The shores where the four boats put in were swarming with the enemy's explorers, sent to trace the fugitives. Anita was lying a little way off the shore, concealed in a corn-field, her head supported by the Recluse. Leggiero, a valiant major belonging to the island of Maddalena, who had followed the General in South America, and returned to Italy with him, was their only companion. He lay peeping through the stalks, and very soon discovered some of the cursed white curs in search of blood. Cicernachio, Bassi, and nine others, who by our advice had taken a different direction in order to escape the enemy, were all captured, and shot like dogs by the Austrians. When the nine victims were taken, the Austrians compelled nine peasants, by force of blows, to dig nine holes in the sand, after which a discharge from the enemy's picket dispatched the unhappy heroes. The youngest, a son of a Roman tribune, only thirteen years of age, still moved after the fire, but a blow from the butt-end of an Austrian's musket smashed in his skull, and thus brutally ended his young life. Bassi and his brother, Cicernachio, met with the same fate at Bologna. The foreigner and the priest made merry in that hour of slaughter over the purest Italian blood; and the mitred master of Rome remounted his polluted throne, having for a footstool the corpses of his compatriots. Let this cold brutality, this savage butchery of their honest noble-hearted compatriots live in the memory of Italians, and give their consciences no peace while they leave their magnificent city a prey to the foreigner and to the vile priests, who use it as a den of infamy. The Recluse, bearing his precious burden--that dear and faithful wife--wandered sadly, with his companion, Leggiero, through the lagoons of the lower Po, until he had closed her eyes, and wept over her cold corpse tears of desperation. Onward he wandered then, through forests and over mountains, ever pursued by the agents of the Pope and of Austria. Fate, however, spared him, to suffer anew both danger and fatigue, and to reap some triumphs too. The tyrants of Italy again found him upon their tracks--those tracks indelibly stained by them with tears and blood. Ill was it for them that he escaped until the day when they, in turn, took to flight, and, like cowards, left their tables spread for him, while the carpets of their superb palaces bore the imprint of the rough shoes of his Thousand. Meanwhile, however, our tale has brought the Recluse to Venice to witness the liberty for which he had sighed so much. It was then that the lagunes, covered with gondolas, saluted the red shirt as the token of national redemption, and sad memories faded in the light of the joy and freedom of that Queen of the Adriatic. CHAPTER LII. THE SPY IN VENICE