talk to you about is
this very question. It occurred to me that we could hardly do better
than ask Rivarez to undertake the management of our own smuggling. That
press at Pistoja is very inefficiently managed, to my thinking; and the
way the leaflets are taken across, always rolled in those everlasting
cigars, is more than primitive."

"It has answered pretty well up till now," said Martini contumaciously.
He was getting wearied of hearing Galli and Riccardo always put the
Gadfly forward as a model to copy, and inclined to think that the world
had gone well enough before this "lackadaisical buccaneer" turned up to
set everyone to rights.

"It has answered so far well that we have been satisfied with it for
want of anything better; but you know there have been plenty of arrests
and confiscations. Now I believe that if Rivarez undertook the business
for us, there would be less of that."

"Why do you think so?"

"In the first place, the smugglers look upon us as strangers to do
business with, or as sheep to fleece, whereas Rivarez is their personal
friend, very likely their leader, whom they look up to and trust. You
may be sure every smuggler in the Apennines will do for a man who was
in the Savigno revolt what he will not do for us. In the next place,
there's hardly a man among us that knows the mountains as Rivarez does.
Remember, he has been a fugitive among them, and knows the smugglers'
paths by heart. No smuggler would dare to cheat him, even if he wished
to, and no smuggler could cheat him if he dared to try."

"Then is your proposal that we should ask him to take over the
whole management of our literature on the other side of the
frontier--distribution, addresses, hiding-places, everything--or simply
that we should ask him to put the things across for us?"

"Well, as for addresses and hiding-places, he probably knows already
all the ones that we have and a good many more that we have not. I
don't suppose we should be able to teach him much in that line. As
for distribution, it's as the others prefer, of course. The important
question, to my mind, is the actual smuggling itself. Once the books are
safe in Bologna, it's a comparatively simple matter to circulate them."

"For my part," said Martini, "I am against the plan. In the first place,
all this about his skilfulness is mere conjecture; we have not actually
seen him engaged in frontier work and do not know whether he keeps his
head in critical moments