Their journey back was quick but uninteresting. Dick acknowledged that he had a faint idea of staying in Rome, but saw a friend who advised him not to. He had taken the reins and driven for a great part of the way, while Pietro had gone inside and slumbered the sleep of the just.
As it was a lonely country, with few inhabitants, he had beguiled the tedious hours of the journey by blowing patriotic airs on an enormous trombone, purchased by him from a miscellaneous dealer in Rome. The result had been in the highest degree pleasing to himself, though perhaps a little surprising to others. No one, however, interfered with him except a party of gendarmes who attempted to stop him. They thought that he was a Garibaldino trying to rouse the country. The trombone might have been the cause of that suspicion.
Fortunately the gendarmes, though armed to the teeth, were not mounted, and so it was that, when they attempted to arrest Dick, that young man lashed his horses to fury, and, loosening the reins at the same moment, burst through the line, and before they knew what he was about he was away.
They fired a volley. The echoes died away, mingled with gendarmerian curses. The only harm done was a hole made by a bullet through the coach. The only apparent effect was the waking of Pietro. That worthy, suddenly roused from slumber, jumped up to hear the last sounds of the rifles, to see the hole made by the bullet, the fading forms of the frantic officials, and the nimble figure of the gallant driver, who stood upright upon the seat waving his hat over his head, while the horses dashed on at a furious gallop.
[Illustration: Dick In His Glory.]
This was all. Nothing more occurred, for Pietro drove the remainder of the way, and Dick's trombone was tabooed.
On the following morning the welcome departure was made. To their inexpressible joy they found that the coach was this time a strong one, and no ordinary event of travel could delay them. They had lost two days, however, and that was no trifle. They now entered upon the second stage, and passed on without difficulty.
In fact, they didn't meet with a single incident worth mentioning till they came to Perugia. Perugia is one of the finest places in Italy, and really did not deserve to be overhauled so terrifically by the Papal troops. Every body remembers that affair. At the time when the Dodge Club arrived at this city they found the Papal party in the middle of a reaction. They actually began to fear that they had gone a little too far. They were making friendly overtures to the outraged citizens. But the latter were implacable, stiff!
What rankled most deeply was the maddening fact that these Swiss, who were made the ministers of vengeance, were part of that accursed, detested, hated, shunned, despised, abhorred, loathed, execrated, contemptible, stupid, thick-headed, brutal, gross, cruel, bestial, demoniacal, fiendish, and utterly abominable race--_I Tedeschi_ --whose very name, when hissed from an Italian month, expresses unutterable scorn and undying hate.