"Now the Blessed Virgin be praised," he cried, "that you have come! We expected you earlier. How was it you did not come before? Ah, Yanni, but your father has wearied for you! Is it a long bill we have with Mehemet? Oh, admirable little Mitsos, the Holy Father reward you for bringing him safe. We will breakfast together when I have finished this job. Get you to my tent with Nicholas." The unlading of the powder was an operation in which, so Petrobey thought, no caution would be superfluous. It arrived in big mule panniers, covered over with charcoal or some country produce, and the panniers were taken off and carried singly by men barefoot into the magazine. Here others were stationed, whose duty it was to take off the stuff under which the powder was concealed and empty it into small skin bottles, which could be carried by a man, and held more than the ordinary powder-flasks. There were eight hundred of these, one for each man in the camp, and when they were full the remainder were to be stored in light wooden boxes of handier shapes than the panniers for transport on the ammunition mules. All day fresh bands of men in eights and tens from the Maina country arrived in camp, and news was passed from the other stations along the mountain-side that they, too, were filling rapidly. Among others fifty men had joined the patriots from Nauplia and the plain of Argos, one of whom was Father Andréa, an incarnated vengeance more than priest, and another was Mitsos' father. Mitsos himself, however, was to remain in the camp of the Mavromichales, acting as aide-de-camp to Nicholas, but otherwise the disposition of the men was strictly geographical, since Petrobey's experience told him that men who have known each other fight best side by side. Each camp was organized on the pattern of the Mavromichales, and the captains of each had voluntarily put themselves under the supreme command of Petrobey, for the dissensions which subsequently broke out in the army had not yet appeared. Moreover, the Hetairist Club, since the flight of Prince Alexander Ypsilanti, had given express orders that the direction of affairs in the south was to be in the hands of some local chieftain, suggesting for that office either Petrobey or Nicholas.