Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/143

my heart!"—and he slipped his arm through that of the other and begged him to lead the way where they could sip their coffee and smoke their pipes in peace … "and speak of our home in Turkey, of the olden days when you and I were even as twin brothers rocked in the same cradle!"

Krelekian sighed. He looked to right and left, at his clerks who were behind the counter attending to the wants of the half-dozen customers. But not a word did he utter in protest. He walked along by the side of the Kurd; for beneath the man's ragged, shabby, hand-me-down coat he could feel the sharp angle of the crooked dagger-handle pressing into his side—like a message.

"Ah!" gently breathed Mohammed Yar as he sat down on a carved, inlaid Syrian chair in the back room of the shop, facing his host, who was still as livid as a dead man's bones, still furtive-eyed, shaking in every limb. "This is good! Good, by mine own honor! It is as if we were back in our home village, in Khinis of the hills, friend of me!"

He made a great gesture with his hairy, high-veined hand, that cut through the clustered shadows of the little room like a dramatic incident, that brushed through the sudden, clogged stillness like a conjurer's wand, sweeping away the drab grime and riot of West Street, and conjuring up the glare, the acrid sweetness, the booming, dropping snow chill of the little hill village where both had lived—and loved.

Clear across Zado Krelekian's livid realization of the present slashed the picture of the little town, Khinis, on the way to Erzerum, and what had happened there between him, not then a well-fed, rosy,