In Maremma/Volume 3/Chapter 58
CHAPTER LVIII.
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N the gloom of the great cork forests of Sardinia Daniello Villamagna found Saturnino Mastarna. They spoke together long in the leafy solitudes of the mountain-side beside the camp-fire lit by the Mastarna men.
In these primeval woods, in these wild untrodden recesses of the almost barbaric isle, the galley-slave was safer than kings are on their thrones. He was once more happy; he sent at pleasure a ball from his rifle down the azure depths of the air; he drank deep and drank often; he had a long fine dagger in his belt; he had danger, plunder, bloodshed, the three things that made the daily bread that he had pined for and hungered for as the first food of life; he felt once more to have hold on his manhood which they had done all they knew to chain down and cudgel out of him. He could lean against the ledge of granite and look down through three thousand feet of air and foliage on to the blue sea below, and lift his gun to his shoulder, and deal death to whatever distant thing he saw; that was to live once more.
The Sicilian said to him:
'Either you or I
And he made answer:
'The Mastarna cure their own wounds,'
For the first time in all his lawless and outlawed life, a duty, that he deemed the one sacred, supreme duty of life, rose up before him and claimed him. To pity he might have been deaf; to shame, indifferent; to the wrath of earth or heaven, callous; to the cry of woman or child, adamant; but when vengeance called aloud to him, he dared not refuse to answer. It was the only invocation before which the men of the blood of the Etruscan Mastarna never ventured to be deaf, or to dally on their road.