"Give them pikes and arquebuses, if you will; but nothing more. The
place we are bound for is well stocked with armour--but even that may not
be required."

"May not be required?" echoed the more and more astonished swashbuckler.
Were they to be paid on so lordly a scale, clothed and fed, to induce
them upon a business that might carry no fighting with it? Surely he had
never sold himself into a more likely or promising service, and that
night he dreamt in his sleep that he was become a gentleman's steward,
and that at his heels marched an endless company of lacqueys in
flamboyant liveries. On the morrow he awoke to the persuasion that at
last, of a truth, was his fortune made, and that hereafter there would be
no more pike­trailing for his war-worn old arms.

Conscientiously he set about enrolling the company, for, in his way, this
Ercole Fortemani was a conscientious man--boisterous and unruly if you
will; a rogue, in his way, with scant respect for property; not above
cogging dice or even filching a purse upon occasion when hard driven by
necessity--for all that he was gently born and had held honourable
employment; a drunkard by long habit, and a swaggering brawler upon the
merest provocation. But for all that, riotous and dishonest though he
might be in the general commerce of life, yet to the hand that hired him
he strove--not always successfully, perhaps, but, at least, always
earnestly--to be loyal.




CHAPTER IX