'That is quite impossible!' Carmagnola was emphatic. As Facino's lieutenant, it fell to his duty to see that the cordon was properly maintained. 'Yet what is the alternative,' wondered Bellarion, 'unless they are eating one another?' Carmagnola's blue eyes flashed upon him almost malevolently for this further reflection upon his vigilance. 'You set me riddles,' he said disdainfully. 'And you're not good at riddles, Francesco,' drawled Bellarion, meeting malice with malice. 'I should have remembered it.' Carmagnola heaved himself up. 'Now, by the Bones of God, what do you mean?' The ears of the ill-humoured Facino had caught a distant sound. 'Quiet, you bellowing calf!' he snapped. 'Listen! Listen! Who comes at that breakneck speed?' It was a hot, breathless night of July, and the windows stood wide to invite a cooling draught. As the four men, so bidden, grew attentive, they caught from the distance the beat of galloping hooves. 'It's not from Alessandria,' said Koenigshofen. 'No, no,' grunted Facino, and thereafter they listened in silence. There was no reason for it save such colour as men's imaginings will give a sound breaking the deathly stillness of a hot dark night, yet each conceived and perhaps intercommunicated a feeling that these hooves approaching so rapidly were harbingers of portents. Carmagnola went to the door as two riders clattered down the village street, and, seeing the tall figure silhouetted against the light from within, they slackened pace. 'The Lord Facino Cane of Biandrate? Where is he quartered?' 'Here!' roared Carmagnola, and at the single word the horses were pulled up with a rasping of hooves that struck fire from the ground. CHAPTER XII VISCONTI FAITH If Facino Cane's eyes grew wide in astonishment to see his countess ushered into that mean chamber by Carmagnola, wider still did they grow to behold the man who accompanied her and to consider their inexplicable conjunction. For this man was Giovanni Pusterla of Venegono, cousin to that Pusterla who had been castellan of Monza, and who by Gian Maria's orders had procured the assassination of Gian Maria's mother. The rest is a matter of history upon which I have already touched. In a vain attempt to mask his own matricide, to make the crime appear as the work of another, Gian Maria had seized the unfortunate castellan who had served his evil will too faithfully and charging him with the crime caused him barbarously and without trial to be done to death. Thereafter, because he perceived that this did not suffice to turn the public mind from the conviction of his own horrible guilt, Gian Maria had vowed the extermination of the Pusterla family, as a blood-offering to the manes of his murdered mother. It was a Pusterla whom he had hunted with his dogs into the arms of Bellarion in the meadows of Abbiategrasso, and that was the fifth innocent member of the family whom he had done to death in satisfaction of his abominable vow.