Before sunset we were discovered and unearthed by some of the infantry whose trappings were unknown to us. We found out later that they belonged to the newly-enlisted Viarii, cohorts created from picked young men judged agile, alert, intelligent and loyal, to act as a special road-constabulary to deal with robbers and especially with the bands obeying the King of the Highwaymen and with him. Our captors did not treat us roughly, though they bound our hands behind us effectually. They laughed over our device for escaping the arrows and commented on our cleverness. Our amulet-bags they ignored, being more interested in our brand-marks and scourge-scars. Their sergeant asked us where we were from. "Do you think it likely," Agathemer laughed, "that we would tell you; can't you read on our backs that, wherever we came from it is the last place on earth we want to go back to?" The sergeant laughed genially. "Mark 'em 'unidentified'," he ordered. They clothed us in tunics innocent of any blood-stains, but which, we felt sure, had been taken from the corpses of our late associates. "Put 'em with the rest," the sergeant ordered. With the rest, some three hundred survivors out of more than three thousand tumultuaries, we were herded inside a convoy of constabulary and marched in the dusk and dark to our former camp at Rubrae. There we were liberally fed on what was, apparently, the leavings from the entertainment afforded the mutineers there on their down-march. Next morning we were lined up and inspected by a superior officer with two orderlies and two secretaries. As he passed down the rank in which Agathemer and I stood he eyed us keenly. After a time he returned and said: "These two rascals are trying to keep together. Separate them!" Thereafter I saw no more of Agathemer for over four years. I do not wish to dwell on my wretchedness, after we were parted. Alone among riffraff, I was very miserable. I mourned for the faithful fellow and knew he mourned for me. I longed for him as keenly as if he had been my twin-brother. I and my fellows were marched on under close convoy, up the Flaminian Highway and the batch among which I was, was cast into the _ergastulum_ at Nuceria. There I passed a miserable winter. Our prison was not unlike the _ergastulum_ at Placentia; ill-designed, damp, cold, filthy, swarming with vermin and crowded with wretches like myself. I was despondent in my loneliness and found harder to bear my shiverings, my fitful half-sleep in my foul infested bunk, the horrible food, the grinding labor, the stripes and blows and insults of the guards and overseers and the jeers of my inhuman fellow-sufferers. This time I had no chance of becoming cook's- helper or of easing my circumstances in any other manner. I spent the entire winter haggard for sleep, underclad, underfed, overworked, shivering, beaten and abused.