“Much belongs to the poor, but others take it from them,” said Adone.  “You have seen a hawk take a sparrow, Trizio.  The poor count no more than the sparrows.”

“But the water is the gift of God,” said the old man.

Adone did not answer.

“What can we do?” said Trizio, wiping the dew off his sickle.  “Who knows aught of us?  Who cares?  If the rich folks want the river they will take it, curse them!”

Adone did not answer.  He knew that it was so, all over the earth.

“We shall know no more than birds tangled in a net,” said Trizio.  “They will come and work their will.”

Adone rose up out of the grass.  “I will go and see Ruffo,” he said.  He was glad to do something.

“Ruffo knows no more than that,” said Trizio angrily.  “The driver of the horses knew no more.”

Adone paid him no need, but began to push his way through the thick network of the interlaced heather.  He thought that perhaps Ruffo, a man who made wooden shoes, and hoops for casks, and shaped chestnut poles for vines, might tell him more than had been told to old Trizio; might at least be able to suggest from what quarter and in what shape this calamity was rising, to burst over their valley as a hailstorm broods above, then breaks, on helpless fields and defenceless gardens, beating down without warning the birds and the blossoms of spring.

When he had been in Lombardy he had seen once a great steam-engine at work, stripping a moorland of its natural growth and turning it into ploughed land.  He remembered how the huge machine with its stench of oil and fire had forced its way through the furze and ferns and wild roses and myrtle, and torn them up, and flung them on one side, and scattered and trampled all the insect life, and all the bird life, and all the hares, and field mice, and stoats, and hedgehogs, who made their home there.  “A fine sight,” a man had said to him; and he had answered, “A cursed wickedness.”  Was this what they would do to the vale of Edera?  If they took the river they could not spare the land.  He felt scared, bruised, terrified, like one of these poor moorland hares.  He remembered a poor stoat which, startled out of its sleep, had turned and bitten one of the iron wheels of the machine, and the wheel had gone over it and crushed it into a mass of blood and fur.  He was as furious and as helpless as the stoat had been.

But when he had walked the four miles which separated the Terra Vergine from the chestnut woods where the maker of wooden shoes lived, he heard nothing else from Ruffo than this:  that gentlemen had come from Teramo to study the Edera water; they were going to turn it aside and use it; more than that the man who had driven them had not heard and could not explain.