Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1890-02-08
TAKING OF OSMAN OGLOU.

The long hot day was over at last, and
with it Osman Oglou's career of crime.
The Cadi's mind Gf it were worthy the
name) was made up; the witnesses, Kurds
and Yuruks of the Taurus, with keen,
cruel eyes and matted hair, Turcoman
women, whose unwilling testimony had
been wrung, syllable by syllable, from
shrouded lips, voluble Armenians or cring-
ing Greeks, in all the filthy glory of Frank
attire, whispered together or looked stol-
idly at nothing, according as they had
borne false witness against or for the pris-
oner The Armenian clerk surveyed the
scene with that mixture of inefable con-
tempt and watchful serviIty which char
acterizes his race in the land of bondage;
the perspiring faces which DISTRACTED the
little light and air which might have en-
tered by the doorway lighted up with the
faintest CLEAN of interest and the ragged
zaptiehs reused themselves and edged
nearer to Osman. There had never been
any real doubt as to the result; and when
the Cadi, with many pious parenthesis
and circumlocutory formula, had delivered
himself of the expected sentence of impris-
onment for life-or rather, as all knew, for
death-no one, not excepting the prisoner,
showed the slightest spark of emotion.
True, he turned his head moment, as
the zaptiehs we're hustling him away,
and glanced at one of q knot of peasant
women, now beginning to make their way
out of the Court with yashmaks drawn
tight over their heads, and held together
at the chin; but the old woman's eyes did
not meet his, and drawing the veil closer
over her mouth, she passed on with bowed
head among the crowd while the weary
zaptiehs, admonishing the most obvious
portions of Osman's person with the butts
of their Winehesters, pressed out of the
Court by another door.
Perhaps Osman Oglou was thinking that,
as things went in Karamania, he had not
much to complain Of For ten long years
no rufian had been a greater terror than
he to the travelling merchant, to his I'm
perial HighneSs the Sultan's post, or the
officials of the Reggie and tales of his
huge strength, his daring, his brutality,
were household words in all the vilayet of
KOnieh. How he and his band had cap
tured the former Cadi of Seletkeh himself
and by smearing him daily with petroleum
and dancing round him with lighted
torches, had extorted six hundred Turkish
pounds from the old mans abject terror;
how all who had quarrel with consti-
tUted authority had found him their ready
ally. But this wild freedom was over
now, and as he walked doggedly out of the
court, his whole mien was that of one who
had been beaten at last in a long and equal
struggle with fate, and the tired zaptiehs
felt that their old enemy would trouble
them no more, as they slouched along the
rumbling bank of the Calycadnus towards
the prison where Osman was to lie this
night before being transferred to the capt.
tai of the vilayet on the morrow.
The short twilight of the South was al
ready passing into dark, and the swollen
current of the river in which BarbGrossa
lost his life made dreary music as it
chafed the piers of the Selefkeh bridge.
The Court had sat so much later than
usual. that only a small throng of loafers
and beggars followed the four zaptiehs
and their prisoner, keeping up continual
clamor of coarse banter, and approaching
as near to the notorious Osman as the two
guards who walked behind him would
allow. But he took no notice; the game
was up, and his head only sank lower on
his breast as the little procession neared
its goal. No way disheartened, however,
by the immobility of the prisoner, the tail
kept up the constant strain Of badinage,
most conspicuous in gibe and retort being
a squalid old hunchback, with head envel-
oped in the filthy green turban which
marks the Prophets myriad and disrepu-
table kinsfolk, and patch, hardly to be
distinguished from the Drowned and grimy
skin, covering one eye-a fair specimen of
the sturdy beggar who may be seen in any
Eastern town. He seemed man of some
rude wit, and for its exercise selected a
squat porter, who, having no job on hand,
had followed in the ruck of the zaptishs TO
gaze like the rest on SO public a character
as Osman. The day had been hot, and
perhaps want of employment had ruf1ed
the porter's temper, and ribald lest, each
more obscene than the last, passed
between the pair until. as the procession
reached point where the path narrowed
and the stream swirled deep and fast be-
low low earthly cliff, a more than usual
grave reflection OH the porter's maternal
ancestry exhausted his slender store of
patience, and, springing, with curse on
The hunchback, he rolled over with him
in the dust, amid the loud ieers of the
rest. The two nindmost zaptiehs turned
and struck at the combatants with the
butts of their rifles, when, quick as
thought, the prisoner hurled himself on
the guard upon his left, pinned him in
his mighty arms, and staggered over the
low cliff With a yell of CONSERVATION the
other three ran down the bank, ready to
shoot as soon as Osman's head should
emerge from the rapid stream; bct the
brigand and the zaptieh rose locked
together, at some distance from the shore,
and three bullets whizzed at the struggling
heads, already scarcely distinguishable in
the gathering gloom. They sank again,
and were seen no more, and not till then
did the distracted zaptiehs turn to look
for the combatants who had been the in
direct cause of this grievous hap. The
porter was still sitting on the ground in
an agony of perspiration and terror, but
the hunchback had vanished.
Ridge upon ridge behind Selefkeh
rises the Taurus, curving back from the
sea in a vast crescent, of which Cape An
namur is the one horn and Mount Amanus
the other. No peak breaks the even
mass piled up against the sky line, but
the mountains rise step by step, evenly as
mighty staircase, to the stony plateau
which crowns the whole-an arid desert
scanned by rocky ridges like the bones of
Mother Earth picked bare. But before
the traveller reaches this waste he passes
through very paradise of vegetation, fed
l. Nv he ,rr
mists of which the mountains rob the
lowlands, and basking in the heat reflected
from the great wall behind. Here in
succession of canyons, leading into the
heart of the ridge, fourishes dense forest
n Il. % M