I accounted it high time to take another tone with him.  Hanging was a discomfort I was never less minded to suffer.

“Draw nearer, fool,” said I contemptuously, and at the epithet, so greatly did my audacity amaze him, he mildly did my bidding.

“I know not what doubts are battling in your thick head, sir captain,” I pursued.  “But this I know—­that if you persist in hindering me, or commit the egregious folly of offering me violence, you will answer for it, hereafter, to the Lord Cardinal of Valencia.

“I am going upon a secret mission”—­and here I sank my voice to a whisper for his ears alone—­“in the service of the house that hires you, as for yourself you might easily have inferred.  Behold.”  And I revealed my ring.  “Detain me longer at your peril.”

He must have had some notion of the fact that I was journeying in Cesare Borgia’s service, and this coupled with the sight of that talisman effected in his manner a swift and wholesome change.  Had I, arrayed in the panoply of Mother Church, defied the devil, my victory could not have been more complete.

He looked about him like a man whose wits have been scattered suddenly to the four winds of Heaven.

“But this litter,” he mumbled, riveting his dazed eyes upon me, “and these four knaves—?”

“Tell me,” I questioned, with sudden earnestness, “are you in quest of just such a party?”

“Aye that I am,” he answered sharply, intelligence returning to his glance, inquiry burning in it.

“And would the men, peradventure, be wearing the livery of the House of Santafior?”

His quick assent came almost choked in a company of oaths.

“Why then, if that be your quarry, you are but wasting time.  Such a party passed us at the gallop about an hour ago.  It would be an hour, would it not, Giacopo?”

“I should say an hour,” answered the lacquey dully.

“In what direction?” came Ramiro’s frenzied question.  He doubted me no longer.

“In the direction of Fabriano I should say,” I answered.  “Although it may well be that they were making for Sinigaglia.  The road branches farther on.”

He waited for no more.  Without word of thanks for the priceless information I had given him, he wheeled his horse, and shouted a hoarse command to his followers.  A moment later and they were cantering past us, the snow flying beneath their hoofs; within five minutes the last of them had vanished round an angle of the road, and the only indication of the halt they had made was the broad path of dirty brown where their horses had crushed the snow.

I have been an actor in few more entertaining comedies than the cozening of Ser Ramiro, and a witness of nothing that afforded me at once so much relief and relish as his abrupt departure.  I sank back on the cushions of my litter, and gave myself over to a burst of full-souled laughter which was interrupted ere it was half done by Giacopo, who had dismounted and approached me.