"
The great fellow turned on him in a sudden anger.
"Why that astonishment?" he blazed. "I tell you my name is both noble
and formidable, and you shall find me as formidable as I am noble.
Diavolo! Seems it incredible?"
"Said I so?" protested Gonzaga.
"You had been dead by now if you had, Messer Gonzaga. But you thought
so, and I may take leave to show you how bold a man it needs to think so
without suffering."
Ruffled as a turkey-cock, wounded in his pride and in his vanity, Ercole
hastened to enlighten Gonzaga on his personality.
"Learn, sir," he announced, "that I am Captain Ercole Fortemani. I held
that rank in the army of the Pope. I have served the Pisans and the
noble Baglioni of Perugia with honour and distinction. I have commanded
a hundred lances of Gianinoni's famous free-company. I have fought with
the French against the Spaniards, and with the Spaniards against the
French, and I have served the Borgia, who is plotting against both. I
have trailed a pike in the emperor's following, and I have held the rank
of captain, too, in the army of the King of Naples. Now, young sir, you
have learned something of me, and if my name is not written in letters of
fire from one end of Italy to the other, it is--Body of God!--because the
hands that hired me to the work garnered the glory of my deeds."
"A noble record," said Gonzaga, who had credulously absorbed that
catalogue of lies, "a very noble record."
"Not so," the other contradicted, for the lust of contradiction that was
a part of him.
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