shouldering big square paving stones from a neighbouring dump, where the
wagons stood, and fitting them carefully into the pavement, and--and
otherwise enjoying their rest. Caius Sulpicius and his orderly officer
stood watching them. The orderly officer leant on his stick. Caius had a
piece of bread in one hand and a wedge of cheese in the other. His
forearm was black with grubbing amongst the paving stones.

"When the Tenth Legion gets a rest without some old brass helmet helping
us to spend it," he said with his mouth full, "I'll begin to think the
end of the war is coming."

"Why didn't it strike old Brassribs to make the inhabitants do a job of
work occasionally?" he added presently. "Now, in the old general's
time--"

Far down on the edge of the forest, across two or three miles of rolling
hills, a patch of orange earth, newly turned, caught the orderly
officer's eye. One of the inhabitants was doing a job of work there,
anyway. Two days ago he had passed that way in a stroll after parade. A
mallet-headed man, his bare arm-muscles orange with mud, was piling up
an earthen embankment on the hill-side. A patch of the forest had been
allowed to him. In two years he had cut out the trees and undergrowth.
He was now trying to make his patch of hill-side level. The orange mud
bank of his terrace had been the labour of twelve months, and there was
a year's work in it yet. He had scarcely hoped to possess even a rood of
land, and now he had two acres. He was going to use every inch of it.
That was Tamar the Hammerhead's life's work.

The Tenth Legion did get its rest. Caius lay beneath a moss-covered,
tilted gravestone--long, long forgotten--not so far from the great road.