How could any thieves conspire to take it from the country in which it was born?  How could any dare to catch it, and imprison it, and put it to vile uses?  It was a living thing, a free thing, a precious thing, more precious than jewel or gold.  Both jewels and gold the law protected.  Could it not protect the Edera?

“Something must be done,” he said to himself.  “But what?”

He had not the faintest knowledge of what could or should be done; he regretted that he had not written his mark with the horns and the hoofs of his oxen on the foreign invaders; they might never again fall into his power.

He had never felt before such ferocious or cruel instincts as arose in him now.  Don Silverio seemed to him tame and lukewarm before this monstrous conspiracy of strangers.  He knew that a priest must not give way to anger; yet it seemed to him that even a priest should be roused to fury here; there was a wrath which was holy.

When he was clothed he stood and looked down again at the gliding stream.

A feeble, cracked voice called to him from the opposite bank.

“Adone, my lad, what is this tale?”

The speaker was an old man of eighty odd years, a native of Ruscino, one Patrizio Cambi, who was not yet too feeble to cut the rushes and osiers, and maintained a widowed daughter and her young children by that means.

“What tale?” said Adone, unwilling to be roused from his own dark thoughts.  “What tale, Trizio?”

“That they are going to meddle with the river,” answered the old man.  “They can’t do it, can they?”

“What have you heard?”

“That they are going to meddle with the river.”

“In what way?”

“The Lord knows, or the devil.  There was a waggon with four horses came as near as it could get to us in the woods yonder by Ruffo’s, and the driver told Ruffo that the gentry he drove had come by road from that town by the sea—­ I forget its name—­ in order to see the river, this river, our river; and that he had brought another posse of gentry two weeks or more on the same errand, and that they were a-measuring and a-plumbing it, and that they were going to get possession of its somehow or other, but Ruffo could not hear anything more than that; and I supposed that you knew, because this part of it is yours if it be any man’s; this part of it that runs through the Terra Vergine.”

“Yes, it is mine,” answered Adone very slowly.  “It is mine here, and it was once ours from source to sea.”

“Aye, it is ours!” said old Trizio Cambi mistaking him.  He was a man once tall, but now bent nearly double; he had a harsh, wrinkled face, brown as a hazel nut, and he was nearly a skeleton; but he had eyes which were still fine and still had some fire in them.  In his youth he had been a Garibaldino.

“It is ours,” repeated Trizio.  “At least if anything belongs to poor folks.  What say you, Adone?”