Dion turned his head slightly toward the steward, who was about to answer, and the steward remained silent. A sort of excitement shot through the apartment.
"Name the horse, if you please, honored magister," said Claudius. Even now the steward could not, or did not, speak.
Before the painful pause was broken, the attention of all present was arrested by a sudden uproar in the street. The noise of a furious trampling, combined with successive shrieks, whether of pain or terror, was borne into the palace.
Dionysius, followed by Paulus, by Claudius, by the steward, and Benigna, ran to the window, if such it can be termed, drew aside the silken curtain, and pushed open the gaudily-painted, perforated shutter, when a strange and alarming spectacle was presented in the open space formed by cross-streets before the left front of the mansion.
A magnificent horse of bigger stature, yet of more elegant proportions, than the horses which were then used for the Roman cavalry, was in the act of rearing; and within stroke of his fore-feet, on coming down, lay a man, face under, motionless, a woollen tunic ripped open behind at the shoulder, and disclosing some sort of wound, from which blood was flowing. The horse, which was of a bright roan color, was neither ridden nor saddled, but girt with a cloth round the belly, and led, or rather held back, by two long cavassons, which a couple of powerfully-built, swarthy men, dressed like slaves, held at the further ends on opposite sides of the beast, considerably apart, and perhaps thirty feet behind him. One of these lines or reins—that nearest the palace—was taut, the other was slack; and the slave who held the former had rolled it twice or thrice round his bare arm, and was leaning back, and hauling, hand over hand.
The animal had apparently stricken on the back, unawares, with a fore-foot play and a pawing blow, the man who was lying so still and motionless on the pavement, and the beast, having reared, was now trying to come down upon his victim. But no sooner were his fore-legs in the air than he, of course, thereby yielded a sudden purchase to the groom who was pulling him with the taut cavasson, and this man was thus at last enabled to drag him fairly off his hind-legs, and to bring him with a hollow thump to the ground upon his side. Before the brute could again struggle to his feet, four or five soldiers who happened to be nigh, running to the rescue, had lifted, and carried out of harm's way, the prostrate and wounded man.
"That is the very horse!" exclaimed the magister, stretching his neck between the shoulders of Dion and Paulus, at the small window of the palace.
"I observe," said Paulus, "that the cavasson is ringed to a muzzle—the beast is indisputably muzzled."
"Why is he muzzled?"
"Because," replied the magister, "he eats people!"