ed a handful for his hat. "The Sword-flower," he
called it, and accepting the omen with a chuckle, jumped into his seat
again and kicked the beast with his naked heels into the shamble that
does duty for a pace. As he decorated his hat-string he resumed his
song:--

"En batalla temerosa
Andaba el Cid castellano
Con Bucar, ese rey moro,
Que contra el Cid ha llegado
A le ganar a Valencia..."

He hung upon the pounding assonances, and his heart thumped in accord,
as if his present adventure had been that crowning one of the hero's.

Accept him for what he was, the graceless son of his
parents--horse-thief, sheep-thief, contrabandist, bully, trader of
women--he had the look of a seraph when he sang, the complacency of an
angel of the Weighing of Souls. And why not? He had no doubts; he
could justify every hour of his life. If money failed him, wits did
not; he had the manners of a gentleman--and a gentleman he actually
was, hidalgo by birth--and the morals of a hyaena, that is to say, none
at all. I doubt if he had anything worth having except the grand air;
the rest had been discarded as of no account.

Schooling had been his, he had let it slip; if his gentlehood had been
negotiable he had carded it away. Nowadays he knew only elementary
things--hunger, thirst, fatigue, desire, hatred, fear. What he craved,
that he took, if he could. He feared the dark, and God in the
Sacrament. He pitied nothing, regretted nothing; for to pity a thing
you must respect it, and to respect you must fear; and as for regret,
when it came to feeling the loss of a thing it came naturally also to
hating the cause of its loss; and so the greater lust swallowed up the
less.

He had felt regret when Manuela ran away; it had hurt him, and he hated
her for it. That was why he intended at all cost to find her again,
and to kill her; because she had been his _amiga_, and had left him.
Three weeks ago, it had been, at the fair of Pobledo. The fair had
been spoiled for him, he had earned nothing, and lost much; esteem, to
wit, his own esteem, mortally wounded by the loss of Manuela, whose
beauty had been a mark, and its possession an asset; and time--valuable
time--lost in finding out where she had gone.

Friends of his had helped him; he had hailed every _arriero_ on the
road, from Pamplona to La Coruna; and when he had what he wanted he had
only delayed for one day, to get his knife ground. He knew exactly
where she w