“The man was a mason, I suppose,” suggested Gigi.

“Of course.  He was working with the others in the morning, and he knew where they would be after dinner.  He did not come back with them, and half an hour after they had gone down the water came.  How many times have I told you that?”

“It is always a new tale,” answered Gigi.  “It gives me pleasure to hear it.  Your father was a young man then, was he not?”

“Eighteen.”  Toto lighted his pipe.

“And the man who did it died soon afterwards?” Gigi said.

“Of course,” said Toto.  “What else could my father do?  He killed him.  It was the least he could have done.  My father is also in Paradise.”

“Requiescat!” ejaculated the carpenter devoutly.

“Amen,” answered Toto.  “He killed him with a mattock.”

“It was well done,” observed Gigi with satisfaction.  “I suppose,” he continued after a pause, “that if anybody went down there now, you could let in the water.”

“Why should I?  I do not care what they do.  If they send for me, I may serve them.  If they think they can do without me, let them try.  I do not care a cabbage!”

“Perhaps not,” Gigi answered thoughtfully.  “But it must be a fine satisfaction to know that you can drown them all, like rats in a hole.”

“Yes,” said Toto, “it is a fine satisfaction.”

“And even to know that you can make the water come before they begin, so that they can never do anything without you.”

“That too,” assented the mason.

“They would pay you a great deal to help them, if they could not pump the water out.  There is no one else in Rome who knows how to turn it off.”

Gigi made the remark tentatively, but Toto did not answer.

“You will need some one to help you,” suggested the carpenter in an insinuating tone.

“I can do it alone.”

“It is somewhere in the cellars of number thirteen, is it not?” asked Gigi.

He would have given all he had to know what Toto knew, and the bargain would have been a very profitable one, no doubt.  But though the mason was his closest friend there were secrets of the trade which Toto would not reveal to him.

“The numbers in the street were all changed ten years ago,” Toto answered.

He rose from his seat by the grimy table, and Gigi followed his example with a sigh of disappointment.  They were moderate men, and hardly ever drank more than their litre of their wine.  Toto smelt of mortar and his fustian clothes and hairy arms were generally splashed with it.  Gigi smelt of glue and sawdust, and there were plentiful marks of his calling on his shiny old cloth trousers and his coarse linen shirt.  Toto’s face was square, stony and impenetrable; Gigi’s was sharp as a bill and alive with curiosity.  Gigi wore a square paper cap; Toto wore a battered felt hat of no shape at all.  On Sundays and holidays they both shaved and turned out in immaculate white shirts, well brushed broadcloth and decent hats, recognizable to each other but not to their employers.