THE NINTH MAN
Only old Count Gervaise Deverti came protesting. It was he whom it had taken the commune three years to smoke out of his perch in Santa Croce, and during that time he sold his right in his castello for four thousand florins and later signed papers which were in my master's possession and which I saw with my own eyes, promising that he would not in any wise help his faithful vassals who fought for him three long years while he had sold and resold them. When no sign was left of Santa Croce, and his vassals came to live in the commonwealth, always he gave himself great airs at the resistance which he, solitary, had made against the town. With the bombast of his race he refused to go forth in the morning, whereupon the men of his own household trussed him up like an old turkey and brought him up squealing and gobbling.
He and a young Count Guido Mazzafini were all that made a disturbance that day. And for Guido it was a greater tragedy. He was a boy of sixteen, and his two brothers and his father had been killed in the fray, and when they led him forth he made resistance and blubbered with rage, and
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