you.'
Asinius Gallo abruptly nodded. 'It might be worth trying,' he said.
'Certainly I can't raise my own. And if they're really good they can be resold at a profit. Sorghum Hackett, I'll finance you.'
SO, WORKING in privacy, the way that the mountain folks like to, it took him a few days before he got a good run. He had to fool around a lot because they used a funny, stunted kind of grain, but finally it came out all right.
'Here, Mr. Gallo,' he called to his backer. 'It's finished.'
'Will it kick?' asked Asinius Gallo cautiously.
Sorghum laughed. 'Like the devil with a porky quill in him, I promise you that much. Best you ever saw.'
'Well,' said Asinius Gallo uncertainly as he entered. Sorghum held up the big jug he'd caught the run in. 'What's that?'
'The white mule,' said Sorghum, a little hurt.
His backer was downright bewildered. 'I expected an animal,' he explained. 'What you've got in there I can't imagine.'
'Oh,' said Sorghum. 'Well, if you don't agree with me, Mr. Gallo, that this is better than any animal you ever tasted I'll make you an animal.'
And he said this because he felt pretty sure that the benighted idolater wouldn't take him up. Sorghum had asked the terrified servants, and they told him that they didn't have anything stronger than the sticky red wine they drank at supper. And that, Sorghum judged by the body, was no more than twenty proof, while this run of his would prove at least a hundred and twenty. He poured a medium slug—four fingers—
for his host, who smelled it cautiously.
'Don't put your eyes over it, Mr. Gallo,' cautioned Sorghum. 'Just drink it right down the way we do in Tennessee.' He filled a glass of his own with a man-sized drink.
'Feliciter,' said Asinius Gallo, which sounded like 'good luck,' to Sorghum.
'Confusion to Tories,' he replied, downing his. His host immediately after swallowed his own shot convulsively. Almost immediately he screamed shrilly and clutched at his throat. Sorghum held a water-pitcher out to him, grinning. The pitcher was empty when he took it back.
'That,' said his host hoarsely, 'was a potion worthy of Livia herself. Are you sure it won't kill me?'
'Sartin,' replied Sorghum, enjoying the backwash of the home-brew.
'That was almost the smoothest I've ever made.'
'Then,' said Asinius Gallo, 'let's have another.'
THE TENNESSEE MAN had a few more runs, each better than the last as his equipment improved and settled, and with Asinius Gallo as his agent he had amassed quite a bit of the coinage of these foreigners.
Altogether things were looking up when a slave appeared with a message.
Sorghum's host read from it: 'The Lady Livia will be pleased to see Sorghum Hackett, the guest of the Senator Asinius Gallo. She believes that there are many mutual interests which it will be profitable to discuss.'
'Right kind of her,' said Sorghum.
'Hah!' groaned his backer. 'You don't know the old hag. Sorghum Hackett, you're as good as dead, and it's no use hoping otherwise. She's always been down on me, but she never dared to strike at me direct because of my family. Now you're going to get it. Oh, I'm sorry, friend.
And I thought I'd kept you a pretty close secret. Well, go on—no use postponing fate.'
Sorghum grinned slowly. 'We'll see,' he said. He picked up two bottles of the latest brew and rammed them into his boot-tops. 'Goodbye, Mr.
Gallo,' he said, entering the sedan-chair that was waiting for him. The bearers let him off at the Augustan Palace and conducted him to a side-entrance. He waited only a moment before the door opened and a cracked voice bade him enter. 'Come in, young man; come in!' it shrilled.
Sorghum closed the door behind him and faced the notorious Livia, mother of the Emperor Tiberius, poisoner supreme and unquestioned ruler of Rome. 'Pleased t'meetcha, ma'am,' he said.
'You're the Hackett they tell me about?' she demanded. He studied her wispy white hair and the bony, hooked nose as he answered: 'I'm the only Hackett in these parts.'
'It's true!' she shrilled. 'You are a magician—your body waves like a flame, and your language is strange, but I can understand it. Everything they said is true!'
'I reckon so, ma'am,' admitted Sorghum.
'Then you're condemned,' she said promptly. 'I won't have any magicians going about in my empire. Can't tax the brutes—they're unfair. You're condemned, young man!'
'To what?' asked the Tennesseean.
'Amphitheater,' she snapped. 'Wild beasts. Take him away, you fools!'
Sorghum's arms were grabbed by two of the biggest, ugliest people he had ever seen in his born days and he was hustled down flights of stairs and hurled into something of a dungeon with other condemned magicians.
'You got in just under the wire,' one of them informed him helpfully.
'We're going to get chased out into the arena in a few minutes.'
'What can I do?' asked Sorghum.
'Don't struggle. Don't shield your throat—let the animals tear it out as soon as possible. That way it's over with at once and you cheat the mob of watching you squirm.'
'I reckon so,' said Sorghum thoughtfully. He remembered his courtesy and the bottles in his boots. 'Have a drink?' he asked, producing them.
The magicians clustered around him like flies around honey.
THE AFTERNOON GAMES were to consist of such little things as a pack of craven magicians and fortune-tellers being killed in a mess by leopards. Consensus favored the leopards; odds were quoted as something like eighty to one against the magicians.
Tiberius waved his hand from the President's box in one end of the colossal amphitheater, and the gate which admitted the beasts opened.
There was a buzz from the audience as the magnificent animals came streaming through like a river of tawny fur.
The emperor waved again, and the public prepared to be amused by the customary sight of unwilling victims being prodded out into the arena by long-handled tridents. But something must have gone wrong, for the craven magicians came striding boldly out, roaring some song or other. At their head was a curiously shimmering figure, who was beating time with two enormous bottles in either hand, both empty.
It roared in a titanic voice, as it sighted the animals: 'Look out, ye hell-fired pussy-cats! I'm a-grapplin'!' The magicians charged in a body to the excited screams of the mob.
Roughly there was one cat to every man, and that was the sensible way that the men went about eliminating the cats. The favorite grip seemed to be the tail—a magician would pick up the leopard and swing it around heftily two or three times, then dash its head to the sand of the arena. The rest would be done with the feet.
In a surprisingly short time the magicians were sitting on the carcasses of the cats and resuming their song.
'Let out the lion!' shrilled Tiberius. 'They can't do this to me!' The second gate opened, and the king of the jungle himself stalked through, his muscles rippling beneath his golden skin, tossing his huge mane.
He sighted the magicians, who weren't paying him any attention at all, and roared savagely.
The shimmering figure looked up in annoyance. 'Another one!' it was heard to declare. The song broke off again as the grim, purposeful body of men went for the lion. He eyed them coldly and roared again. They kept coming. The king of the jungle grew somewhat apprehensive, lashing his tail and crouching as for a spring. The bluff didn't work, he realized a second later, for the men were on him and all over him, gouging his face cruelly and kicking him in the ribs. He tumbled to the sand rather than suffer a broken leg and grunted convulsively as the magicians sat heavily on his flanks and continued their song.
'It was dow-wen in Raid River Vail-lee—' mournfully chanted the leader—he with the empty bottles.
Tiberius stamped his feet and burst into tears of rage. 'My lion!' he wailed. 'They're sitting on my lion!'
The leader dropped his bottles and sauntered absently about the arena.
One of the deep-driven, iron posts of the inside wall caught his eye. He reached out to touch it and—was gone,
