Some few days after his interview with di Lippo, the Captain Guido Moratti rode his horse across the old Roman bridge which at that time spanned the Aulella, and directed his way towards the castle of Pieve, whose outlines rose before him, cresting an eminence about a league from the bridge. The captain was travelling as a person of some quality, the better to carry out a plan he had formed for gaining admission to Pieve, and a lackey rode behind him holding his valise. He had hired horse and man in Florence, and the servant was an honest fellow enough, in complete ignorance of his master's character and profession. Both the captain and his man bore the appearance of long travel, and in truth they had journeyed with a free rein; and now that a stormy night was setting in, they were not a little anxious to reach their point. The snow was falling in soft flakes, and the landscape was grey with the driving mist, through which the outlines of the castle loomed large and shadowy, more like a fantastic creation in cloudland than the work of human hands. As the captain pulled down the lapels of his cap to ward off the drift which was coming straight in his face, the bright flare of a beacon fire shone from a tower of the castle, and the rays from it stretched in broad orange bands athwart the rolling mist, which threatened, together with the increasing darkness, to extinguish all the view that was left, and make the league to Pieve a road of suffering. With the flash of the fire a weird, sustained howl came to the travellers in an eerie cadence; and as the fearsome call died away, it was picked up by an answering cry from behind, then another and yet another. There could be no mistaking these signals; they meant pressing and immediate danger. "Wolves!" shouted Moratti; and turning to his knave: "Gallop, Tito!--else our bones will be picked clean by morning. Gallop!"