‘He will not go at any price,’ came the reply. ‘He has a wife and children depending on him, and an officer has been to him last night and told him that he should lead us to Veles and nowhere else.’ It was no use arguing. We turned our horses’ heads towards a village of some ten houses a few miles off, half way up a mountain side. The dragoman followed. The guide would not leave the road to Veles, literally following instructions. It was Sunday, and the peasants were all in their brightest clothes. They were dancing a _horo_, but our appearance among them broke up the festivities. Every man, woman, and child in the village collected about these queer travellers. They understood the dragoman’s Bulgarian, as was apparent by the state of alarm into which they fell. Not for a hundred liras, said the headman of the village, would one of them guide us over the mountains. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why!’ came the answer, ‘the man who should take you over those mountains would be shot by the committajis, for we have refused to arm. Were the Turks to find out that one of us had left here without a _teskeré_, and taken you to see a village which they had destroyed, they would come and do the same to this place.’ ‘Please leave us,’ they begged, as we still argued, ‘and get away before the Turks see you.’ Several old women began to cry. We returned to our guide, our last card played, and said demurely, ‘Lead us back to Veles.’ We made our way slowly, and waited at the next khan for a cloud of dust on our trail to develop into a troop of cavalry, who kept a close cordon about us for the rest of the journey back to the railway. Defeated we had been, but we had learned a lesson in the ways of the Turk, who thinks his intelligence is superior to that of a mere ‘giaour.’ CHAPTER X USKUB AND THE SERBS After our attempt to evade the authorities we were closely watched until we left Veles, the police, as is their way, pretending to wait upon us only for our convenience. When we departed two mounted gendarmes accompanied us to the railway station, though we needed no protection, and a careful sleuth, with painful politeness, assisted us in taking tickets for Uskub--an unnecessary courtesy--and went with us to the train to see, he alleged, that we secured a comfortable compartment. There was only one first-class compartment in the train, and this was occupied by a well-dressed officer whose trousers had been pressed inside out. The Turkish gentleman stood not upon ceremony, as does his admiring British contemporary on such occasions; he introduced himself before we had taken our seats, immediately inquired our life history, and soon divulged what purported to be his. He was no other than Hamdi Pasha, of Albanian extraction, the youngest general in the Turkish army, so he informed us, on his way to the Bulgarian border, of which he was military inspector.