ights."

"We have no candles up here," answered the man with a laugh. He only
spoke Basque and it was in this language that Marcos gave a brief
explanation. Juanita sat on a rock. She was tired out. There were three
men--short, thick-set and silent, a father and two sons. They stood in
front of Marcos and spoke in monosyllables after the manner of old
friends. Under his directions they brought a heap of dried bracken and
hay. In a shed, little more than a roof and four uprights, they made a
rough couch for Juanita which they hedged round with heaps of bracken to
protect her from the wind.

"You will see the stars," said the old man shaking out the blanket which
Marcos had carried up from the cottage at the ford. "It is good to see
the stars when you awake in the night. One remembers that the saints are
watching."

In a few minutes Juanita was sleeping, like a child, curled up beneath
her blanket, and heard through her dreams the low voices of Marcos and
the peasants talking hurriedly in the half-ruined cottage. For Marcos and
these three were the only men who knew the way over the mountains to
Torre Garda.

The dawn was just breaking when Marcos awoke Juanita.

"Oh," she said plaintively. "I have only been asleep ten minutes."

"You have slept three hours," replied Marcos in that hushed voice in
which it seems natural to speak before the dawn. "I am making
coffee--come when you are ready."

Juanita found a pail of water and a piece of last year's yellow soap
which had been carefully scraped clean with a knife. A clean towel had
also been provided. Juanita noted the manly simplicity of these
attentions with a little tender and wise smile.

"I know what it is that makes men gipsies," she said, when she joined
Marcos who was attending to a fire of sticks on the ground at the cottage
door. "I shall always have a kindly feeling for them now. They get
something straight from heaven which is never known to people who sleep
in stuffy houses and get up to wash in warm water."

She gave a little shiver at the recollection of her ablutions, and
laughed a clear, low laugh, as fresh as the morning itself.

"Where are the men?" she asked.

"One has gone to Pampeluna, one has taken a note to the officer
commanding the reinforcements sent for by Zeneta. The third has gone down
to fetch his mother up here to bake bread all day. There will be a little
army here to-night."

Juanita stood watching Marcos who seemed entirely