in he revolved
the past--his early peaceful days, his years with Severus, his memories
of Britain, his long campaigns, his strivings and battlings, all leading
to that mad night by the Rhine. His fellow soldiers had loved him then.
And now he had read death in their eyes. How had he failed them? Others
he might have wronged, but they at least had no complaint against him.
If he had his time again, he would think less of them and more of his
people, he would try to win love instead of fear, he would live
for peace and not for war. If he had his time again! But there were
shuffling Steps, furtive whispers, and the low rattle of arms outside
his tent. A bearded face looked in at him, a swarthy African face that
he knew well. He laughed, and, bearing his arm, he took his sword from
the table beside him.

"It is you, Sulpicius," said he. "You have not come to cry 'Ave
Imperator Maximin!' as once by the camp fire. You are tired of me, and
by the gods I am tired of you, and glad to be at the end of it. Come
and have done with it, for I am minded to see how many of you I can take
with me when I go."

They clustered at the door of the tent, peeping over each other's
shoulders, and none wishing to be the first to close with that laughing,
mocking giant. But something was pushed forward upon a spear point, and
as he saw it, Maximin groaned and his sword sank to the earth.

"You might have spared the boy," he sobbed. "He would not have hurt you.
Have done with it then, for I will gladly follow him."

So they closed upon him and cut and stabbed and thrust, until his knees
gave way beneath him and he dropped upon the floor.

"The tyrant is dead!" they cried. "The tyrant is dead," and from all the
camp beneath them and from the walls of the beleaguered city the joyous
cry came echoing back, "He is dead, Maximin is dead!"

I sit in my study, and upon the table before me lies a denarius of
Maximin, as fresh as when the triumvir of the Temple of Juno Moneta
sent it from the mint. Around it are recorded his resounding
titles--Imperator Maximinus, Pontifex Maximus, Tribunitia potestate, and
the rest. In the centre is the impress of a great craggy head, a massive
jaw, a rude fighting face, a contracted forehead. For all the pompous
roll of titles it is a peasant's face, and I see him not as the Emperor
of Rome, but as the great Thracian boor who strode down the hillside on
that far-distant summer day when first the eagles beckoned him