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He thought that perhaps Ruffo, a man who made wooden shoes, and hoops for casks, and shaped chestnut poles for vines, might tell him more than had been told to old Trizio; might at least be able to suggest from what quarter and in what shape this calamity was rising, to burst over their valley as a hailstorm broods above, then breaks, on helpless fields and defenceless gardens, beating down without warning the birds and the blossoms of spring.
"Yes, it is mine," answered Adone very slowly. "It is mine here, and it was once ours from source to sea." "Aye, it is ours!" said old Trizio Cambi mistaking him. He was a man once tall, but now bent nearly double; he had a harsh, wrinkled face, brown as a hazel nut, and he was nearly a skeleton; but he had eyes which were still fine and still had some fire in them.
The speaker was an old man of eighty odd years, a native of Ruscino, one Patrizio Cambi, who was not yet too feeble to cut the rushes and osiers, and maintained a widowed daughter and her young children by that means. "What tale?" said Adone, unwilling to be roused from his own dark thoughts. "What tale, Trizio?" "That they are going to meddle with the river," answered the old man.
Cannot you tell them this, and make them see?" The old man shook his white head. "They would never believe. It is too hard for them. Where the river runs, there it will always be. So they think." "They are dolts, they are mules, they are swine!" said Adone. "Nay, may the poor beasts forgive me! The beasts cannot help themselves, but men can if they choose." "Humph!" said Trizio doubtfully.
"Tell them," he said to old Trizio: "tell them their wells will run dry; their fish will rot on the dry bed of what was once the river; their canes, their reeds and rushes, their osiers, will all fail them; when they shall go out into their fields nothing which they sow or plant will grow, because the land will be cracked and parched; there will be no longer the runlets and rivulets to water the soil; birds will die of thirst, and thousands of little river creatures will be putrid carcasses in the sun; for the Edera, which is life and joy and health to this part of the country, will be carried far away, imprisoned in brick walls, drawn under ground, forced to labour like a slave, put to vile uses, soiled and degraded.
"What can we do?" said Trizio, wiping the dew off his sickle. "Who knows aught of us? Who cares? If the rich folks want the river they will take it, curse them!" Adone did not answer. He knew that it was so, all over the earth. "We shall know no more than birds tangled in a net," said Trizio. "They will come and work their will." Adone rose up out of the grass. "I will go and see Ruffo," he said.
He was glad to do something. "Ruffo knows no more than that," said Trizio angrily. "The driver of the horses knew no more." Adone paid him no need, but began to push his way through the thick network of the interlaced heather.
In his youth he had been a Garibaldino. "It is ours," repeated Trizio. "At least if anything belongs to poor folks. What say you, Adone?" "Much belongs to the poor, but others take it from them," said Adone. "You have seen a hawk take a sparrow, Trizio. The poor count no more than the sparrows." "But the water is the gift of God," said the old man. Adone did not answer.
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