"Whenever the foreign labourers come to work on the water we shall drive them away."
"But if they will not go?"
"Child, the river is deep; we know its ways and its soundings; they do not."
Her great bright eyes flashed fire: an unholy joy laughed in them.
"We will baptize them over again!" she said; and all her face laughed and sparkled in the moonlight. There was fierce mountain blood in her veins; it grew hot at the thought of slaughter like the juice of grapes warmed in an August noon.
He laughed slow, savagely. "Their blood will be on their own heads!"
He meant to drive them out, swamp them in the stream, choke them in the sand, hunt them in the heather; make every man of them rue the day that ever they came thither to meddle with the Edera water.
"Curse them! Their blood will be on their own heads!" he said between his teeth. He was thinking of the strange men who it was said would be at work on the land and the water before the moon, young now, should be in her last quarter; men hired by the hundreds, day-labourers of the Romagna and the Puglie, leased by contract, marshalled under overseers, different in nothing from slaves who groan under the white man's lash in Africa.
"Let me come with you to-night," she pleaded again. "I will hide in the bushes. The men shall not see me."
"No, no," he said sternly. "Get you back to your rest at Ruscino. I did wrong, I did basely to use your ignorance and abuse your obedience. Get you gone, and listen to your priest, not to me."