A great groan arose from the audience and then a cheer as someone shouted: 'Caesar is dead!'
A hope flashed to the breast of von Harben. He turned and grabbed Mallius Lepus by the arm. 'Caesar is dead,' he whispered. 'Now is our chance.'
'What do you mean?' demanded Mallius Lepus.
'In the confusion we can escape. We can hide in the city and at night we can take Favonia with us and go away.'
'Where?' asked Mallius Lepus.
'God! I do not know,' exclaimed von Harben, 'but anywhere would be better than here, for Fulvus Fupus is Caesar and if we do not save Favonia tonight, it will be too late.'
'You are right,' said Mallius Lepus.
'Pass the word to the others,' said von Harben. 'The more there are who try to escape the better chance there will be for some of us to succeed.'
The legionaries and their officers as well as the vast multitude could attend only upon what was happening in the logo of Caesar. So few of them had seen what really occurred there that as yet there had been no pursuit of Gabula.
Mallius Lepus turned to the other prisoners. 'The gods have been good to us,' he cried. 'Caesar is dead and in the confusion we can escape. Come!'
As Mallius Lepus started on a run toward the gateway that led to the cells beneath the Colosseum, the shouting prisoners fell in behind him. Only those of the professional gladiators who were freemen held aloof, but they made no effort to stop them.
'Good luck!' shouted Claudius Taurus, as von Harben passed him. 'Now if someone would kill Fulvus Fupus we might have a Caesar who is a Caesar.'
The sudden rush of the escaping prisoners so confused and upset the few guards beneath the Colosseum that they were easily overpowered and a moment later the prisoners found themselves in the streets of Castrum Mare.
'Where now?' cried one.
'We must scatter,' said Mallius Lepus. 'Each man for himself.'
'We shall stick together, Mallius Lepus,' said von Harben.
'To the end,' replied the Roman.
'And here is Gabula,' said von Harben, as the Negro joined them. 'He shall come with us.'
'We cannot desert the brave Gabula,' said Mallius Lepus, 'but the first thing for us to do is to find a hiding- place.'
'There is a low wall across the avenue,' said von Harben, 'and there are trees beyond it.'
'Come, then,' said Mallius Lepus. 'It is as good for now as any other place.'
The three men hurried across the avenue and scaled the low wall, finding themselves in a garden so overgrown with weeds and underbrush that they at once assumed that it was deserted. Creeping through the weeds and forcing their way through the underbrush, they came to the rear of a house. A broken door, hanging by one hinge, windows from which the wooden blinds had fallen, an accumulation of rubbish upon the threshold marked the dilapidated structure as a deserted house.
'Perhaps this is just the place for us to hide until night,' said von Harben.
'Its proximity to the Colosseum is its greatest advantage,' said Mallius Lepus, 'for they will be sure to believe that we have rushed as far from our dungeon as we could. Let us go in and investigate. We must be sure that the place is uninhabited.'
The rear room, which had been the kitchen, had a crumbling brick oven in one corner, a bench and a dilapidated table. Crossing the kitchen, they entered an apartment beyond and saw that these two rooms constituted all that there was to the house. The front room was large and as the blinds at the windows facing the avenue had not fallen, it was dark within it. In one corner they saw a ladder reaching to a trap-door in the ceiling, which evidently led to the roof of the building, and two or three feet below the ceiling and running entirely across the end of the room where the ladder arose was a false ceiling, which formed a tiny loft just below the roof-beams, a place utilized by former tenants as a storage room. A more careful examination of the room revealed nothing more than a pile of filthy rags against one wall, the remains perhaps of some homeless beggar's bed.
'It could not have been better,' said Mallius Lepus, 'if this had been built for us. Why, we have three exits if we are hard pressed—one into the back garden, one into the avenue in front, and the third to the roof.'
'We can remain in safety, then,' said von Harben, 'until after dark, when it should be easy to make our way unseen through the dark streets to the home of Septimus Favonius.'
Chapter Twenty-Two
EAST along the Via Mare from Castra Sanguinarius marched five thousand men. The white plumes of the Waziri nodded at the back of Tarzan. Stalwart legionaries followed Maxim us Praeclarus, while the warriors of the outer villages brought up the rear.
Sweating slaves dragged catapults, ballistae, testudones, huge battering-rams, and other ancient engines of war. There were scaling ladders and wall hooks and devices for throwing fire balls into the defenses of an enemy. The heavy engines had delayed the march and Tarzan had chafed at the delay, but he had to listen to Maximus Praeclarus and Cassius Hasta and Caecilius Metellus, all of whom had assured him that the fort, which defended the only road to Castrum Mare, could not be taken by assault without the aid of these mechanical engines of war.
Along the hot and dusty Via Mare the Waziri swung, chanting the war-songs of their people. The hardened legionaries, their heavy helmets dangling against their breasts from cords that passed about their necks, their packs on forked sticks across their shoulders, their great oblong shields hanging in their leather covers at their backs, cursed and grumbled as become veterans, while the warriors from the outer villages laughed and sang and chattered as might a party of picnickers.
As they approached the fort with its moat and embankment and palisade and towers, slaves were bearing the body of Valid us Augustus to his palace within the city, and Fulvus Fupus, surrounded by fawning sycophants, was proclaiming himself Caesar, though he trembled inwardly in contemplation of what fate might lie before him— for though he was a fool be knew that he was not popular and that many a noble patrician with a strong following had a better right to the imperial purple than he.
Throughout the city of Castrum Mare legionaries searched for the escaped prisoners and especially for the slave who had struck down Validus Augustus, though they were handicapped by the fact that no one had recognized Gabula, for there were few in the city and certainly none in the entourage of Caesar who was familiar with the face of the black from distant Urambi.
A few of the thieves and five or six gladiators, who were condemned felons and not freemen, had clung together in the break for freedom and presently they found themselves in hiding in a low part of the city, in a den where wine could be procured and where there were other forms of entertainment for people of their class.
'What sort of a Caesar will this Fulvus Fupus make?' asked one.
'He will be worse than Validus Augustus,' said another. 'I have seen him in the Baths where I once worked. He is vain and dull and ignorant; even the patricians hate him.'
'They say he is going to marry the daughter of Septimus Favonius.'
'I saw her in the Colosseum today,' said another. 'I know her well by sight, for she used to come to the shop of my father and make purchases before I was sent to the dungeons.'
'Have you ever been to the house of Septimus Favonius?' asked another.
'Yes, I have,' said the youth. 'Twice I took goods there for her inspection, going through the forecourt and into the inner garden. I know the place well.'
'If one like her should happen to fall into the hands of a few poor convicts they might win their freedom and a great ransom,' suggested a low-browed fellow with evil, cunning eyes.
'And be drawn asunder by wild oxen for their pains.'
'We must die anyway if we are caught.'
'It is a good plan.'
