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The snow lay a few inches deep, but the sun had come out strong, and it was melted in patches, so that we stepped alternately in mud and in snow, slipping and picking our way in the best haste we might until 2 P.M., when we arrived at Vukovich, a tiny village where Peko had his headquarters for the moment, the entire population having taken refuge across the frontier.
He gave me, for official information, his version of the late fight, in which old Peko had drawn a convoy of provisions into an ambush and captured it, killing eighty men of the escort, whose heads one of my colleagues had seen stuck up on poles at the insurgent camp, but in which the pasha admitted a loss of only twenty or thirty men.
Dissensions and mutual recriminations followed the defeat of Utovu, Peko openly expressing his disgust with the insurgents of the plain, who were braver when there was no enemy than when the fighting was imminent, and he marched off to a position in the hilly country nearer the Montenegrin frontier, leaving Ljubibratich with the men of the low country.
Peko had then a force of about 1500 men, and Mukhtar did not attempt an attack, but, having made a military promenade through the lower Herzegovina, went back to Mostar and into comfortable winter quarters. Peko took position astride the road from Ragusa to Trebinje, and held the latter place effectually blockaded.
A voice that I could never forget, strive how I would, a voice that haunted my dreams by night, and for which by day I was ever listening, cried out from some adjoining room: "Ta'ala hina!" it called. "Ta'ala hina, Peko!" It was Kâramanèh! The effect upon the marmoset was instantaneous.
We heard the story of the fight at Utovu, where the insurgents had been taken in a trap by treachery of the weak chiefs of a Catholic village, and escaped with the loss of only four killed, owing to the precautions of the wily Peko, who, like an experienced fox, never went into a possible trap without seeing the way out of it; but they brought away the visible proofs of their fight in the noses of fifty-eight Turkish soldiers killed.
There was a reunion of all the bands, amounting to about 900 men, of whom 250 were Montenegrins under old Peko Pavlovich, a wiry, wily, Slavonic Ulysses, who had been in more than ninety battles with the Turks, and who knew and used every stratagem of this border warfare.
The lull brought into action that Shefket Pasha who, the following year, inaugurated the "Bulgarian atrocities," and who, declining to attack the band of Peko, came to vent his prowess on the people of the Popovo plain, of whom about five thousand had returned from exile in Dalmatia under the guarantee of the Turkish authorities of freedom from molestation on resuming their ordinary vocations.
The Austrian Slavs could not be permitted to be more patriotic than the Montenegrin; and the Prince, after having attempted to quiet the former by sending old Peko Pavlovich to bring them to reason, and found that the matter could not be settled in that way, allowed Peko to take a band of young men into Herzegovina and assume the direction of the insurrection.
A voice that I could never forget, strive how I would, a voice that haunted my dreams by night, and for which by day I was ever listening, cried out from some adjoining room. "Ta'ala hina!" it called. "Ta'ala hina, Peko!" It was Karamaneh! The effect upon the marmoset was instantaneous.
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