It was only seventy yards up the street from the Hôtel d’Angleterre. The body of a boy some eighteen or twenty years of age lay pale and lifeless in a gutter half full of dirty water. There was a short pause before anyone ventured to approach him; there was an infernal machine under his coat. Then a black soldier went up, felt the body carefully and relieved it of an iron bomb and two sticks of dynamite. He had no sooner done this than two other Asiatics approached the body, and one, with blood trickling down his face, set upon it with the bayonet, muttering Turkish--curses, I imagine--through his clenched teeth. Before he had struck many blows, however, an officer caught hold of his sword arm and violently pushed him back; and for a moment there was a rapid argument, followed by a tussle. The other white soldier raised his gun, butt downwards, to smash in the victim’s face, but the negro thrust him back too. In a few minutes four soldiers and the officer came and dragged the body through the mire across the street, and the now freed Asiatic, with drawn bayonet, unable to control himself, began again his curses, and dealt three blows at the stomach of the victim trailing through the mud. Then he put his bayonet between his teeth and took hold of the feet, and helped to throw the dead Bulgar upon a Jew’s cart standing by. The old Jew drove off rapidly; he had cut a cabman out of a job. The slaughtered youth was said to have come from a small town up the railroad. He was a Bulgarian school teacher. In his attempt to blow up the telegraph office (this was his object) he went down to the place dressed as a European. He loitered about his goal, which aroused suspicion, and when he collected his courage and started to enter, one of the sentries at the door challenged him. The young man, holding a paper in his hand and feigning indignation, is said to have exclaimed, ‘Let me pass! I want to send off this telegram.’ The guard answered, ‘I must search you before you go in.’ Here the young Bulgar thrust his hand into his pocket for a bomb, but before he could withdraw it, the stalwart guard, who was twice the size of the Bulgar, grabbed him by the throat, threw him on his back, and sent two balls into him. A letter was found on the boy’s body stating that he had successfully carried out one piece of dynamiting and hoped to accomplish this. CHAPTER VIII MONASTIR AND THE GREEKS