Aye! it was here now fully aroused. The praefect of Rome was popular with the plebs. His action in the arena had called forth unbounded enthusiasm. When he fell rolling into the sand, with the black panther snarling above him, his steel-like grip warding for the moment the brute's jaws from off his throat, the people broke out into regular frenzy.
"The praefect! the praefect!" they shouted.
Men climbed down along the gradients leaping over other men, determined to jump down twelve feet into the arena in order to rescue the praefect from the jaws of the ferocious beast.
But above in the imperial tribune the Cæsar sat snarling like the panther and rubbing his hands with glee. His trap had been over-successful, one by one the arch-traitors fell headlong into it. First Hortensius Martius, that young fool! What mattered if he had escaped from a ravenous panther? The claws of a vengeful Cæsar were sharper far than those of any beast of the desert.
And now Taurus Antinor! the praefect of Rome! the man of silence and of integrity! the idol of the people, the scorner of Cæsar's godhead. Vague rumour had reached Caligula of the praefect's strange sayings, his refusal to enter the temples and to sacrifice to the gods. People said that the Anglicanus worshipped one who claimed to be greater than Cæsar and all the deities of Rome.
Well, so be it! There he lay now in the dust, a huddled mass of man and beast, the sand of the arena reddened with his blood. Caligula screamed like the rest of his people, but his cry was:
"Habet! Habet! Habet!" And in a frenzy of rage and hate his thumb pointed downwards, downwards, as if it were a dagger which he could plunge into the Anglicanus' throat.
But the city guard were the first to break their bounds. Even whilst the imperial madman exulted and shrieked forth his murderous "Habet!" they had rushed to the rescue of their praefect.
The powerful grasp on the panther's throat was on the point of relaxing; the brute was digging its claws in the shoulders of the fallen man, and he, feeling faint with loss of blood, looked upon death as it stared down at him from the beast's golden eyes, and all that he was conscious of was the feeling that death was good.
When the city guard rushed to his rescue, and by dint of numbers and strength of steel tore the ferocious creature from the body of its prey, Taurus Antinor lay a while half conscious. He heard the cry of the people round him, he felt a shower of sweet-scented petals fall upon him from above, he heard the last dying roar of the panther and a scream of rage from the imperial tribune.