“Know him? I should think I did. Haven’t I carried him in my arms when he was little? If it hadn’t been so dark I should have recognised him at once. Well, as it is he, I don’t mind doing him a good turn. I certainly wouldn’t have taken a florin less from anyone else. I’ll take from him the offer of seventeen hundred thalers.”
“Seventeen hundred florins, I said.”
“I tell your honour, you said thalers—thalers was what I heard, and I won’t undertake the job for less; may my hand and leg wither if I move a step for less.”
“Oh, I’ll give him his thalers,” said Rákóczy, interrupting the dispute; whereupon the robber seized the youth’s hand and shook it joyfully.
“Didn’t I know that your honour was the finest fellow of the three?” said the robber. “If, therefore, you will send these few trumpery thalers a week hence to the house of the worthy man who guided you hither, I will be at Grosswardein a week later with my seventeen hundred fellows.”
“But, suppose we pay you in advance, and you don’t turn up?” said Raining anxiously.
The robber looked at the quartermaster proudly.
“Do you take me for a common swindler?” said he. Then he turned with a movement of confiding expansion to the other gentlemen.
“We understand each other better,” he remarked. “Your honours may depend upon me. God be with you.”
With that he turned his horse and galloped off into the darkness. The three gentlemen were conducted back to Ladány.
“Marvellous fellow, this Kökényesdi,” said Raining, who had scarce recovered yet from his astonishment.
“You mustn’t believe all the yarns he chooses to tell you,” said Topay.
“What!” inquired Raining. “Had he then no communications with the French and English Courts?”
“No more than his grandmother.”
“Then how about those treasures of which he spoke?”
“He himself has never seen them, and he only talked about them to give you a higher opinion of him.”
“And his castle in the puszta, and his seventeen companies of freebooters?”
“He invented them entirely for your honour’s edification. The freebooter is no fool, he lives in no castle in the puszta, but in a simple village as modest Mr. Kökényesdi, and his seventeen companies scarcely amount to more than seventeen hundred men.”
“Then why did he consent so easily to take only seventeen hundred thalers?”
“Because he does not mean to give his lads a single farthing of it.”
Raining shook his head, and grumbled to himself all the way home.
In a week’s time they sent to Kökényesdi the stipulated money. Raining, moreover, fearing lest the fellow might forget the fixed time, did not hesitate to go personally to Vásárhely, to seek him at his own door. There stood Master Kökényesdi in his threshing-floor, picking his teeth with a straw.
“Good day,” said the quartermaster.
“If it’s good, eat it,” murmured Kökényesdi to himself.
“Don’t you know me?”
“Blast me if I do.”
“Then don’t you remember what you promised at the Barátfa inn?”
“I don’t know where the Barátfa inn is.”
“Then haven’t you received the seventeen hundred thalers?”
“What should I receive seventeen hundred thalers for?”
“Don’t joke, the appointed time has come.”
“What appointed time?”
“What appointed time? And you who have to be at Grosswardein with seventeen hundred men!”
“Seventeen oxen and seventeen herdsmen on their backs, I suppose you mean.”
“Well, a pretty mess we are in now,” said Raining to himself as he wrathfully trotted back to Debreczen, and as he rushed into Rákóczy’s room exclaiming, “Well, Kökényesdi has toasted us finely!” there stood Kökényesdi before his very eyes.
“What, you here?”
“Yes, I am; and another time your honour will know that whenever I am at my own place I am not at home.”
It was the Friday before Whit Sunday, and the time about evening. A great silence rested over the whole district, only from the minarets of Varalja one Imam answered another, and from the tombs one shepherd dog answered his fellow: it was impossible to distinguish from which of the two the howling proceeded.
A couple of turbaned gentlemen were leisurely strolling along the bastions. Above the palisaded gate the torso of a square-headed Tartar was visible, with his elbows resting on the ramparts, holding his long musket in his hand. The Tartar sentinel was gazing with round open eyes into the black night, watching lest anyone should come from the direction in which he was aiming with his gun, and blowing vigorously at the lunt to prevent its going out. While he was thus anxiously on the watch, it suddenly seemed to him as if he discerned the shape of a horseman approaching the city.
In such cases the orders given to the Osmanli sentinels were of the simplest description: they were to shoot everyone who approached in the nighttime without a word.
The Tartar only waited until the man had come nearer, and then, placing his long musket on the moulding of the gate, began to take aim with it.
But the approaching horseman rode his steed as oddly as only Hungarian csikósok10 can do, for he bobbed perpetually from the right to the left, and dodged backwards and forwards in the most aggravating manner.
“Allah pluck thy skin from off thee, thou drunken Giaour,” murmured the baffled Tartar to himself, as he found all his aiming useless; for just as he was about to apply the lunt, the csikós was no longer there, and the next moment he stood at the very end of his musket. “May all the seven-and-seventy hells have a little bit of thee! Why canst thou not remain still for a moment that I may fire at thee?”
Meanwhile the shape had gradually come up to the very gate.
“Don’t come any nearer,” cried the Tartar, “or I shan’t be able to shoot thee.”
“Oh, that’s it, is it?” said the other. “Then why didn’t you tell me so sooner? But don’t hold your musket so near to me, it may go off of its own accord.”
We recognise in the csikós Kökényesdi, whose horse now began to prance about to
