Up, down to the ground, up again, and then around in frantic waving circles swept the flame: a mad bellowing rolled through the night, until the tribune himself almost checked his stride in awe-struck wonder. The next instant the torch, if torch it was, seemed to flounder to the earth, from which it rose again and came driving directly toward him, explained at last,—an ox with a great bundle of blazing fagots fastened between its horns, blinded, frantic with pain and terror.
Sergius sprang aside, as the beast dashed by; but Decius, roused once more to the possibility of independent thought and action, stepped toward it and, as it passed, plunged his sword between its heaving ribs.
"What now, my master?" he said, flushing with shame at his fears of the last hour—perhaps the bravest hour of his life. "Does the lying Carthaginian seek to terrify Quintus Fabius, the dictator, as he terrified Marcus Decius, the decurion?"
"Yes, truly," replied Sergius, gloomily; "and he will succeed even better. No general, and, least of all, ours, would lead out his army in the night against such a spectacle. Come, it is necessary that we should reach the camp," and, turning once again, they fell to running in a more southern direction, where a dim glow in the sky seemed to tell of the watchfires of an army.
At first no sound broke the stillness of the night, save the laboured breathing of the weary runners and the strokes of their leathern cothurni upon the hard ground; but soon other noises came to mingle with these and, at last, to drown them: the lowing of thousands of cattle, now scattered far and wide over the plain and hillsides, and then the distant clash of arms and the cries of combatants.
Day began to dawn, just as the fugitives came in sight of the Roman camp with the army drawn up behind its ramparts, waiting for they knew not what. Here and there upon the heights they could see small bodies of legionaries who defended themselves against light troops of the enemy, until overwhelmed by the Spanish infantry that scaled the hills and cut them to pieces; while to every prayer that the dictator should march out to their support, he returned one grim answer.
"They deserted their posts in the passes. Rome needs not such soldiers."
So, company by company, the guards of the defiles, terrified or lured away to the ridges by the ruse of the cattle and the blazing fagots, fell ingloriously before their comrades' eyes, as being men not worth the effort to succour. The rear-guard of the invaders had already made its way through the pass, while the Carthaginian van was well on into the valley of the Volturnus. Now, too, the African light troops disappeared, and, at last, the white tunics of the Spaniards, gay with their purple borders, glittered for a moment on the hilltops, and then, their work of death completed, sank away behind the ridges to fall back and join their comrades in a march of new destruction through a new country.