Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/283

 once famous brigand had been borne to the casemates of Orbetello, thence to go back to his doom on Gorgona. So the pale, emaciated, fever-shaken coastguards said one night, standing about on the mole, and smoking their rank tobacco.

More than fourteen years had gone since the name of Saturnino had been at once the pride and the terror of Maremma, and the legends of him had faded off the minds of the people, as the frescoes of their churches faded in the damp of ages. Yet when they heard his name again—that name which had been as a trumpet-call, as an incantation, as the belling of the king-stag in the forest to his herd—even the sickly women lifted their heads, even the palsied men took their pipes from their mouths: 'he was a man!' they said softly, under their breath.

The mountain robber always bewitches the fancy of the multitude, and the robbery which only strikes at the rich always seems a sort of rough justice to the poor: the argument of the bandit is the argument of the socialist couched in simpler language.

Beneath their subjugation by that witchery of adventure and of defiance, which allure the imagination of the populace, there is