from his cliff-nest, made of oak leaves and olive boughs, on to the water-fowls of the pools, until the daring and the frequency of his captures had made his name a household word that had rung far and wide beyond the confines of Maremma.
Therefore Maremma had been proud of him; proud in a fierce, defiant way that had given him many a nameless ally amidst the scattered gentry of all that wild and lonesome country, and even here in old grave Grosseto, a score of miles away from the foaming waters of the Fiora, people had felt the same pride in him, and now, as the trot of the horses and the clangour of weapons died away into silence, there were regret and a smothered rage in the populace to think that their hero should have been brought through their streets with his feet tied under the belly of his horse, to go to the galleys of Gorgona or the salt mines of Sardinia, and be no more seen of men, although for years and years to come the story of his exploits would be told from mouth to mouth wherever a group of woodmen sat about the forest fires at night, or a couple of fishermen wiled the becalmed day away with talk, or in the winter evenings in farmhouses far
