med to wrestle briefly with cloaked figures. Then armed,
more-or-less-armored men ran back to the scene of their reveling.
Swords, daggers, and gladii thrust, stabbed, and cut. Tables and benches
ran red; ground and grass grew slippery with blood.

The conspirators turned then and rushed toward the Emperor's brilliantly
torch-lit garden. Patroclus, however, was not in the van. He had had
trouble in finding a cuirass big enough for him to get into. He had been
delayed further by the fact that he had had to kill three strange
lanistae before he could get at his owner, the man he really wanted to
slay. He was therefore some little distance behind the other gladiators
when Petronius rushed up to him and seized him by the arm.

White and trembling, the noble was not now the exquisite Arbiter
Elegantiae; nor the imperturbable Augustian.

"Patroclus! In the name of Bacchus, Patroclus, why do the men go there
now? No signal was given--I could not get to Nero!"

"What?" the Thracian blazed. "Vulcan and his fiends! It _was_ given--I
heard it myself! What went wrong?"

"Everything." Petronius licked his lips. "I was standing right beside
him. No one else was near enough to interfere. It was--should have
been--easy. But after I got my knife out I couldn't move. It was his
_eyes_, Patroclus--I swear it, by the white breasts of Venus! He has the
evil eye--I couldn't move a muscle, I tell you! Then, although I didn't
want to, I turned and ran!"

"How did you find _me_ so quick?"

"I--I--I--don't know," the frantic Arbiter stuttered. "I ran and ran,
and there you were. But what are we--you--going to do?"

Patroclus' mind raced. He believed implicitly that Jupiter guarded him
personally. He believed in the other gods and goddesses of Rome. He more
than half believed in the multitudinous deities of Greece, of Egypt, and
even of Babylon. The other world was real and close; the evil eye only
one of the many inexplicable facts of every-day life. Nevertheless, in
spite of his credulity--or perhaps in part because of it--he also
believed firmly in himself; in his own powers. Wherefore he soon came to
a decision.

"Jupiter, ward from me Ahenobarbus' evil eye!" he called aloud, and
turned.

"Where are you going?" Petronius, still shaking, demanded.

"To do the job _you_ swore to do, of course--to kill that bloated toad.
And then to give Tigellinus what I have owed him so long."

At full run, he soon overtook his fellows, and waded