fled down and down with his knife still
wet in his hand. He had no time to wipe it, and it dripped as he ran.

_For this man had now neither wife nor friend._

CHAPTER III

COCK O' THE NORTH

"_Carai! Caramba! Car----!_ This bantam will outface us on our own
dung-hill! Close in there, Pedro! Take down the iron spit to him, Jose!
Heaven's curses on his long arm! A foreigner to challenge us to fight
with the knife, or with the sword, or with the pistol!"

From the kitchen of the venta at San Vicencio, just where the track up
the Montblanch takes its first spring into the air, came these and other
similar cries. It was a long and narrowish apartment--the upper portion
merely of a ground-floor chamber, which occupied the whole length of the
building.

Part of the space was intended for horses and mules, and indeed was
somewhat overcrowded by them that night. These being alarmed by the
tumult and shoutings, were rearing so far as their short unsinkered
head-stalls permitted them, and in especial making play with their feet
at the various _machos_ or he-mules scattered among them. These gladly
retaliated, that being their form of relaxation, and through the
resulting chaos of whinnying, stamping, neighing, and striking of sparks
from pavement stones, skirmished a score of brown imps, more than half
naked, each armed with a baton or stout wand with which he struck and
pushed the animals entrusted to their care out of the reach of harm, or
with equal good-will gave a sly poke with the sharp spur of the goad to
a neighbour's beast, by way of redressing any superiorities of heels or
teeth.

But all the men had run together to the kitchen end of the apartment.
Where the stable ended there was a step up, for all distinction between
the abode of beasts and of men. Over this step most of those who had
thus hasted to the fray incontinently stumbled. And in the majority of
instances their stumble had been converted into a fall by a blow on the
sconce, or across the shoulders, from the flat of a long sword wielded
by the arm of a youth so tall as almost to reach the low-beamed ceiling
along which the spiders were scuttling, in terror doubtless of the
sweeping bright thing on which the firelight played as it waved this way
and that.

First in the fray were a round dozen of Migueletes, come in from an
unsuccessful chase, and eager to avenge on a stranger the failure and
disgrace they had suffered from one of their own ra