About the time the lighter sank, I received a letter from the camp, asking for a man who spoke English, had some knowledge of accounts—a man, in fine, like Thompson—who would come to Messina. Belknap was shorthanded; the work was doubling up on them. Was there any chance of that nice boy, Flint? Would Thompson possibly reconsider? Thompson could not; Flint was in Egypt.
I remember well the day the letter came, if not the date. I was in Florence, spending a few happy hours by the Arno, in the shadow of the Giglio, Giotto’s perfect tower, second among towers only to the Giralda of Seville. There had been a wonderful jaunt from Rome in an automobile, that reminded me of my mother’s stories of her wedding journey through Italy in a traveling carriage. The motor has brought back the romance to travel, that seemed banished forever when the last vetturino sold his traveling carriage, driven out of business by the railroad.
We four—Mr. Parrish the host, Miss Helen Lee, his niece, Charles, the Yankee chauffeur, and I—had passed through Umbria, Tuscany, visited Perugia and Gubbio, stopped at Assisi and Siena, looked at the gem, San Gimignano—but that’s another story.
That golden day in Florence we hunted up our old friend, George de Forrest Brush, the painter, corralled him in his studio and carried him off willy-nilly to lunch at the Trattoria Aurora on the heights of Fiesole. It was too cold to eat in the garden, so after a long look at the blue Val d’Arno with its encircling mountains, the Carraras and the Apennines, we went into the bare little dining-room. Soon the two specialties of the inn smoked on the table, a dish of chicken cooked with red and yellow peppers—the sauce would make an anchorite greedy—and whole artichokes fried to a golden brown, served with melted butter. For those who wanted it, there was a flask of good red Chianti di Broglio; for all there was the rarer wine of friendship.
After luncheon we started in the automobile for the convent, perched on a hill high above Fiesole. When we had made half the distance, we passed an automobile stuck fast in the mire. Soon after we were obliged to turn back on account of the snow; the road runs in spirals; some of the turns are sharp, a true mountain highway, with a precipice on either side. Just as we turned a sharp curve, the machine came to a sudden stop. A tree trunk, big as a railroad sleeper, lay directly in our path, placed across the road since we made the ascent.
“A close call!” muttered the chauffeur, as he put on the brake and stopped the car. If he had not been quick as a flash, we should have had a bad accident. Charles next sprang from the car, dragged the log to the edge of the path and hurled it down the mountainside.
“That dago will have a little trouble to tote you up again!” he chuckled, as the great piece of wood hurtled down the steep.
“A miss is as good as a mile,” our host reassured us.
“Such wickedness as that makes me sick,” said Charles, as he twirled the steering wheel and set the car in motion. We were all silent for the next mile or two.
Which of us was it meant for? Who has so cruel an enemy? We never knew. When I read lately of Mr. Edward Boit and his brother being “held up” and robbed near Vallombrosa, not very far from Fiesole, I wondered if we had escaped the same band of brigands.