Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/27

 the people looking on were all for him, and muttered menaces of the guards. The mountaineers and woodcutters, and rough labourers of all kinds that had come down into the town, were most of them men to whom 'to take to the hills' seemed a bold and right thing to do; most of them would have been not unwilling to try it themselves; many of them had been often in secret league and complicity with the terrorism which was no terror to them, because it only struck the rich and never harmed the poor. They would have all been willing to rescue the doomed man, but they paused doubtfully: no one taking the lead.

'''Poveretto! Poveretto!''' they all muttered in regret for him; and had there been an adventurous spirit amidst them to advise his rescue, those gathered labourers of the forests and the plains might have been formidable in their resistance to the law.

But the Italian loves to talk; he loves not equally to act. And so they stood there, sullen, sympathetic, but inert, as the prison gates opened, and the carabiniers rode out with Saturnino in their midst.

The autumnal floods had for the time rendered the railway that runs through Gros-