n't know
such a fellow.'

'I am his favourite pupil,' said Angelo.

'I'd have sworn it,' groaned the innkeeper, and cursed the day and hour
when Angelo crossed his threshold. That done, he begged permission to be
allowed to return, crying with tears of entreaty for mercy: 'Barto
Rizzo's pupils are always out upon bloody business!' Angelo told him that
he had now an opportunity of earning the approval of Barto Rizzo, and
then said, 'On,' and they went in the track of the two whitecoats; the
innkeeper murmuring all the while that he wanted the approval of Barto
Rizzo as little as his enmity; he wanted neither frost nor fire. The
glacier being traversed, they skirted a young stream, and arrived at an
inn, where they found the soldiers regaling. Jacopo was informed by them
that the lady whom they were pursuing had not passed. They pushed their
wine for Angelo to drink: he declined, saying that he had sworn not to
drink before he had shot the chamois with the white cross on his back.

'Come: we're two to one,' they said, 'and drink you shall this time!'

'Two to two,' returned Angelo: 'here is my Jacopo, and if he doesn't
count for one, I won't call him father-in-law, and the fellow living at
Cles may have his daughter without fighting for her.'

'Right so,' said one of the soldiers, 'and you don't speak bad German
already.'

'Haven't I served in the ranks?' said Angelo, giving a bugle-call of the
reveille of the cavalry.

He got on with them so well that they related the object of their
expedition, which was, to catch a runaway young rebel lady and hold her
fast down at Cles for the great captain--'unser tuchtiger Hauptmann.'

'Hadn't she a servant, a sort of rascal?' Angelo inquired.

'Right so; she had: but the doe's the buck in this chase.'

Angelo tossed them cigars. The valley was like a tumbled mountain, thick
with crags and eminences, through which the river worked strenuously,
sinuous in foam, hurrying at the turns. Angelo watched all the ways from
a distant height till set of sun. He saw another couple of soldiers meet
those two at the inn, and then one pair went up toward the vale-head. It
seemed as if Vittoria had disconcerted them by having chosen another
route.

'Padrone,' said Jacopo to him abruptly, when they descended to find a
resting-place, 'you are, I speak humbly, so like the devil that I must
enter into a stipulation with you, before I continue in your company, and
take the worst at once. T