t smelt appetizing.

We wriggled into the tunnel side by side, until our heads were well under
the mattress-roof. We could see out under the huddled, crumpled canvas.
Full in our limited view lay, in the middle of the camp street, a fat
Nucerian, the outline of his big chest and prominent paunch dimly visible
in the increasing light. His gurgling snores were plainly audible.

Agathemer broke off two fragments of the bread and we munched
ruminatively.

We had hardly swallowed three mouthfuls when Agathemer exclaimed:

"Just in time! I can hear the arrows already! Listen!"

We listened. I could hear a sound as of hail on roofs. And, just above us,
I could hear the arrows plunge into our protecting mound with a swishing,
rending thud.

"We ought to be safe," Agathemer whispered. "But we may get skewered even
as we are. Volleyed arrows drive deep."

I heard many a volley and, after the first, since I was listening for it,
I heard faintly before each volley the deep boom of thousands of powerful
bows, twanging all at the same instant.

As the light increased I could see the drunken Nucerian with his hummocky
outline emphasized by five feathered arrows planted in his body. He must
have been killed by any of the five.

When we saw living men pass across our outlook, their legs looked like
those of some sort of foreign auxiliaries. I made the conjecture, from
their movements, that they were killing the merely wounded. Certainly, one
of them drove his long sword through the prostrate, arrow-skewered
Nucerian; and, sometime later, another, with quite a different type of
leg-coverings, did the like.

After daylight we saw pass by the legs of many Praetorian infantrymen and
of some cavalrymen. From the second hour we saw only legs of some novel
sort of regular soldiery whose trappings neither of us could recognize.

It grew hot in our hiding place. We talked in whispers; while talking we
seemed more indifferent to the heat.

Agathemer said:

"All this must have been planned beforehand and carefully and very
skillfully carried out. It took ingenuity, minutely detailed arrangements
and great skill to arrange that banquet so as to get all the tumultuary
additions to the deputation surfeited and dead drunk and yet keep the
veteran legionaries near enough to being sober to be waked up, marshalled
and marched out. And it took amazing eloquence to wheedle their centurions
into abandoning their invited associates. The whole