verpool, and my
thousand pounds upon deposit receipt in honest William Deacon's Bank in
Chorley, it would be a hanged sight more comfort to me than all the
appointed ticks on all the appointed watches in the world!"

And so saying, the Englishman rode on his way very sullenly, muttering
and shaking his head at intervals, as if the journey and adventure they
had entered upon, were not at all to his liking.

During this fatalistic controversy between Rollo and his friend, Etienne
de Saint Pierre had dropped somewhat behind. He had been interested in
the remark of the glum servitor who followed them that they must of
necessity pass through the village of Sarria.

"Do you know that place well?" he said, speaking in Castilian, which,
being of Spanish descent on his mother's side, he knew as accurately as
his native language.

"What place?" queried the Gallegan without raising his eyes. Etienne was
not disturbed by the apparent ill-humour of the fellow. It was, as he
knew, natural to these corner-men of Spain. But he wondered at the
rascal's quite remarkable size and strength. The arm which showed below
the velvet-banded cuff of the rusty brown coat was knotted and corded,
like the roots of an oak where the water wears away the bank in the
spring rains. His chest, where his embroidered shirt was open for a
hand's-breadth down, showed a perfect network of scars, ridged white
cuts, triangular purple stabs, as it were punched out and only half
filled in, as well as cicatrices where wounds reluctant to heal had been
treated by the hot iron of half the unskilful surgeons in Spain.

But after all these things are no novelty in Iberia, where the knife is
still among the lower orders the only court of appeal, and Etienne made
no remark upon them. He had indeed other affairs on his mind of a more
engrossing nature.

"Mon Dieu," he communed with himself, "'tis a full calendar month since
I kissed a pretty girl. I wonder what on earth it feels like?"

The path to Sarria was steep and long, but their guide, now permanently
in the van, threaded his way betwixt stone and stone, now down the
narrow gorge of an _arroyo_ littered with _debris_ and then up the next
talus of slate chips like a man familiar from infancy with the way.

From a commanding hill-top he pointed away to the southward and showed
them where the bayonet of a Cristino outpost glinted every half minute
as the sentinel stalked to and fro upon his beat.

The Gallega