“They all are—these Greeks—from wearing caps so tight. Any bargeman at the Taverns could have told you that. Go on—”
“And she had only one little boat astern, that almost swamped in the mountain waves; and when the northeaster struck her you were afraid of being driven to Africa, and cut the great mainmast and threw her overboard, and drifted for fourteen days, four hundred miles; and when the hull sprang a leak and strained to split apart you frapped her round and round with great cables and trussed her up as cooks tie up the legs of a fowl! And when the soldiers would have sprung into the little boat, you cut her adrift; and when you would have slain the prisoners to prevent escape, and slain yourself to avoid punishment for the loss, it was the Prophet, who is the prisoner in your hut there, stopped your hand and foretold you not a soul would lose his life. Then you cast the cargo overboard.
“No stars, no sun we saw for fourteen days, only the clouds and the pelting rain, and fogs so thick a sword could cut them. When the breakers and the surf roared ahead, you heaved and heaved and heaved the lead, and knew we were driving straight ashore to wreck in the breakers, and you cast four great iron anchors out astern to hold her back; but they only combed the fine sand as a housekeeper’s knife cuts dough. The shore of Malta Bay was soft as paste. The pumps you set to work; but she settled on her prow, like a swine’s snout in mud, with her goose-beaked stern, high in the crash of waves, breaking to splinters—”
“Stop!” cried the Idumean. “I’ll test your truth right there! The bargemen of the Taverns might have told you all the rest. When the ship broke and the sailors and the prisoners plunged over in the pelting dark to swim for it, what said the Prophet, who is my prisoner, then?”
“When you could not look the wind in the eye, my Lord Julius, the Prophet bade you be of good cheer and thanked his strange Judean God, whom he called Christus, that he was reaching Rome.”
“By Jupiter, child,” cried the guard, with a crash of his sword on the stone bench, “you have spoken truth! What next? Be careful how you answer—your life hangs on it if you are slave! It is death to harbor a runaway in Roman law—”
“I know not what next, my Lord Julius; for Publius, the Governor of Malta, took all your shipwrecked crew in, and you tarried to come by the Castor and Pollux on to Neapolis (Naples) while I took secret passage on a fishing vessel and reached Rome first.”
The Idumean then knew the youth spoke truth; but not all the truth—what more? Here was a lad of noble birth and clad in a page’s garments, caught and held and hounded by the harpies of the wine shops amid the rascal loafers of the underworld—lost in the gutters of Rome for two full years. Whose son was he and why was he here?
The old guard’s manner changed. Could he find the boy’s parents there might be money in it—honest money—not the kidnapper’s ransom for which the knavish criminals of the Three Taverns had tried to steal him; but the old soldier knew he must proceed cautiously. No gain to frighten a startled bird that had fallen in your hand; a gift of gold from the gods. Good money from a good father somewhere back in Grecian Asia could he but win the lad’s trust and get his story true, and save some royal youth from those sharp-taloned hawks of the wine shops.
He bade the little stranger sit down on the bench.