"I was a shepherd by occupation. My father was a shepherd; so had his father before him been, and his father too, for many generations. Yes, for many hundred years, but not always. There was a tradition in the family that we had been princes once, owning all the land over which the flocks we cared for grazed, and a great deal more. We believed that we were descended from the great Thessalus[25] himself. Well, we were fairly content. Our master was a gay young fellow, a little thoughtless, and too ready with his hands if things did not go quite as he wished, but kind and generous. Poor fellow! he was killed by a wild-boar. To tell the truth, he had taken a cup too much. It was his habit, and a bad habit too—a very bad habit."
Laches was quite sincere, though his own utterance had grown a little thick.
"We had found a boar in the morning, and lost him. After the mid-day meal—he would finish the flask of heady Chian—we found the brute again. My master threw one of his two hunting-spears, and wounded him in the shoulder. He was a little flurried, and he threw it too soon, and with a bad aim. The boar charged, and my master knelt on one knee to receive it. Flurried again, and the spear not quite straight. I was running as hard as I could, but it was too late. When I came up, he was lying on the ground, with as bad a wound in the thigh as ever I saw. He was dead before you could count twenty.
"Then our troubles began. The master was not married, and all the property went to an uncle, the meanest old skinflint in Thessaly. He had been a spendthrift, they said, in his young days; such men always make the worst kind of misers, I have heard. Anyhow, he was as bad as he could be. He hadn't been in possession for a week when he began to cut us short in everything. We used to be allowed half a drachma[26] for every lamb that we reared. This was taken away. Not only that, but we had to make good all that died. 'Your fault,' he would say; 'your fault; a quite healthy lamb.' All the lambs, according to him, were quite healthy. It was the same if one was killed by a wolf, and there are a terrible lot of wolves in that part of the country. What used to be our best time, the lambing season, came to be the worst. There was very little of our wages left by the time that we had made good all the losses. Then he charged us for every stick of wood that we picked up. We were not allowed to catch a fish or snare a bird. We had to buy our flour at his mill; damp, chalky stuff it was, more like bird-lime than flour. Sour wine, rotten cloth, stinking salt-fish—we had to buy them all of him. At every turn the villain made a profit out of us. As for our wages, it was the rarest thing for us to see an obol[27] of them. Most months he made out the balance to be on the wrong side."
"Well, to cut the story short, we got pretty deeply into his debt, my poor father and I. What does the scoundrel do but take my sister—as good and as pretty a girl as there was in the whole country—to be sold as a slave, in payment of the debt, he said. He took care to do this villainy when we—I mean the girl's husband that was to be and I—were with the sheep on the summer pastures in the hills. A nice home-coming we had; my old father dead—he had a stroke the day when his daughter was carried away, dying in an hour,—and my sister gone. She wrenched herself out of the hands of the slave-dealer as they were crossing the Peneus, threw herself into the river, and was drowned—the best thing that could happen to her, poor girl!
"You can guess the end, I dare say. The villain, my master, was found dead in his bed—his throat cut from ear to ear—three days afterwards. They caught Agathon—that was the lover, you understand—and crucified him. And I am here."
"But," cried Cleanor, "are there no laws?"
"Laws!" answered the chief; "laws in plenty. But the question is—who administers them?"
"The Romans, I suppose," replied Cleanor.
"I only wish they did," was the unexpected answer. "We might get some sort of justice then. No; they leave the matter in the hands of the rich, and there is only one in a hundred who has a spark of conscience or pity in him. Mark this, young sir. I have twelve men in my band, and there is not one of them but has a story to tell as bad as what Laches here has told us. And in every one of them the oppressor has been one of our own people. And now, doubtless, you will be ready for sleep."