“There must have been an extra load of peccadilloes on hand that night, for I didn’t find his reverence, nor the sacristan, nor anybody connected with the church. What I did find was a chap squatting against one side of the door with a tray on his lap filled with little medals and rosaries—and a most picturesque-looking chap he was. His feet were tied up in raw hides; his head bound in a red cotton handkerchief, over which was smashed a broad-brimmed sombrero; his waist was gripped with another to match; his lank body squeezed into a shrunken blue jacket, and his shambly legs wobbled about in yellow breeches. The sombrero shaded two cunning, monkey eyes, a hooked nose, a wavering mouth, and a beard a week old. It was his smile, though, that tickled my funny-bone, and this happened when he held up the tray for my inspection—one of those creepy, oily smiles that spread slowly over his dirty, soapy face, like the swirl of oil and turpentine which floats over a basin of suds when you wash your brushes.
“Not a very inviting person;—a loafer, a lazzaroni, a dead-beat of a dago, really—and yet my heart warmed to him all the same when he answered me with enough French sandwiched between his ‘o’s’ and ‘i’s’ to help out my bad Italian. What finally trickled from his wrinkled lips was the disappointing announcement that no hostelry at all worthy of the Distinguished Signore existed in the village, nor was there money enough in the place for any one of the inhabitants to have a surplus of anything—rooms especially—but there was—here the oily smile overran the soap-suddy face—a most excellent casino kept by an equally excellent citizen where travellers were wont to stay overnight; that it was up a back street—they were all ‘back’ so far as I had seen—and that, if the Distinguished Signore would permit, he would curtail the sale of his religious relics long enough to conduct his D. S. to the very door.
“So we started, the vendor of ‘helps to piety’ ahead and I following behind, my knapsack over my shoulder. I soon discovered that if the casino was up a back street he was going a long way round to reach it. First he dived into an alley behind the mouldy, plaster-pock-marked church—the candle-stick of the campanile—ducked under an archway—‘sotto portico,’ he called it—opened out into a field, struck across a little bridge into another street—hardly a soul about, nothing alive—nothing except dogs and children—all of which he explained was a short cut. For some time his dodging made no impression on me; then the way he rounded the corners and hugged the shadowed side of the street, away from the few dim lamps, set me to wondering as to his intentions. What the devil did he mean by picking out these blind alleys? He must have seen that I was no tenderfoot or tourist who had lost his way.
“With this I began to fix certain landmarks in my memory in case I had to make my way back alone. There was no question now in my mind as to the town’s character. Half the murders and hold-ups in the large cities are concocted in these villages, and this had rascality stamped all over it. Every corner I turned looked more forbidding than the last—every street seemed to end in a trap—the kind of street a scene-painter tries to produce when he has a murder up a back alley to provide for the third act. And crooked!—well, the tracks of a bunch of fishworms crawling out from under a brick were straight compared to it. When I at last protested—for I was getting ravenous and I must say a trifle uneasy—the beggar bowed low enough for me to see the tail of his jacket over his sombrero, and gave as a reason that any other route would have greatly fatigued the signore, all of which he must have known was a lie. The fact was that if I had known how to get out of the tangle, I would have lifted him by the scruff of his neck and the slack of his trousers and dropped him into the first convenient hole.
“When he did come to a halt I found myself before a low two-story ruin of a house—almost the last house in the village, and on the opposite edge from that which I had entered on my way to the church. It was evidently a common road house, the customary portico covered with grape-vines and a square room on the ground floor, containing one or more tables. In the rear, so I discovered later, was a dreary yard corralling a few scraggly trees—one overhanging a slanting shed under which the cooking was done—and below this tree an assortment of chairs and tables under an arbor, where a bottle of wine and a bit of cheese or bunch of grapes were served when the sun was hot.
“It was now quite dark, and my guide had some difficulty in getting his fingers on the latch of the garden gate. When it swung open I followed up a short path and found myself in a square room which was lighted by a single lamp. Under this sat another oily Italian, in his shirt-sleeves, eating from an earthen bowl. Not a picturesque-looking chap at all, but a fat, swarthy lump of a man with small, restless eyes, stub nose, and flabby lips—one of those fellows you think is fast asleep until you catch him studying you from under his eyebrows, and begin to look out for his knife. The only other occupant of the room was a woman who was filling his glass from a straw-covered flask—a thin, flat-bosomed woman who stooped when she walked, and who sneaked a glance at me now and then from one side of her nose. I might better have slept in the slant and bunked in with the goats.
“My guide bent down and whispered a word in his ear; the man jumped up—looked me all over—a boring, sizing-up look—like a farmer guessing the weight of a steer—bowed grandiloquently, and with an upward flourish of his hand put his house, his fortune, and his future happiness at my feet. There were bread and wine, and cheese and grapes; and there were also eggs, and it might be a slice of pork. As for chicken—he would regret to his dying day that none was within his reach. Would I take my repast in the house at the adjoining table, or would I have a lamp lighted in the arbor and eat under the trees?
“I preferred the lamp, of course, under the trees; picked up the flask of wine, poured out a glass for my guide, which he drank at a gulp, and handed him a franc for his trouble. The woman gave a sidelong glance at the coin and followed him out into the garden; there the two stood whispering. On her return, while she passed close enough to me to graze my arm, she never once raised her eyes, but kept her face averted until she had hidden herself in the kitchen.
“I had selected the garden for two reasons: I wanted the air and I wanted to know something more of my surroundings. What I saw—and I could see now the more clearly, for the moon had risen over the mountain—were two rear windows on the second floor, their sills level with the sloping shed, and a tree with its branches curved over its roof. This meant ventilation and a view of the mountains at sunrise—always a delight to me. It also meant an easy escape out the window, over the roof, and down the tree-trunk to the garden, and so on back to the goatherd if anything unusual should happen. That, however, could take care of itself. The sensible thing to do was to eat my supper, order my coffee to be ready at six o’clock, go to bed in one of these rear rooms, and get back to my work before the heat became intense.
“All this was carried out—that is, the first part of it. I had the rear room, the one I had picked out for myself, not by my choice but by his, the landlord selecting it for me; it would be cooler, he said, and then I could sleep with my window open, free from the dust which sometimes blew in the front windows when the wind rose—and it was rising now, as the signore could hear. Yes, I should be called at six, and my coffee would be ready—and ‘may the good God watch over your slumbers, most Distinguished of Excellencies.’