To return to our trooper, breathing his horse and probably smacking his lips over the prospect of the cheer with which his blood-spotted loot would provide him for the next month or so. Looking around in the early dusk, he noticed a boy working desultorily in the fields, and, while his horse rested, he studied him. There was something in the way in which he carried his head, and the set of his chin and jaw, which sounded a sympathetic echo in the trooper’s breast. This was no common peasant, he told himself, and called out to the boy to come over and speak to him. Nothing loath, the youth obeyed, and the upshot of this conversation was that the boy elected to take the trooper’s advice and follow him. The trooper, one imagines, must have been in the service of Facino Cane, a grizzled, deaf old soldier with a high reputation, as reputations went in those days, and it did not take the new recruit long to show his worth. Even when he was still young, Cane seems to have recognized in him an equal if not a superior, and refused flatly to promote him, swearing that if he was given one step he would take all the rest for himself. Francesco Borsone, better known as Carmagnola, retired into himself, and bided his time. Cane was great, and with Cane there was always profitable employment in plenty. So he decided to remain where he was; but if Facino Cane continued to behave as he had been doing of late, it was not likely that he would last for very long, and in the happy and quite possible event of his being assassinated before long Carmagnola would take his place. There would be no one, he felt sure, who would wish to oppose him, and if there were, he thought he knew how to overcome their opposition. Cane had a splendid force under him—and they would need a leader, to be of any use to themselves. They would choose him for themselves. One can almost hear him saying to himself, as he leaves the chief’s presence and looks back at the door, “Eh! chì va piano va sano—chì va sano va lontano!” (“Who goes slowly goes safely—who goes safely goes far!”)