Nearing Casa Guiccioli, Gordon saw a crowd clustering a few paces from the entrance. Servants were watching from the balcony.
A couple of soldiers cocked their guns and would have hindered him, but he put them aside. On the pavement lay a man in uniform, shot through the breast. Over him bent a beardless adjutant feeling for a pulse, and a priest muttering a horrified prayer.
He asked a hurried question or two amid the confusion and dismay: The prostrate man was the military commandant of Ravenna. No one knew whence the shot had come a full twenty minutes before. Now his guard stood, with characteristic Italian helplessness, doing nothing, waiting orders from they knew not whom or where.
Gordon spoke authoritatively to the subaltern, bade one of the soldiers go for the police, despatched another with the news to the cardinal and directed two of the crowd to lift the injured man and carry him to his own quarters in the casa. This done he sent Fletcher for the surgeon who had attended his own wound in that same chamber, and stationed the remaining soldiers at the lower doors. When the room was cleared he gave his attention to the unconscious commandant.
He stood a moment looking fixedly at the bed. It was this man’s spies who had dogged him during the past month, persecuted his servants and attempted to raise the Ravennese against his very presence in the city. The government he served would have rejoiced to see him, Gordon, lying stretched there in the other’s place; would have given but lukewarm pursuit to the assassin. Yet the man before him lay helpless enough now. Presently the casa would be full of soldiers, dragoons, priests and all the human paraphernalia of autocratic authority. Who had fired the shot? And by what strange chance, almost at his own threshold?
He crossed the floor, unlocked a drawer and took out Count Gamba’s packet with satisfaction. His foot struck something on the floor.
He picked it up. It was a small leather letter-case—evidently fallen from the pocket of the wounded commandant. He took a step toward the bed, intending to replace it, and saw Tita at the door.
The latter wore no coat. He was sweaty and covered with dust. He beckoned Gordon into the next room.
“Excellence,” he asked huskily; “will you not open that portafogli?”
“Why?”