behind sea to see the Cid with the long
beard. We must greet each other and cut out a friendship."

"God confound such friendships," cried Bucar, following his flying troops
with nimble speed.

Hard behind him rode the Cid, but his horse Bavieca was weary with the
day's hard work, and Bucar rode a fresh and swift steed. And thus they
went, fugitive and pursuer, until the ships of the Moors were at hand,
when the Cid, finding that he could not reach the Moorish king with his
sword, flung the weapon fiercely at him, striking him between the
shoulders. Bucar, with the mark of battle thus upon him, rode into the sea
and was taken into a boat, while the Cid picked up his sword from the
ground and sought his men again.

The Moorish host did not escape so well. Set upon fiercely by the
Spaniards, they ran in a panic into the sea, where twice as many were
drowned as were slain in the battle; and of these, seventeen thousand and
more had fallen, while a vast host remained as prisoners. Of the
twenty-nine kings who came with Bucar, seventeen were left dead upon the
field.

The chronicler uses numbers with freedom. The Cid is his hero, and it is
his task to exalt him. But the efforts of the Moors to regain Valencia and
their failure to do so may be accepted as history. In due time, however,
age began to tell upon the Cid, and death came to him as it does to all.
He died in 1099, from grief, as the story goes, that his colleague, Alvar
Fanez, had suffered a defeat. Whether from grief or age, at any rate he
died, and his wife, Ximena, was left to hold the city, which for two years
she gallantly did, against all the power of the Moors. Then Alfonso
entered it, and, finding that he could not hold it, burned the principal
buildings and left it to the Moors. A century and a quarter passed before
the Christians won it again.

When Alfonso left the city of the Cid he brought with him the body of the
campeador, mounted upon his steed Bavieca, and solemnly and slowly the
train wound on until the corpse of the mighty dead was brought to the
cloister of the monastery of Cardena. Here the dead hero was seated on a
throne, with his sword Tisona in his hand; and, the story goes, a caitiff
Jew, perhaps wishing to revenge his brethren who had been given sand for
gold, plucked the flowing beard of the Cid. At this insult the hand of the
corpse struck out and the insulter was hurled to the floor.

The Cid Campeador is a true hero of romance, a