flashed up a few hours since hardly tinted the clouds. It is only
the old soldier who can read the signs of a decamping foe, who knows
how the fagots must be heaped at the moment of departure, so that the
deserted fires may burn until the morning, whose quick ear catches and
recognizes the indefinite noises of a host moving in secret. All these
things were, and old campaigners among the legionaries at the gate had
read them aright. Messenger after messenger hurried to the praetorium,
and returned with word that the dictator slept, "having taken all
needed measures," and how the master-of-the-horse paced up and down
before his tent, grinding his teeth, clenching his hands, and muttering
curses upon patrician cowardice and imbecility.

Meanwhile, Lucius Sergius rode on through the night, with Marcus Decius
at his side, and the troop of horse trailing out across the plain
behind them.

"It is silent, master," said the decurion, but his attitude, as he
leaned forward over his horse's neck, was rather of one trying to smell
than to listen. "The pulse-eaters sleep deeply." He watched Sergius
from under half-closed lids, waiting to be contradicted, that he might
measure his officer's warcraft.

Sergius smiled. "Perhaps they are even wider awake than ourselves," he
said, drawing rein. Then, as the other nodded several times in
satisfied acquiescence, he brought his horse to his haunches a stride
beyond, and added: "It was the dictator who said we should find their
lair empty, and, though I do not question his judgment, it will be well
to send on a few who shall spy out the fact, and see whether there be
not Numidians lurking among the huts."

So, slowly and cautiously, they pushed forward again, with riders in
advance, until a shout gave notice that the way was indeed clear, and
they rode through the open gate of the rampart and along the silent
street of the deserted camp.

Nothing was about them save dismantled huts, for the most part mere
burrows with roofs of interlaced boughs that were now smoking amid the
ashes of the fires. Not a sign of disorder, nor even of the rapidity
with which so great an army had been moved; not a scale of armour left
behind--only the insufferable stench of a barbarian camp, of offal and
refuse piled or scattered about, of dead beasts and of dead men--the
sick and wounded who had yielded to sword or disease during the last
few days.

It was with a sense of relief that the cavalcade