"Speak when you want any," he said. "It will be share and share alike here for us till they come to finish us.
"And now, tell me about yourself. I have always been curious about you. I heard all about you when you first got into trouble and I was told that the official report of your death was fictitious, invented by underlings too clumsy to capture you and fearful of the consequences of their incompetence. Also I heard unimpeachable testimony that you were alive later and had been seen in Rome with Maternus and outside Rome, the next summer, with the mutineers from Britain. I have often wondered how you got into such company. Tell me how you came to be with Maternus."
I saw no utility in any further dissimulation of anything or in any reticence; I began with our springtime stay at the farm in the mountains, and told my story in detail, from that hour.
When I came to my visit, along with Maternus, to the Temple of Mercury and mentioned how Maternus had warned me that we were being watched, and how I had shot one glance towards the watchers and had recognized one of them, he interrupted me and, without enquiring where I had seen him before, asked for a description of the watcher I had recognized. I gave it as well as I could and he said:
"That was my brother, Marcus Galvius Crispinillus, now dead. It was he who told me that he had seen you with Maternus. Go on."
Again, when I spoke of recognizing Crispinillus by the wayside as I passed with the mutineers he interjected:
"Yes, he told me he saw you there."
And later, when I spoke of being found with Agathemer after the massacre, separated from him and led off to the ergastulum at Nuceria he remarked:
"I can't conceive how my brother missed you. Nor could he. He looked for you among the corpses and went over the survivors twice in search of you."
"I did not see him after the massacre," I declared.