miles between camps. These blatherskites were on fire
with high resolve, by their talk, yet had loafed along for a thousand
miles, camping early, sleeping long after sunrise, resting at midday and
gorging themselves at leisurely meals. All this was amazing.

Equally astonishing was the condition of supineness, of all governmental
officials in Gaul, local and Imperial, as their tale revealed it. Neither
the Prefect of the Rhine, nor any one of the Procurators of Gaul, had, as
far as their story indicated, made any effort to arrest them, turn them
back, stop them, check them, hinder them or even have them expostulated
with. As far as I could infer from all I heard neither had the governing
body of any city or town. For all they were interfered with by any
official they might have been full-time veterans, honorably discharged,
marching homeward under accredited officers provided with diplomas
properly made out, signed, sealed and stamped. Everywhere they had been
fed at public expense, lodged free or provided with camping-grounds and
tents; their pack-animals had been replaced if worn out, and everything
they needed had been provided on their asking for it or even before they
made any request. I could only infer that they had inspired fear by their
numbers and truculence and that each town or district had striven to keep
them in a good humor and to get rid of them as soon as possible by
entertaining them lavishly and speeding them along their chosen way.

As they told of their own behavior there had been no consistency or system
or method in their additions to their company. By their own account they
had enticed men to join them or had ignored likely recruits in the most
haphazard fashion, purely as the humor struck them. The like was true of
their emptyings of _ergastula_ in Italy. At Turin, as well as I could
gather from my chats with this or that centurion or soldier or liberated
slave, they had set free the inmates of the _ergastulum_ by the Segusio
Gate and had then turned aside to that by the Vercellae Gate, but had
ignored the larger _ergastulum_ by the Milan Gate; though they had marched
out of Turin, necessarily, by that gate. Similarly at Milan, they had
emptied two _ergastula_ and ignored the rest; as at Placentia, where they
had expended all their time and energy on the first _ergastulum_ they
happened on inside the Milan Gate and on ours, and then had ignored or
forgotten the four or five others, equally large