“You have fooled us finely,” said he, with venom.

I quenched my laughter to regard him.  Of what did he babble?  Was he, and were his fellows, too, so ungrateful as to bear a grudge against the man who had saved them?

“You have fooled us finely,” he insisted in a louder voice.

“That, knave, is my trade,” said I.  “But it rather seems to me that it was Messer Ramiro del’ Orca whom I fooled.”

“Aye,” he answered querulously.  “But what when he discerns how you have played upon him?  What when he discovers the trick by which you have thrown him off the scent?  What when he returns?”

“Spare me” I begged, “I am but indifferently skilful at conjecture.”

“Nay, but you shall answer me,” he cried, livid with a passion that my bantering tone had quickened.

“Can it be that you are indeed curious to know what will befall when he returns?” I questioned meekly.

“I am,” he snorted, with an angry twist of the lips.

“It should be easy to gratify the morbid spirit of curiosity that actuates you.  Remain here, and await his return.  Thus shall you learn.”

“That will not I,” he vowed.

“Nor I, nor I, nor I!” chorused his followers.

“Then, why plague me with unprofitable questions?  What concern is it of ours how Messer del’ Orca shall vent his wrath when he is disillusioned.  Your duty now is to rejoin your mistress.  Ride hard for Cagli.  Seek her at the sign of ‘The Full Moon,’ and then away for Pesaro.  If you are brisk you will gain the shelter of the Lord Giovanni Sforza’s fortress long before Messer del’ Orca again picks up the scent, if, indeed, he ever does so.”

Giacopo laughed derisively till his fat body shook with the scornful mirth of him.

“By my faith, I’m done with the business,” he cried, and the other three expressed a very hearty agreement with that attitude.

“How done with it?” I asked.

“I shall make my way back across the hills and so retrace my steps to Rome.  I’ll risk my head no more for any lady or any Fool.”

“If you should ever chance to risk it for yourself,” said I, with unmeasured scorn, “you’ll risk it for the greatest fool and the cowardliest rogue that ever shamed the name of man.  And your mistress?  Is she to wait at Cagli until doomsday?  If anywhere within the bulk of that elephant’s body there lurks the heart of a rabbit, you’ll get you to horse and ride to the help of that poor lady.”

They resented my tone, and showed their resentment plainly.  Messer Giacopo went the length of raising his hand to me.  But I am a man of amazing strength—­amazing inasmuch as being slender of shape I do not have the air of it.  Leaping suddenly from the litter, I caught that miserable vassal by the breast of his doublet, shook him once or twice, then tossed him headlong into a drift of snow by the roadside.