ned away.

"I'll just pin it up," she said, and she disappeared behind the cart
rather precipitately.

"By Jove! You have pretty good nerves!" observed Johnstone, more to
himself than to her. "Shut up!" he cried to the carter, who was swearing
again. "Stop that noise, will you?"

He made a step angrily towards the man, for the sight of the slit frock
had roused him again, when he thought what the knife might have done.
The fellow was silent instantly, and lay quite still, for he knew that
he should strangle himself if he moved.

"I'll have you in prison before night," continued Johnstone, speaking
English to him. "Oh yes! the _carabinieri_ will come, and you will go to
_galera_--do you understand that?"

He had picked up the words somewhere. The man began to moan and pray.

"Stop that noise!" cried Brook, with slow emphasis.

He was not far wrong in saying that the carabineers would come. They
patrol the roads day and night, in pairs, as they patrol every high road
and every mountain path in Italy, all the year round. And just then, far
up the road down which Johnstone and Clare had come, two of them
appeared in sight, recognisable a mile away by their snow-white
crossbelts and gleaming accoutrements. There are twelve or fourteen
thousand of them in the country, trained soldiers and picked men, by all
odds the finest corps in the army. Until lately no man could serve in
the carabineers who could not show documentary evidence that neither he
nor his father nor his mother had ever been in prison even for the
smallest offence. They are feared and respected, and it is they who have
so greatly reduced brigandage throughout the country.

Clare came back to Johnstone's side, having done what she could to pin
the rents together.

"It's all right now," she cried. "Here come the carabineers. They will
take the man and his cart to the next village. Let me talk to them--I
can speak Italian, you know."

She was pale again, and very quiet. She had noticed that her hands
trembled violently when she was pinning her frock, though they had been
steady enough when they had gone round the man's throat.

When the patrol men came up, she stepped forward and explained what had
happened, clearly and briefly. There was the bleeding mule, Johnstone
standing before it and rubbing its dusty nose; there was the knife;
there was the man. With a modest gesture she showed them where her frock
had been cut to shreds. Johnstone made remarks