e within two days of each other, if he holds the rate he has
kept all the way from Bononia and they travel as such luxurious folks
generally do. Come over as often as you like. No one will suspect you or
follow you. I'll keep you posted as to what our advices promise us. You
may be able to help us."

By this time I was so interested in Bulla and his plans that I oscillated
between my crag, the outlaws' camp and the constabulary post, with no more
other occupations than what I judged absolutely needful to forestall any
unwelcome interest in my doings and the possibility of too many persons
knowing of my visits to the outlaws.

When next I visited them Bulla told me that something had alarmed the
procurator. Either some rumor of their presence along the road had reached
him or he knew of the bad reputation of the stretch of the Flaminian
Highway through the Umbrian mountains between Forum Sempronii and Nuceria,
which it had acquired some years before when the King of the Highwaymen
himself had made on it a succession of valuable captures which had yielded
him princely booty and the reports of which had spread all over Italy.
Anyhow their advices informed them that he had packed his bullion-chests
with stones and old-iron and had parcelled out his packets of dust and
nuggets among the wagons of a long train of arena-beasts.

"We'll fool him!" Bulla boasted. "We'll nab him and hold him for a big
ransom. Also we'll not only make sure of his bullion chests in case our
information is false, or based on an intentional rumor he has given out as
a blind; but we'll get that bullion, too, if it is not in the chests, but
hidden in the wagons in the guise of dusty packets of provender for the
draft-cattle or of meat for the caged beasts. We'll get it!"

Prom his mention of the wagons we fell into talk of the increasing
difficulty of getting fresh meat for the lions and other beasts, of the
depletion of the flocks and herds along the roads from Aquileia, to Rome;
and he told me that his advices reported that the whole country near the
highways was already swept clean of all goats, sheep and cattle, except
breeding stock, milch stock and their choicest young kept for breeding.
The inhabitants could get no beef, mutton or goats' flesh for themselves;
all had gone into the maws of hyenas, tigers, wolves and the rest; and the
procurators were insisting on the farmers selling their kids, lambs,
calves, ewes and cows-in-milk, any stock, e