crime is having
defended his country against Caesar!" I cried bitterly. "And yet I did
not kill that same Caesar, who has reduced our people to slavery and is
now about to divide among his soldiers the lands of our fathers, I did
not kill him when I was making off with him on my horse!"

"You, my fine Bull, you took great Caesar prisoner?" asked the
"horse-dealer" mockingly. "It's too bad I can't proclaim that at the
auction. It would make a rare slave of you."

I reproached myself for having uttered before that trafficker in human
flesh words which resembled a regret or a complaint. Coming back to my
first thought, which made me endure patiently the loquacity of the man,
I said to him:

"When you picked me up where I fell on the battlefield, did you see hard
by a war chariot harnessed to four black bulls, with a woman and two
children hanging from the pole?"

"Did I see them? Did I see them!" exclaimed the "horse-dealer" with a
mournful sigh. "Ah, what excellent goods lost! We counted in that
chariot eleven young women and girls, all beautiful--oh,
beautiful!--worth at least forty or fifty gold sous apiece--but dead.
They had all killed themselves. They were no good to anyone."

"And in the chariot were there no women nor children still alive?"

"Women? No,--alas, no. Not one, to the great loss of the Roman soldiers
and myself. But of children, there were, I believe, two or three who had
survived the death which those fierce Gallic women, furious as
lionesses, wished to inflict upon them."

"And where are they?" I exclaimed, thinking of my son and daughter, who
were, perhaps, among them, "where are those children? Answer! Answer!"

"I told you, my Bull, that I buy only wounded persons; one of my fellows
bought the lot of children, and also some other little ones, for they
picked up some alive from the other chariots. But what does it matter to
you whether or not there are children to sell?"

"Because I had a son and a daughter in that chariot," I answered, my
heart bursting.

"And how old were they?"

"The girl was eight, the boy nine."

"And your wife?"

"If none of those eleven women found in the chariot were living, my wife
is dead."

"Isn't that too bad--too bad! Your wife had already borne you two
children; you four would have made a fine deal. Ah, what a lost
treasure!"

I repressed a gesture of impotent anger at the scoundrel, and answered:

"Yes, they would have billed us as the Bull and t