The envoys began persuading the Khansha to send her eldest son also to Hamzad.
I saw there was treachery and told her not to send him; but a woman has as much sense in her head as an egg has hair.
She ordered her son to go.
Abu Nutsal Khan did not wish to.
Then she said,
‘I see thou are afraid!’
Like a bee she knew where to sting him most painfully.
Abu Nutsal Khan flushed and did not speak to her any more, but ordered his horse to be saddled.
I went with him.
“Hamzad met us with even greater honor than he had shown Umma Khan.
He himself rode out two rifle-shot lengths down the hill to meet us.
A large party of horsemen with their banners followed him, and they too sang, shot, and caracoled.
“When we reached the camp, Hamzad led the Khan into his tent and I remained with the horses. . . .
“I was some way down the hiss when I heard shots fired in Hamzad’s tent.
I ran there and saw Umma Khan lying prone in a pool of blood, and Abu Nutsal was fighting the murids.
One of his cheeks had been hacked off and hung down.
He supported it with one hand and with the other stabbed with his dagger at all who came near him.
I saw him strike down Hamzad’s brother and aim a blow at another man, but then the murids fired at him and he fell.”
Hadji Murad stopped and his sunburnt face flushed a dark red and his eyes became bloodshot.
“I was seized with fear and ran away.”
“Really? . . .
I thought thou never wast afraid,” said Loris- Melikov.
“Never after that. . . . Since then I have always remembered that shame, and when I recalled it I feared nothing!”
Chapter XII
“But enough!
It is time for me to pray,” said Hadji Murad drawing from an inner breast-pocket of his Circassian coat Vorontsov’s repeater watch and carefully pressing the spring.
The repeater struck twelve and a quarter.
Hadji Murad listened with his head on one side, repressing a childlike smile.
“Kunak Vorontsov’s present,” he said, smiling.
“It is a good watch,” said Loris-Melikov.
“Well then, to thou and pray, and I will wait.”
“Yakshi. Very well,” said Hadji Murad and went to his bedroom.
Left by himself, Loris-Melikov wrote down in his notebook the chief things Hadji Murad had related, and then lighting a cigarette began to pace up and down the room.
On reaching the door opposite the bedroom he heard animated voices speaking rapidly in Tartar.
He guessed that the speakers were Hadji Murad’s murids, and opening the door he went to them.
The room was impregnated with that special leathery acid smell peculiar to the mountaineers.
On a burka spread out on the floor sat the one-eyed, red-haired Gamzalo, in a tattered greasy beshmet, plaiting a bridle.
He was saying something excitedly, speaking in a hoarse voice, but when Loris-Melikov entered he immediately became silent and continued his work without paying any attention to him.
In front of Gamzalo stood the merry Khan Mahoma showing his white teeth, his black lashless eyes glittering, and saying something over and over again.
The handsome Eldar, his sleeves turned up on his strong arms, was polishing the girths of a saddle suspended from a nail.
Khanefi, the principal worker and manager of the household, was not there, he was cooking their dinner in the kitchen.
“What were you disputing about?” asked Loris-Melikov after greeting them.
“Why, he keeps on praising Shamil,” said Khan Mahoma giving his hand to Loris-Melikov.
“He says Shamil is a great man, learned, holy, and a dzhigit.”
“How is it that he has left him and still praises him?”
“He has left him and still praises him,” repeated Khan Mahoma, his teeth showing and his eyes glittering.
“And does he really consider him a saint?” asked Loris- Melikov.
“If he were not a saint the people would not listen to him,” said Gamzalo rapidly.
“Shamil is no saint, but Mansur was!” replied Khan Mahoma.
“He was a real saint.