The Ferry (4)

Hermes

Tried to run away, do you say? Yes, and if my very good friend here, the one with the club, had not helped me to capture him and put him in irons, he would have got clean away from us. For, from the moment Atropos handed him over to me, the whole way along he has been resisting and struggling, and he would plant his feet on the ground so that he was not exactly easy to conduct. And sometimes he would fall to supplication and prayer, begging me to let him go for a little and promising great bribes. But

I, of course, did not loose him, for I saw he was longing for the impossible. But when we had come to the very entrance and I was giving the customary inventory of the dead to Aiakos, and he was reckoning them by the memorandum sent to him by your sister, that confounded villain managed somehow to give us the slip and get off. Accordingly, there was one soul short by the count, and Aiakos, raising his eyebrows, said, "Don't use your thieving skill in all departments, Hermes. Be satisfied with your tricks in heaven. Dealings with the dead are exact, and can in no way evade scrutiny. The memorandum, you see, has 'one thousand and four' written on it, but you come bringing me one too few, unless you are prepared to say that Atropos has falsified her accounts for you." I blushed at this speech, and instantly remembered what had happened on the road, and when I cast my eye about and saw this fellow nowhere I perceived that he had run away, and gave chase as hard as I could up the road to daylight. This good soul here followed me of his own motion. We ran like racers, and only caught him at Tain- He was as near as that to getting away.