"Kagig must be more of a ruthless bird than we guessed!" Will whispered.

Counting women, there was less than a score of refugees in the room,
and if we had only had them to convince, our work was pretty nearly
done. There was the guard among the trees down-hill that we knew
about still to be converted, or perhaps coerced. But just at the
moment when we felt we held the winning hand, there came a ladder
thrust down through the hole in the corner of the roof, and a man
whom they all greeted as Ephraim began to climb down backward. He
was so loaded with every imaginable kind of weapon that he made more
noise than a tinker's cart.

Nor was Ephraim the only new arrival. Man after man came down backward
after him, each man cursed richly for treading on his predecessor's
fingers--a seeming endless chain of men that did not cease when the
room was already uncomfortably overcrowded. Some of these men wore
clothes that suggested Russia, but the majority were in rags. The
ladder swayed and creaked under them, and finally, at a word from
Ephraim, the last-comers sat on the upper rungs, bending the frail
thing with their weight into a complaining loop.

Several of the newcomers had torches, and their acrid smoke turned
the twice-breathed air of the place into evil-tasting fog.

Three men put their faces close to Ephraim's and proceeded to enlighten
him as to what had passed. He seemed to be recognized as some sort
of chieftain, and carried himself with a commanding air, but so many
men talked at once, and all in Armenian, that we could not pick out
more than a word or two here and there. Even Fred, with his gift
of tongues, could hardly make head or tail of it.