"All robbers are Armenians—all Armenians are robbers!" they assured us gravely.
When we halted for a meal they refused to eat with our Zeitoonli, although they graciously permitted them to gather all the firewood, and accepted pieces of their pasderma (sun-dried meat) as if that were their due. As soon as they had eaten, and before we had finished, Ibrahim, their grizzled senior, came to us with a new demand. On its face it was not outrageous, because we were doing our own cooking, as any man does who has ever peeped into a Turkish servant's behind-the-scene arrangements.
"Send those Armenians away!" he urged. "We Turks are worth twice their number!"
"By the beard of God's prophet!" thundered Rustum Khan, "who gave camp-followers the right to impose advice?"
"They are in league with highwaymen to lead you into a trap!" Ibrahim answered.
Rustum Khan rattled the saber that lay on the rock beside him.
"I am hunting for fear," he said. "All my life I have hunted for fear and never found it !"
"Pekki!" said Ibrahim dryly. The word means "very well." The tone implied that when the emergency should come we should do well not to depend on him, for he had warned us.
We were marching about parallel with the course the completed Baghdad railway was to take, and there were frequent parties of surveyors and engineers in sight. Once we came near enough to talk with the German in charge of a party, encamped very sumptuously near his work. He had a numerous armed guard of Turks.
