Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/25

 woods, and the wineflask passed round when the last of the long furrows had been turned across the plains.

In a gloomy silence, broken only by gloomier mutterings of the crowd, the carabiniers drew rein before the prison.

The closely-packed, loudly chattering groups of men, few women amongst them but many in the doorways of houses and churches, stood gathered together to see him brought out and taken on his next stage to the tribunal of Massa, where his trial was to take place. They were all sorrowful. None blamed him. None thought him a criminal.

Poveretto! he had lived a bold, vigorous, manful life up yonder on the snow-capped hills above the foaming Fiora and down in the deep, dark ravines where the Fiora water rolls, and in the rich vale of the Albegna, and on the treeless lands that stretch away to Ostia far down in the south.

He had been a fierce fellow, indeed, and a terror to all travellers, and many a tale of his ferocity to captives was told from mouth to mouth along the marshy shores of the Maremma, and in the huts of the shepherds on its moors; but the travellers were all strangers, and the captives all rich men,