The broad head was buried in the naked breast of the victim, and with one sob, one shudder, the spirit was released from the tortured clay. Had a thunderbolt fallen among the cohort, the men could not have been more stunned—more astounded. Before they had sufficiently recovered from their shock to cast a missile at him, much less to start forth in pursuit, he was half way toward his own camp in safety; and ere long a prolonged burst, again and again reiterated, of joyous acclamations, told to the consular camp that the traitors knew and appreciated the strange and dauntless daring of their almost ubiquitous leader. An hour afterward that leader was alone, in his tent, stretched on his couch, sleeping. But oh! that sleep—not gentle slumber, not nature’s soft nurse—but nature’s horrible convulsion! The eyes wide open, glaring, dilated in their sockets as of a strangled man—the brow beaded with black sweat drops—the teeth grinded together—the white lips muttering words too horrible to be recorded—the talon-like fingers clutching at vacancy. It was too horrible to last. With a wild cry, "Lucia! Ha! Lucia! Fury! Avenger! Fiend!" he started to his feet, and glared around him with a bewildered eye, as if expecting to behold some ghastly supernatural visitant. At length, he said, with a shudder—which he could not repress, "It was a dream! A dream—but ye Gods! what a dream! I will sleep no more—’till to-morrow. To-morrow," he repeated in a doubtful and enquiring tone, "to-morrow. If I should fall to-morrow, and such dreams come in that sleep which hath no waking, those dreams should be reality—that reality should be—HELL! I know not—I begin to doubt some things, which of yore I held certain! What if there should be Gods! avenging, everlasting torturers! If there should be a HELL! Ha! ha!" he laughed wildly and almost frantically. "Ha! ha! what matters it? Methinks this is a hell already!" and with the words he struck his hand heavily on his broad breast, and relapsed into gloomy and sullen meditation. That night he slept no more, but strode backward and forward hour after hour, gnawing his nether lip till the blood streamed from the wounds inflicted by his unconscious teeth. What awful and mysterious retribution might await him in the land of spirits, it is not for mortals to premise; but in this at least did he speak truth that night—conscience and crime may kindle in the human heart a Hell, which nothing can extinguish, so long as the soul live identical self-knowing, self-tormenting. CHAPTER XX. THE FIELD OF PISTORIA. Make all our trumpets speak; give them all breath, Those clamorous harbingers of blood and death. MACBETH. The first faint streaks of day were scarcely visible in the east, when Catiline, glad to escape the horrors which he had endured through the dark solitude of the night watches, issued from his tent, armed at all points, and every inch a captain.