s, even, with a sense of
the enjoyable.

He was not quite penniless. Those who had helped in his escape from
Edinburgh had provided him gold. But, his voyage paid for, he must buy
at Vigo fresh apparel and a horse. When at last he rode eastward and
northward he was poor enough! Food and lodging must be bought for
himself and his steed. Inns and innkeepers, chance folk applied to for
guidance, petty officials in perennially suspicious towns--twenty
people a day stood ready to present a spectral aspect of leech and
gold-sucker! He was expert in traveling, but usually he had borne a
purse quite like that of Fortunatus. Now he must consider that he
might presently have to sell his horse--and it was not a steed of
Roland's, to bring a great price! He might be compelled to go afoot
into France. He might be sufficiently blessed if the millennium did
not find him yet living by his wits in Spain. It was Spanish, that
prospect! Turn what? Ian asked himself. Bull-fighter--fencing-master--
gipsy--or brigand? He played with the notion of fencing-master. But he
would have to sell his horse to provide room and equipment, and he
must turn aside to some considerable town. Brigand would be easier, in
these wild forests and rock fortresses that climbed and stood upon the
sky-line. Matter enough for perplexity! But the sweep of forest and
mountain wall was admirable--admirable the air, the freedom from the
Edinburgh prison. Except occasionally, in the midst of some
intensification of annoyance, he rode and maneuvered undetected.

Past happenings might and did come across him in waves. He remembered,
he regretted; he pursued a dialectic with various convenient divisions
of himself. But all that would be lost for long times in the general
miraculous variety of things! On the whole, going through Spain in the
autumn weather, even with poverty making mouths alongside, was not a
sorry business! Zest lived in pitting vigor and wit against mole hills
threatening an aggregation into mountains! As for time, what was it,
anyhow, to matter so much? He owned time and a wide world.

Delay and delay and delay. In one town the alcalde kept him a week,
denying him the road beyond while inquiries were made as to his
identity or non-identity with some famed outlaw escaping from justice.
Further on, his horse fell badly lame and he stayed day after day in a
miserable village, lounging under a cork-tree, learning patois. There
was a girl with great black e