The girls peered back at the travel-worn lad peering in at them, but when the largest of them called mockingly to him, “Enter, signore!” Natale ran away down the street and again out upon the road. The girls had made him think of Arduina and Olga and little Maria, and away down at the end of the corridor he had caught a glimpse of a gray-haired woman sitting on a flight of broken stone steps, with an infant on her lap. His heart swelled with homesickness. If only he might see Nonna once again! How long was the monotonous road to Bagni di Lucca!
The day, however, was not to close without an exciting and important event.
CHAPTER XI
FLUTTERING A LITTLE FARTHER
Natale sat down in his leisurely fashion on the low wall bounding the road just beyond the town and began daintily nibbling around the crisp, sugared edges of his bread ring. It was mid-afternoon, and while his jaws worked steadily, his wide bright eyes watched with interest two bicyclists toiling up the hill and trundling their wheels alongside. As they passed him by without a glance, their faces red and perspiring, and their shoes whitened with the light dust, the boy’s eyes still followed them and lighted upon a queer figure coming from the town he had just quitted. It was the red-capped, swarthy-faced man of the wine-shop door, and now his shoulders were bent under a pack slung on his back, and his legs were bowed as he limped along, and he wore an old overcoat much too long, which had seen better days upon another’s shoulders.
The wheelmen paid no attention to this fellow, as he stopped on meeting them and perhaps offered them a sight of his wares hidden in the pack, so the peddler presently came up with Natale, grumbling sourly.
“These foreigners without manners!” he growled, planting himself in front of the little boy’s swinging legs. “Ah! you are the boy who goes to the Bagni. Come, I also go thither. We shall be companions merry enough!”
Natale had no fancy for joining company with this man who frowned with his black brows and grinned, in turn, with big white teeth gleaming in his hairy face, but neither had he the courage to demur. Therefore, he slipped down unwillingly from his perch and trotted along at the peddler’s side.
Fortunately, the man asked no questions and spoke little, and before evening, his steady tramp had led Natale over more miles than the whole previous day had carried him. Little cared this strange, silent fellow for leaning over walls to gaze at the foaming water singing over the rocks, or for idly resting on a bridge to watch the white cloud-ships crossing the azure sea overhead, as the white sails of the orange boats ply the blue waves between Sicily and the Italian coast, and to dream of future glory as an acrobat of renown!
The sun had again sunk behind the rounded summits in the west, when the peddler at last stood still and grinned down upon the panting child.
“One easily sees that you are no traveler,” he said in his hoarse, unpleasant voice. “Now we will sit down here by the roadside and make our beds for the night. Did you mention supper? The bracelet you wear on your arm will suffice for us both, if we divide it according to the size of our stomachs. Ecco!” And Natale’s precious ring of sweetened bread was rudely snatched from his arm.