If this were pestilence, she should not come near.

The hiss of the lash and the bound of the stung camel disturbed him but he lapsed into the immense cold again as they raced down the slight declivity toward the Syrian village.

But Pestilence was riding with them and the odds were with it.
But the dwellers of that little huddle of huts had nothing to do but to sit in their doorways and suspect.

Whatever came their way from the sea for many months had brought them disaster and long since they had learned to defend themselves.

So now, when a party riding at breakneck speed, bearing with them an old man on whom the inertia of death was plain, came across the frontiers of their little town, they met them with the convenient stones of their rocky streets, with their savage, stark-ribbed dogs, with offal from kitchen heap and donkey stall and with insults and curses.
"Away, ye bringers of plague! Out, lepers; be gone, ye unclean!" Laodice and Aquila who rode in the open were fair targets for half the hail that fell about them.