"Perfectly!" Fred agreed. "Any young woman in your place would have
come away!"

She laughed, and colored a trifle. "Women and men are equals in
the States, Mr. Oakes."

"And the Turk ought to know that! I get you, Miss Vanderman! I
see the point exactly!"

"At any rate, I started. And we slept at night in the houses of
Armenians whom my guides knew, so that the journey wasn't bad at
all. Everything was going splendidly until we reached a sort of
crossroads--if you can call those goat-tracks roads without stretching
truth too far--and there three men came galloping toward us on blown
horses from the direction of Marash. We could hardly get them to
stop and tell us what the trouble was, they were in such a hurry,
but I set my horse across the path and we held them up."

"As any young lady would have done!" Fred murmured.

"Never mind. I did it! They told us, when they could get their breath
and quit looking behind them like men afraid of ghosts, that the
Turks in Marash--which by all accounts is a very fanatical place--had
started to murder Armenians. They yelled at me to turn and run.

" 'Run where?' I asked them. 'The Turks won't murder me!'

"That seemed to make them think, and they and my six men all talked
together in Armenian much too fast for me to understand a word of