or as sheep to fleece
"I suppose it is almost an open secret that it’s into the mountains he goes," said Sacconi. "He has hardly taken the trouble to deny that he is still in relations with the smugglers he got to know in the Savigno affair, and it’s quite natural he should take advantage of their friendship to get his leaflets across the Papal frontier."
"For my part," said Riccardo; "what I wanted to talk to you about is this very question. It occurred to me that we could hardly do better than ask Rivarez to undertake the management of our own smuggling. That press at Pistoja is very inefficiently managed, to my thinking; and the way the leaflets are taken across, always rolled in those everlasting , is more than primitive."
"It has answered pretty well up till now," said Martini contumaciously. He was getting wearied of hearing Galli and Riccardo always put the Gadfly forward as a model to copy, and inclined to think that the world had gone well enough before this "lackadaisical buccaneer" turned up to set everyone to rights.
"It has answered so far well that we have been satisfied with it for want of anything better; but you know there have been plenty of arrests and confiscations. Now I believe that if Rivarez undertook the business for us, there would be less of that."
"Why do you think so?"
"In the first place, the smugglers look upon us as strangers to do business with, or as sheep to fleece, whereas Rivarez is their personal friend, very likely their leader, whom they look up to and trust. You may be sure every smuggler in the Apennines will do for a man who was in the Savigno revolt what he will not do for us. In the next place, there’s hardly a man among us that knows the mountains as Rivarez does. Remember, he has been a fugitive among them, and knows the smugglers’ paths by heart. No smuggler would dare to cheat him, even if he wished to, and no smuggler could cheat him if he dared to try."
"Then is your proposal that we should ask him to take over the whole management of our literature on the other side of the frontier–distribution, addresses, hiding-places, everything–or simply that we should ask him to put the things across for us?"
"Well, as for addresses and hiding-places, he probably knows already all the ones that we have and a good many more that we have not. I don’t suppose we should be able to teach him much in that line. As for distribution, it’s as the others prefer, of course. The important question, to my mind, is the actual smuggling itself. Once the books are safe in Bologna, it’s a comparatively simple matter to circulate them."
Processing your request, Please wait....
