Page:The Song of the Sirens.djvu/214

 whom you can make no arrangement. Through me you can make one with Pompey."

"I have tried over and over to make a dicker with him," Crassus growled. "I've got for my pains nothing but scorn and that cool, exasperating contempt of his. I hate him and I mean to get even with him at any cost. You can't change me."

"Nor me either," Clodius put in.

"Even if each of you," Caesar pursued, "is too blinded by hatred to see your own advantage as it is, you might be alive to considerations of prudence. Starting a mutiny is as easy as starting an avalanche, one rumor is like one rolling stone or sliding snow-wreath. Once under way an avalanche is no more unmanageable than a mutiny. A mutiny can no more be directed than a tempest or an earthquake."

"What's the use of your talking about mutinies to me," Crassus rumbled. "You know about slum-votes and election-trickery, you know nothing about soldiery."

"Just wait till I get to Spain," Caesar bragged. "I'll show you what I know about soldiery. When I come back you'll confess I know how to manage soldiers as well as any man alive."

"That's neither here nor there," Crassus objected. "That's all in your mind. It may prove true, but most likely it is mere dreaming.