“Nor I, nor I, nor I!” chorused his followers.
“Then, why plague me with unprofitable questions? What concern is it of ours how Messer del’ Orca shall vent his wrath when he is disillusioned. Your duty now is to rejoin your mistress. Ride hard for Cagli. Seek her at the sign of ‘The Full Moon,’ and then away for Pesaro. If you are brisk you will gain the shelter of the Lord Giovanni Sforza’s fortress long before Messer del’ Orca again picks up the scent, if, indeed, he ever does so.”
Giacopo laughed derisively till his fat body shook with the scornful mirth of him.
“By my faith, I’m done with the business,” he cried, and the other three expressed a very hearty agreement with that attitude.
“How done with it?” I asked.
“I shall make my way back across the hills and so retrace my steps to Rome. I’ll risk my head no more for any lady or any Fool.”
“If you should ever chance to risk it for yourself,” said I, with unmeasured scorn, “you’ll risk it for the greatest fool and the cowardliest rogue that ever shamed the name of man. And your mistress? Is she to wait at Cagli until doomsday? If anywhere within the bulk of that elephant’s body there lurks the heart of a rabbit, you’ll get you to horse and ride to the help of that poor lady.”
They resented my tone, and showed their resentment plainly. Messer Giacopo went the length of raising his hand to me. But I am a man of amazing strength—amazing inasmuch as being slender of shape I do not have the air of it. Leaping suddenly from the litter, I caught that miserable vassal by the breast of his doublet, shook him once or twice, then tossed him headlong into a drift of snow by the roadside.
At that they bared their knives and made shift to attack me. But I flung myself on to one of the mules of the litter, and showing them the stout Pistoja dagger that I carried, I presented with it a bold and truculent front, no whit intimidated by their numbers. Four to one though they were, they thought better of it. A moment they stood off, consulting among themselves; then Giacopo mounted, and with some mocking counsel as to how I should dispose of the litter and the mules, they made off, no doubt, to find their way back to Rome. Giacopo, as I was afterwards to discover, was Madonna Paola’s purse-bearer, so that they would not lack for means.
Awhile I stayed there, cursing them for the white-livered cravens that they were, and thinking of that poor child who had ridden on to Cagli, and who would await them in vain. There, on the mule, I sat in the noontide sunlight, and pondered this, so absorbed in her affairs as to have grown forgetful of my own. At last I resolved to ride on to Cagli alone, and inform her that her men were fled.