Barto Rizzo wanted to know, and could not consequently tell what to bring
to the market. The simplicity of the questions put to him was
bewildering: he fell into the trap. Barto's eyes began to get terribly
oblique. Jingling money in his pocket, he said:--"You saw Colonel Corte
on the Motterone: you saw the Signor Agostino Balderini: good men, both!
Also young Count Ammiani: I served his father, the General, and jogged
the lad on my knee. You saw the Signorina Vittoria. The English people
came, and you heard them talk, but did not understand. You came home and
told all this to the Signor Antonio, your employer number one. You have
told the same to me, your employer number two. There's your pay."

Barto summed up thus the information he had received, and handed Luigi
six gold pieces. The latter, springing with boyish thankfulness and pride
at the easy earning of them, threw in a few additional facts, as, that he
had been taken for a spy by the conspirators, and had heard one of the
Englishmen mention the Signorina Vittoria's English name. Barto Rizzo
lifted his eyebrows queerly. "We'll go through another interrogatory in
an hour," he said; "stop here till I return."

Luigi was always too full of his own cunning to suspect the same in
another, until he was left alone to reflect on a scene; when it became
overwhelmingly transparent. "But, what could I say more than I did say?"
he asked himself, as he stared at the one lamp Barto had left. Finding
the door unfastened, he took the lamp and lighted himself out, and along
a cavernous passage ending in a blank wall, against which his heart
knocked and fell, for his sensation was immediately the terror of
imprisonment and helplessness. Mad with alarm, he tried every spot for an
aperture. Then he sat down on his haunches; he remembered hearing word of
Barto Rizzo's rack:--certain methods peculiar to Barto Rizzo, by which he
screwed matters out of his agents, and terrified them into fidelity. His
personal dealings with Barto were of recent date; but Luigi knew him by
repute: he knew that the shoemaking business was a mask. Barto had been a
soldier, a schoolmaster: twice an exile; a conspirator since the day when
the Austrians had the two fine Apples of Pomona, Lombardy and Venice,
given them as fruits of peace. Luigi remembered how he had snapped his
fingers at the name of Barto Rizzo. There was no despising him now. He
could only arrive at a peaceful contemplation of Barto Rizzo's