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of beans and began to eat quickly.
    â€œWould you like coffee?” the innkeeper asked, when he came to take away the empty bowl.
    Gjorg looked at him bewildered. His eyes seemed to say, don’t tempt me. I may have five hundred
groschen
in my purse but I’d rather give you my head (Lord, he thought, that’s just what it will cost me, my head thirty days from now, and even before thirty days, twenty-eight days), before time, than one
groschen
from the purse that’sowing to the
Kulla
of Orosh. But the innkeeper, as if he guessed what was in Gjorg’s mind, added:
    â€œIt’s very cheap. Ten cents.”
    Gjorg nodded impatiently. The innkeeper, moving awkwardly between the chairs and the table, cleared away dishes, brought fresh ones, and then disappeared again, finally coming back with a cup of coffee in his hand.
    Gjorg was still sipping his coffee when a small group entered the inn. From the stir their arrival caused, from the turning of heads and by the way the lame innkeeper behaved in their presence, he understood that the newcomers must be well-known in the district. One of them, the man who came at once into the center of the room, was very short, with a cold, pallid face. After him came a man dressed like a townsman, but very oddly, with a checked jacket, and his breeches stuffed into his boots. The third man had a face whose features seemed somehow blunted and whose eyes rained scorn. But it was clear at once that everybody’s attention was centered upon the short man.
    â€œAli Binak, Ali Binak,” people began to whisper around Gjorg. His eyes widened, as if he could scarcely believe that there, in the same inn as himself, was the famous interpreter of the
Kanun
, of whom he had heard since he was a child.
    The innkeeper, with his odd sideling walk, invited the small party into an adjacent room, evidently reserved for distinguished guests.
    The short man mumbled a brief greeting to no one in particular, and without turning his head either to the right or to the left, he followed the innkeeper. While appearing to be aware of his fame, he was, surprisingly, quite without the haughty bearing common among men of small stature who have a sense of their own importance; on thecontrary, his movements, his face, and especially his eyes, suggested the calm of a man without illusions.
    The newcomers had disappeared into the other room, but the whispering on their account had not stopped. Gjorg had finished his coffee, but while he knew that time was important now, he was pleased to be sitting there, listening to the lively comments on every hand. Why had Ali Binak come? he wondered. No doubt to settle some complex case. Besides, he had been dealing with such things all his life. They called him from Province to Province and from Banner to Banner to ask his opinion in difficult cases, when the elders were divided among themselves over the interpretation of the Code. Of the hundreds of interpreters in the limitless space of the north country
rrafsh
* , there were no more than ten as famous as Ali Binak. So that it was not for nothing that he went to one place or another. This time, too, someone said, he had come about a complicated boundary question that had to be settled promptly, tomorrow, in the neighboring Banner. But who was the other, the man with the light-colored eyes? That’s right, who was he? They said he was a doctor whom Ali Binak often brought with him in thorny affairs, especially when it was a matter of reckoning up wounds to be paid for with fines. Well, if that was the case, Ali Binak hadn’t come about a boundary dispute but for some other reason, since of course a doctor had no business with boundaries. Perhaps they had misunderstood all along. Some said that he was in fact here about another matter, very complicated, that had come up a few days ago in the village beyond the plateau. In an exchange of shots because of a quarrel, a woman who happened to be there,