Marsyas saluted him, and the rabbi disappeared. A figure in armor stepped up to the place where Eleazar had stood. He was helmeted and greaved and had a line of purple about the hem of his short tunic. He applied for a loan and yielded as indorsement the favor of Caesar and the family name of Aulus. Marsyas withdrew hastily into the overhanging shadow of the grating, received the officer's note, counted out the gold and drew in a free breath when another stepped into his place. It was Vitellius' legionary. "Am I run to earth?" Marsyas asked himself. At the end of the first watch that night he prepared to follow Eleazar's suggestion, if only to discover what to expect. That he was not filled with confidence nor resigned to suffer what might befall him was evident by his slipping a knife into his belt when he made himself ready. He went out into the unlighted street and looked about him for Eleazar. The tall figure of the rabbi emerged from the darkness a moment after Marsyas appeared and approached the young man. "Have no fear," the rabbi said. "We are common victims of the same unjust suspicion; let us not be suspicious of each other." "Thy words are fair, Rabbi, but I do not know thee. Whom I most trusted hath failed me of late; it must follow then that I am not sure of strangers. Tell me first thy business with me." "I am Eleazar, the rabbi, who sat with Saul in the college that day when Joel, the Levite, came with news of Stephen of Galilee." "I know that; also that thou knowest that Saul oppresses me. Thou art a rabbi and zealous for the Law. Art thou sent for me on Saul's mission?" "No, brother." "Or the proconsul's?" "I know nothing of the proconsul; I am here, driven from Jerusalem by Saul who charged me with apostasy because I would not aid him in his oppression." For a moment Marsyas was dumb with amazement. "He is mad!" he cried when speech came to him. "Is it madness when he persecutes others, but villainy when he oppresses thee?" Eleazar demanded. "I pray thy pardon," Marsyas said quickly, "if I seem to miscall his work. It might follow in reason that he should accuse me, but thou--thou a rabbi, accepted before the Law and clean-skirted before all Judea--that he should accuse thee of apostasy seems to be the work of no sane man." "But it is! He layeth plans keen as Joshua's who warred under God's banner, and he striketh with the strength of an army. Unless he is stayed he will devastate to the end!" Marsyas came close and laid a hand on the rabbi's shoulder. "What of Stephen?" he asked with stiffened lips. "How did it come to pass?" For a moment there was silence, and then the rabbi drew up and shook himself. "It will not help thee, young brother," he said, with an impatience which was only fortification against feeling. "It is ill enough to take a blasphemer and deliver him up to punishment; ask no more, for it wrenches me to think of it."