘What are the beggars up to?’ ‘What have they been up to?’ I asked; for I could not doubt that the song we had heard had been chanted over a dead Stefanopoulos two hundred years before. At this age of the world the idea seemed absurd, preposterous, horrible. But there was no law nearer than Rhodes, and there only Turk’s law. The sole law here was the law of the Stefanopouloi, and if that law lost its force by the crime of the hand which should wield it, why, strange things might happen even to-day in Neopalia. And we were caught in the inn like rats in a trap. ‘I don’t see,’ remarked old Hogvardt, laying a hand on my shoulder, ‘any harm in loading our revolvers, my lord.’ I did not see any harm in it either, and we all followed Hogvardt’s advice, and also filled our pockets with cartridges. I was determined--I think we were all determined--not to be bullied by these islanders and their skull-and-crossbones ditty. A quarter of an hour passed; then there came a knock at the door, while the bolts shot back. ‘I shall go out,’ said I, springing to my feet. The door opened, and the face of a lad appeared.