ir loyalty to the Emperor, their hatred of
Perennis and their eagerness to foil one and save the other, our
irresponsible frontier centurions let their men and us loiter southward
through Cisalpine Gaul and Umbria as they had loitered on the other side
of the Alps, seldom marching more than ten miles a day. So that we left
Ocriculum on the tenth day before the Kalends of August and stopped
overnight at each change-station.

We had had fair weather all the way from Placentia, except a heavy rain at
Ariminum and showers in the mountains between Forum Sempronii and Nuceria.
When day dawned on us at Rostrata Villa, on the eighth day before the
Kalends of August, it dawned cloudy, but not threatening. After the usual
camp breakfast of porridge and wine, we fell in, by now fairly decent
marchers, and set off for Rubrae. But before we had marched a mile, the
low clouds soaked us with such a downpour as I had seldom seen of a July
morning near Rome. So heavy and so unrelenting was the rain that we were
glad to halt at the change-house at the twentieth mile-stone, where the
road from Capena to Veii crosses the Flaminian Highway and where there is
a prosperous village as large as many a small town. There we found
quarters and food ready for us and were well entertained. Ad Vicesimum, as
the place is called, is only four miles nearer Rome than Villa Rostrata.

It was about midway of that four-mile march in the pouring rain that I saw
by the roadside three immobile horsemen, their forms swathed in horsemen's
rain-cloaks, their faces hidden under broad-brimmed rain-hats, lined up
with their horses' noses barely a horse-length from the roadway, watching
from a little knoll our column as it passed. The middle horseman of the
three looked familiar. I glanced back at him and met his eyes, intensely
watching me from under his dripping hat brim, as I trudged on the edge of
the trudging rabble. A hot qualm surged through me. It was, it certainly
was, the very same man I had seen in the very same guise on the road
below Villa Andivia as Tanno and I passed by on our way to our fatal brawl
at Vediamnum; the very man who had peered in at me and Capito during his
fatal conference with me in Nemestronia's water-garden, the man whom Tanno
had asserted that he knew for an Imperial spy. I felt recognition in his
gaze; felt that he knew me for my very self. And his nose was hooked.

At our halting place, when Agathemer and I were alone, I asked him