was to be seen.  The crowds rushing to and fro, from the Curia and back, were too busy and excited to pay attention to a little group of slaves, who carefully kept from intruding themselves into notice.  Occasionally the roar and echo of applause and shouting came from the now distant Curia, indicating that the Senate was still at its unholy work of voting wars and destructions.  A short walk would bring them across the Pons AEmilius, and there, in the shelter of one of the groves of the new public gardens which Caesar had just been laying out on Janiculum, were waiting several of the fastest mounts which the activity of Agias and the lavish expenditures of Pausanias had been able to procure.

  [147] Slaves were always close clipped.

The friends breathed more easily.

“I hardly think,” said Quintus Cassius, “we shall be molested.  The consuls cannot carry their mad hate so far.”

They were close to the bridge.  The way was lined with tall warehouses and grain storehouses,[148] the precursors of the modern “elevators.”  They could see the tawny Tiber water flashing between the stone arches of the bridge.  The swarms of peasants and countrymen driving herds of lowing kine and bleating sheep toward the adjacent Forum Boarium seemed unsuspicious and inoffensive.  A moment more and all Drusus’s tremors and anxieties would have passed as harmless fantasy.

  [148] Horreae.

Their feet were on the bridge.  They could notice the wind sweeping through the tall cypresses in the gardens where waited the steeds that were to take them to safety.  The friends quickened their pace.  A cloud had drifted across the sun; there was a moment’s gloom.  When the light danced back, Drusus caught Curio’s arm with a start.

“Look!” The new sunbeams had glanced on the polished helmet of a soldier standing guard at the farther end of the bridge.

There was only an instant for hesitation.

“Lentulus has foreseen that we must try to escape by this way,” said Curio, seriously, but without panic.  “We must go back at once, and try to cross by the wooden bridge below or by some other means.”

But a great herd of dirty silver-grey Etruscan cattle came over the causeway, and to get ahead of them would have been impracticable without attracting the most unusual attention.  It was now evident enough that there was a considerable guard at the head of the bridge, and to make a rush and overpower it was impossible.  The heavy-uddered cows and snorting, bellowing bulls dragged by with a slow plodding that almost drove Drusus frantic.  They were over at last, and the friends hastened after them, far more anxious to leave the bridge than they had been an instant before to set foot upon it.  On they pressed, until as if by magic there stood across their path the twelve lictors of one of the consuls, with upraised fasces.  Behind the lictors was a half-century of soldiers in full armour led by their optio.[149]