The gallant Ferrabraccio, hero of a hundred strenuous
battles, had gone to the ignoble doom which half in jest he had
prophesied himself. His horse had played him false at the outset of the
charge, and taking fright it had veered aside despite his efforts to
control it, until, losing its foothold, man and beast had gone hurtling
over the cliff. Amerini, Fanfulla had seen slain, whilst the remaining
two, being both unhorsed, would doubtless be the prisoners of Masuccio.
Some three miles beyond Sant' Angelo, Fanfulla's weary horse splashed
across a ford of the Metauro, and thus, towards the second hour of night,
they gained the territory of Urbino, where for the time they might hold
themselves safe from all pursuit.
CHAPTER III
SACKCLOTH AND MOTLEY
The fool and the friar had fallen a-quarrelling, and--to the shame of the
friar and the glory of the fool be it spoken--their subject of contention
was a woman. Now the friar, finding himself no match for the fool in
words, and being as broad and stout of girth and limb as the other was
puny and misshapen, he had plucked off his sandal that with it he might
drive the full force of his arguments through the jester's skull. At
that the fool, being a very coward, had fled incontinently through the
trees.
Running, like the fool he was, with his head turned to learn whether the
good father followed him, he never saw the figure that lay half-hidden in
the bracken, and might never have guessed its presence but that tripping
over it he shot forward, with a tinkle of bells, on to his crooked nose.
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