Then she bade her coachman drive her to the Fagutal. Her appearance among her tenants caused general trepidation, as usual.
When the clustering drabs and brats discovered that she felt no present interest in women and children, but that she demanded speech with the men, the elder men, their dismay deepened into acute consternation.
Since she would take no denial some dotards and striplings were routed out and the patriarch of the clan was thrust forward. He looked senile from his slippered feet to the shine on his bald-pate, he was blear-eyed and hard of hearing, but he understood plain Latin when he heard it, he knew of old the signs he read in the flash of her eyes, the set of her jaw and every feature as she stood or moved. Also no dog ever had a keener scent for game than he for business.
He shouted in the slang of his caste.
The women and children vanished.
Promptly a chair was brought, carefully dusted and she was invited to seat herself. Before her cringed, in attitudes of obsequious deference, a group of as hulking, truculent, ruthless villains as could have been found anywhere on earth. Just out of earshot of a low-voiced conversation, stood younger men, sentinels, to keep all others at a distance.
The patriarch’s son, recognized chief of the brotherhood, an appallingly inhuman brute, acted as spokesman.
At the first word their wary expression altered to one of brotherly comprehension. There was a man to be killed. Pride in their vocation shone all over them. Yes, they knew of the King of the Grove, who did not? and they especially, since the patriarch’s grandfather, great-grandfather to the spokesman, had at an advanced age ended his life in the Grove, after years as its priest, having become King late in life, the last of a long series of challengers whom the Emperor Caligula had suborned against an insufferable and all but invincible hierophant.
Could they find a swashbuckler willing to assail the present incumbent?
Of a surety and what was more able to vanquish anybody.