The lads took the stuff thankfully and crunched the stony balls with white, wolfish teeth.

With Padre Michele’s help they got an old woman from amongst the neighbours to rouse herself and do what was necessary.  When all was over she took the brown blanket as payment without asking for it, smuggling it out of the mean room under her great black handkerchief.  But it was day then, and Don Pietro Casale was wide awake.  He stopped her in the narrow part of the lane at the foot of his own staircase, and forcibly undid the bundle, to the old woman’s inexpressible discomfiture.  He said nothing, as he took it from her and carried it away, but his thin grey lips smiled quietly.  The old woman shook her fist at him behind his back and cursed his dead under her breath.  From Rome to Palermo, swear at a man if you please, call him by bad names, and he will laugh at you.  But curse his dead relations or their souls, and you had better keep beyond the reach of his knife, or of his hands if he have no weapon.  So the old woman was careful that Pietro Casale should not hear her.

“Managgia l’anima di chi t’ e morto!” she muttered, as she hobbled away.

Everything in the room where Carmela died belonged to Don Pietro, and he took everything.  He found the two boys standing together, looking across the fence of the cabbage garden down at the distant valley and over at the height opposite, beyond which the sea was hidden.

“Eh!  You good-for-nothings!” he called out to them.  “Is nothing done to-day because the mother is dead?  No bread to-night, then—­you know that.”

“We will not work for you any more,” answered Ruggiero, the elder, as both turned round.

Don Pietro went up to them.  He had a short stout stick in his hand, tough and black with age, and he lifted it as though to drive them to work.  They waited quietly till it should please him to come to close quarters, which he did without delay.  I have said that he was a man of few words.  But the Children of the King were not like Calabrian boys, children though they were.  Their wolfish teeth were very white as they waited for him with parted lips, and there was an odd blue light in their eyes which is not often seen south of Goth-land.

They were but twelve and ten years old, but they could fight already, in their small way, and had tried it many a time with shepherd lads on the hill-side.  But Don Pietro despised children and aimed a blow at Ruggiero’s right shoulder.  The blow did not take effect, but a moment had not passed before the old peasant lay sprawling on his back with both the boys on top of him.

“You cannot hurt the mother now,” said Ruggiero.  “Hit him as I do, Bastianello!”

And the four bony boyish fists fell in a storm of savage blows upon Don Pietro Casale’s leathern face and eyes and head and thin grey lips.

“That is for the mother,” said Ruggiero.  “Another fifty a-piece for ourselves.”