Liuderis shrugged. "I would not know. I am only doing my duty, which is to hold you for questioning about this secret plan. Take him away, Sigifrith."
Padway hid a shudder at the word "questioning." If this honest blockhead got set on an idea, he'd have a swell chance of talking him out of it.
The Goths had set up a prison camp at the north end of the city, between the Flaminian Way and the Tiber. Two sides of the camp were formed by a hastily erected fence, and the remaining two by the Wall of Aurelian. Padway found that two Roman patricians had preceded him in custody; both said they had been arrested on suspicion of complicity in an Imperialist plot. Several more Romans arrived within a few hours.
The camp was no escape-proof masterpiece, but the Goths made the best of it. They kept a heavy guard around the fence and along the wall. They even had a squad camped across the Tiber, in case a prisoner got over the wall and tried to swim the river.
For three days Padway rusticated. He walked from one end of the camp to the other, and back, and forward, and back, When he got tired of walking he sat. When he got tired of sitting he walked. He talked a little with his fellow prisoners, but in a moody and abstracted manner.
He'd been a fool—well, at least he'd been badly mistaken—in supposing that he could carry out his plans with as little difficulty as in Chicago. This was a harsh, convulsive world; you had to take it into account, or you'd get caught in the gears sooner or later. Even the experts at political intrigue and uniformed banditry often came to a bad end. What chance would such a hopelessly unwarlike and unpolitical alien as himself have?
Well, what chance did he have anyway? He'd kept out of public affairs as much as possible, and here he was in a horrifying predicament as a result of a pretty squabble over a brass telescope. He might just as well have gone adventuring up to the hilt. If he ever got out, he would go adventuring, He'd show 'em!
The fourth day failed to settle Padway's gnawing anxiety about his interrogation. The guards seemed excited about something. Padway tried to question them, but they rebuffed him, Listening to their muttering talk, he caught the word folkmote, That meant that the great meeting was about to be held near Terracina, at which the Goths would consider what to do about the loss of Naples.
Padway got into talk with one of the patrician prisoners, "Bet you a solidus," he said, "that they depose Thiudahad and elect Wittigis king in his place."
The patrician, poor man, took him on.