"No, quite otherwise!" I retorted. "My property does not touch Vedian or Satronian land anywhere, and Ducconius has barely half a mile of boundary line along the Satronian domain. There are six other estates, the largest half as big as mine, the smallest not much bigger than the largest of my tenant-farms; three are on one side of me and three on the other. You will meet the proprietors at dinner, as I told you. They should be here now."
"Goggling country bumpkins?" he conjectured.
"Not a bit like that," I countered, "though you would scarcely call them cultured. There is no art connoisseur among them. They care little for books, but they are educated gentlemen and can talk of other subjects besides vine-growing and cattle breeding. They have all been to Rome, the Ducconians are the only stay-at-home, stick-in-the-mud family in this valley. You will find all your fellow-diners keenly interested in anything you can tell them about the latest fashions and the latest gossip from Rome. They think and talk of the doings of Rome's fast set much more than you do."
"They have nothing to do with the feud?" he queried.
"Three of them," I explained, "are on the Vedian side, three on the Satronian side, though they are always polite to each other. But it is a frigid politeness and I was anticipating the dinner tonight as a frightful trial. I fancy your presence will ensure its passing off comfortably. Entedius Hirnio will be here, too. His estates are beyond Vediamnum and he has never taken sides in the feud any more than Ducconius or my family."
"Do you ever see Ducconius?" he asked.
"Oh, never," said I, "we take care never to recognize each other, I assure you. We cannot help meeting occasionally, but I never see him and he never sees me. We meet mostly on the road. The lower part of this valley-road where he overtook you is as much his right-of-way as mine, up to where the road forks and is crossed by the Bran Brook. You can see the bridge from here."
Tanno shaded his eyes with his hand.
"That is all his land over there, on the other side of the Bran Brook," I continued. "Further up the valley the brook has three feeders. The Flour rises back of my land on the Vedian estate. The Chaff brook is all mine and the Bran rises in his woodlands."
"Will he appeal the case or reopen it now your uncle is dead?" Tanno queried.
"There is no possibility of appeal," I said, "or of reopening. The case is closed and I have won it forever. And all thanks to Agathemer. But for Agathemer, Ducconius would have won the final hearing as he had won all the intermediate appeals. His defeat after so many victories has embittered him more than if we had won every time and he hates me worse than ever.
"The only unpleasant feature for me is that the tenant of the farm so long in dispute cannot be ousted. He was heart and soul with Ducconius all through the period of the suit. His daughter is married to one of Ducconius' tenants and his younger son has taken one of Ducconius' farms since three of his tenant-families died off year before, last with the plague. This makes old Chryseros Philargyrus by no means a pleasant tenant for me."
"Old Love-Gold Love-Silver," Tanno commented, "is that a nickname or is it really his name?"
"Really his name," I affirmed. "His mother was so extravagant and wasteful that his father named him Chryseros Philargyrus as a sort of antidote incantation, in the hope that it might prove a good omen of his disposition and predispose him to parsimony. He certainly has turned out sufficiently close-fisted to justify the choice."
"I don't understand your talk about tenantry," said Tanno. "Do you mean you cannot change a bailiff on a farm which you have won incontestably on final appeal in a suit at law?"
"He is no bailiff," I answered him. "He is a free man, just as much as you or I. Sabinum is not like Latium or Etruria or Campania, where the free tenantry has vanished, or like Bruttium or Spain, where there never was any free tenantry. The free tenantry have survived in Sabinum more completely than in any part of the world. I have only one bailiff here and he manages only the villa-farm with a very moderate gang of slaves under him. I do not own any more slaves on my estate. The slaves on the farms are all owned by my tenants and there are eight farms besides the villa- farm; counting Chryseros, there are nine tenant farmers. Each owns slaves enough to work his farms. All the estates about here are managed in that way: Aemilian, Vedian, Satronian, Entedian and all the rest, big or little. We are rather proud of the system and very proud of our tenants."
"It must be a fine system," Tanno sneered. "I have been wondering what kept you away from Rome. I suppose it has been the beautifully smooth and marvellously easy working of your farm-tenant system."
"It works just as well as one slave-gang under one bailiff, if not better," I retorted, hotly.
"Oh, yes," Tanno drawled, "it works just as well as one slave-gang under one bailiff. That is why you have not had to inspect your estates in Bruttium, why you have not visited Bruttium at all, why you have not so much as thought of visiting Bruttium, whereas you have had to spend more than two months here in these fascinating wilds. You can trust your tenantry so completely that you only have to spend two months making sure they are not idling or cheating you: you can trust your Bruttian bailiff so poorly that you let him alone absolutely."
I was more than a little nettled by his ironical mood.
"I spent three months of the year out of the past four years in Bruttium," I argued. "I know every inch of the ranches perfectly. My uncle never allowed me to become acquainted with anything up here. I was his representative and factor in Bruttium. When I visited him here I was no more than a guest and I have had to learn all the workings of the estate from the beginning."
"Nonsense!" Tanno rejoined. "You know each when you see it. If the tenants pay their rent on time, what do you need to know about how they run their farms?"
"They pay cash and on time," I explained, "but the cash represents half the yield and each manages the sale of his own produce. It is necessary for the proprietor to understand the capacities of each farm."
"And you are proud of a tenantry," he sneered, "so honest that you cannot trust them not to swindle you out of your just dues and on whom you have to spy all the time to get what you should get from them."
"You do not understand," I declared.
"Right you are," said Tanno. "I do not and I do not want to."
"Just wait a moment and do not interrupt," I urged. "You do not understand, there is no use in being a proprietor if you do not know more than your tenantry. There are a thousand, there are ten thousand details in which the management of the farms may be made more profitable or less profitable, and all these details have to be watched and must be well in the proprietor's mind."
"Could you not get some kind of overseeing general estate bailiff to do all that for you?" he suggested.
"I can," I said, "and I'm going to get one. My uncle's overseer died of the plague and my uncle was too old and too set in his ways to get another, so he acted as his own overseer for the last four years of his life. I must know of my own knowledge just how the place ought to be managed or I can never detect and forestall unnecessary and ruinous friction and trouble between my tenantry and any new superintending overseer."
"I do not know," Tanno ruminated, "which to admire more, the beauties of the Sabine tenant system or the wonders of the Sabine character. Any other man I know would have stayed in Rome and attended strictly to his courtship and let his estates take care of themselves. You are supposed to be violently in love and you certainly behave like it: yet you leave Rome and Vedia and shut yourself up among these damp cold hills and inspect and reinspect and make a final inspection, and delay for one last peep and linger for one final glance, where any other man would ignore the property and be with the widow."
"I do not see anything extraordinary about it," I disclaimed. "A man needs an income, a lover most of all."
"Income!" he snorted. "Isn't your income from your Bruttian estates ten times the gross return from the property?"
"More than ten times,"