Without hesitation I obeyed him, a strange excitement thrilling me.  For a second we stood in the dark, then another light gleamed as he plucked away the cloak that masked a lanthorn which he had brought with him.  He set the lanthorn on the floor, and held the cloak in his hand, ready at a moment’s notice to conceal the light in its folds.  Then pulling me down beside him on the bed, where he had perched himself: 

“My friend,” said he, “it may be that I bring you assistance.”

“Speak, then,” I bade him.  “You shall not find me slow to act if there is the need or the way.”

“So I had surmised,” he said.  “Are you not that same Boccadoro, Fool of the Court of Pesaro, who donned the Lord Giovanni’s armour and rode out to do battle in his stead?”

I answered him that I was that man.

“I have heard the tale,” said he.  “Indeed, all Italy has heard it, and knows you for a man of steel, as strong and audacious as you are cunning and resourceful.  I know against what desperate odds you fought that day, and how you overcame this terrible Ramiro.  This it is that leads me to hope that in the service of your own ends you may become the instrument of my vengeance.”

“Unfold your project, man,” I muttered, fiercely almost, in my burning eagerness.  “Let me hear what you would have me do.”

He did not answer me until a sob had shaken his old frame.

“That boy,” he muttered brokenly, “that golden-haired angel sent me for the consolation of my decaying years, that lad whom Ramiro destroyed so foully and wantonly, was my son.  Futile though the attempt had proved, I had certainly set my hands at the tyrants neck, but that I founded hopes on you of a surer and more terrible revenge.  That thought has manned me and upheld me when anguish was near to slaying me outright.  To see the boy burn so under my very eyes!  God of mercy and pity!  That I should have lived so long!”

“Your child burned but a moment, suffered but an instant; for the deed, Ramiro will burn in Hell through countless generations, through interminable ages.”

It was a paltry consolation, perhaps, but it was the best that then occurred to me.

“Meanwhile,” I begged him, “do you tell me what you would have me do.”

I urged him to it that he might, thereby, suffer his mind to rest a moment from pondering that ghastly thing that he had witnessed, that scene that would live before his eyes until they closed in their last sleep.

“You heard Lampugnani quip Ramiro with the fact that three messengers have ridden desperately within the week from Citta di Castello to Cesena, and you heard, perhaps, his obscure reference to the hat?”

“I heard both, and both I weighed,” said I. The old man looked at me as if surprised.

“And what,” he asked, “was the conclusion you arrived at?”

“Why, simply this:  that whilst the messenger bore some letter from Vitelli to Ramiro that should serve to lull the suspicions of any who, wondering at so much traffic between these two, should be moved to take a peep into those missives, the true letter with which the courier rides is concealed within the lining of his hat—­probably unknown even to himself.”