“The government!” exclaimed Toto contemptuously, from his hiding-place.  “May an apoplexy seize it!  Do you take me for a spy?  I am a Christian.”

“I begin to think he is, sir,” put in Masin, knocking the ash from his pipe.

“I think so, too,” said Malipieri.  “Throw away that iron, Masin.  He shall show himself, at all events, and if we like his face we can talk to him here.”

Masin dropped the drill with a clang.  Toto’s hairy hand appeared, grasping the golden wrist of the statue, as he raised himself to approach the hole.

“He is a mason, as he says,” said Masin, catching sight of the rough fingers.

“Did you take me for a coachman?” enquired Toto, thrusting his shaggy head forward cautiously, and looking up through the aperture.

“Before you come up here,” Malipieri answered, “tell me how you got in.”

“You seem to know so much about the overflow shaft that I should think you might have guessed.  If you do not believe that I came that way, look at my clothes!”

He now crawled upon the body of the statue, and Malipieri saw that he was covered with half-dried mud and ooze.

“You got through some old drain, I suppose, and found your way up.”

“It seems so,” answered Toto, shaking his shoulders, as if he were stiff.

“Are you going to let him go free, sir?” asked Masin, standing ready.  “If you do, he will be down the shaft, before you can catch him.  These men know their way underground like moles.”

“Moles, yourselves!” answered Toto in a growl, putting his head up above the level of the vault.

Masin measured him with his eye, and saw that he was a strong man, probably much more active than he looked in his heavy, mud-plastered clothes.

“Get up here,” said Malipieri.

Toto obeyed, and in a moment he sat on the edge of the hole, his legs dangling down into it.

“Not so bad,” he said, settling himself with a grunt of satisfaction.

“I like you, Master Toto,” said Malipieri.  “You might have thought that we really meant to kill you, but you did not seem much frightened.”

“There is no woman in the affair,” answered Toto.  “Why should you kill me?  And I can help you.”

“How am I to know that you will?” asked Malipieri.

“I am a man of honour,” Toto replied, turning his stony face to the light of the lanterns.

“I have not a doubt of it, my friend,” returned Malipieri, without conviction.  “Just now, the only help I need of you, is that you should hold your tongue.  How can I be sure that you will do that?  Does any one else know the way in through the drain?”

“No.  I only found it to-night.  If there is a day’s rain in the mountains, and the Tiber rises even a little, nobody can pass through it.  The lower part is barely above the level of the river now.”

“How did you guess that you could get here by that way?”