people are saying your
wife is thick with Manolo Berlanga!"

The eyes of the tavern-keeper and the engineer met. They remained fixed,
so, a moment. Then the eyes of Zureda opened wide, seemed starting from
their sockets. Suddenly he jumped up, and his square finger-nails fairly
sank into the wood of the table. His white lips, slavering, stammered in
a fit of rage:

"That's a lie, a damned lie, Senor Tomas! I'll cut your heart out for
that! Yes, if the Virgin herself came down and told me that, I'd cut her
heart out, too! God, what a lie!"

The tavern-keeper remained entirely self-possessed. Without even a
change of expression he answered:

"All right! Find out what's true or false in this business. For you know
there's no difference between the truth and a lie that everybody's
telling. And if you decide there's nothing to this except what I say,
come and tell me, for I'm right here and everywhere to back up my
words!"

The tavern-keeper grew silent, and Amadeo Zureda remained motionless,
struck senseless, gaping.

After a few minutes his ideas began to calm down again, and as they grew
quiet they coordinated themselves; then the engineer felt an unwholesome
and resistless curiosity to know everything, to torture himself digging
out details.

"You mean to tell me," asked he, "that they've talked about that, right
here?"

"Right on the spot, sir!"

"When?"

"More than once, and more than twenty times; and they say worse than
that, too. They say Berlanga beats your wife, and you're wise to
everything, and have been from the beginning. And they say you stand for
it, to have a good thing, because this Berlanga fellow helps you pay the
rent."

A couple of porters came in, and interrupted the conversation. Senor
Tomas ended up with:

"Well now, you know all about it!"

When Zureda left the tavern, his first impulse was to go home and put it
up to Rafaela. Either with soft words or with a stick he might get
something about Berlanga out of her. But presently he changed his mind.
Affairs of this kind can't be hurried much. It is better to go slow, to
wait, to get information bit by bit and all by one's self. When he
reached the station it was six o'clock. He met Pedro on the platform.

"Which engine have we got to-day?" asked Amadeo.

"Nigger," answered the fireman.

"The devil! It just had to be her, eh?"

That run was terrible indeed, packed full of inward struggles and of
battles with the rebellious l