but they had left Weisspriess near on Nagen’s detachment, and they furnished sound military reasons to show why, if Weisspriess favoured the escape, they should not be present.  They supposed that they were not half-a-mile from the scene in the pass where Nagen was being forcibly deposed from his authority:  Merthyr borrowed Count Karl’s glass, and went as they directed him round a bluff of the descending hills, that faced the vale, much like a blown and beaten sea-cliff.  Wilfrid and Karl were so certain of Count Ammiani’s safety, that their only thought was to get under good cover before nightfall, and haply into good quarters, where the three proper requirements of the soldier-meat, wine, and tobacco—­might be furnished to them.  After an imperative caution that they should not present themselves before the Countess Alessandra, Merthyr sped quickly over the broken ground.  How gaily the two young men cheered to him as he hurried on!  He met a sort of pedlar turning the bluntfaced mountain-spur, and this man said, “Yes, sure enough, prisoners had been taken,” and he was not aware of harm having been done to them; he fancied there was a quarrel between two captains.  His plan being always to avoid the military, he had slunk round and away from them as fast as might be.  An Austrian common soldier, a good-humoured German, distressed by a fall that had hurt his knee-cap, sat within the gorge, which was very wide at the mouth.  Merthyr questioned him, and he, while mending one of his gathered cigar-ends, pointed to a meadow near the beaten track, some distance up the rocks.  Whitecoats stood thick on it.  Merthyr lifted his telescope and perceived an eager air about the men, though they stood ranged in careless order.  He began to mount forthwith, but amazed by a sudden ringing of shot, he stopped, asking himself in horror whether it could be an execution.  The shots and the noise increased, until the confusion of a positive mellay reigned above.  The fall of the meadow swept to a bold crag right over the pathway, and with a projection that seen sideways made a vulture’s head and beak of it.  There rolled a corpse down the precipitous wave of green grass on to the crag, where it lodged, face to the sky; sword dangled from swordknot at one wrist, heels and arms were in the air, and the body caught midway hung poised and motionless.  The firing deadened.  Then Merthyr drawing nearer beneath the crag, saw one who had life in him slipping down toward the body, and knew the man for Beppo.  Beppo knocked his hands together and groaned miserably, but flung himself astride the beak of the crag, and took the body in his arms, sprang down with it, and lay stunned at Merthyr’s feet.  Merthyr looked on the face of Carlo Ammiani.

EPILOGUE