Just outside of Vediamnum was, as Tanno had related, the village idiot,
guarding his flock of goats. He mowed and gibbered at us and then spoke
some intelligible words, as he occasionally did.
"I know you, Hedulio," he called. "You can't hide yourself under that hat
nor inside that raincloak. I know you, Hedulio. But nobody but an idiot
would ever recognize you inside that rig and with all this escort. I know
you, you aren't Vedius Vindex, you aren't Satronius Sabinus. You're
Andivius Hedulio. I know you. But nobody else will guess who you are.
Nobody else around here is an idiot!"
Again, as with Tanno's utterance when we were leaving my villa, the words
fell on my ears but did not penetrate to my thinking consciousness. Had I
noted what I heard, had I thought instantaneously of what the idiot's
words really signified, I might even then have saved myself.
We plodded on, a long cavalcade of horsemen and bevy of men afoot,
convoying a shut litter and a closed travelling carriage.
Round the turn of the road, after passing the idiot and his goats, with
the brawling stream of the Bran Brook, now swollen to a respectable little
river, on our left, with the wooded hills rising on our right, we entered
the long, narrow winding single street of Vediamnum, a paved lane along
the close-crowded tall stone houses built against the hillside on the
northeast, with the stream along it to the southwest, and houses wedged
between the street and the stream, brokenly, for about half of its length,
with open intervals between.
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