y anybody on his
journey; we, also, could start without fear in daylight, as soon as he
brought the mules. For the rest, he would make proper arrangements for
secrecy with the husband of Seraphina's nurse--Enrico, he called him: a
silent Galician; a graybeard worthy of confidence.

One of his first cares had been to grub out of his soaked clothes
a handful of tobacco, and now he turned over the little drying heap
critically. He hunted up a fragment of maize leaf somewhere upon his
bosom. His face brightened. "_Bueno_," he muttered, very pleased.

"Senor--good-night," he said, more humanized than I had supposed
possible; or was it only that I was getting to know him better? "And
thanks. There's that in life which even an old tired man.... Here I,
Castro... old and sad, Senor. Yes, Senor--nothing of mine in all the
world--and yet.... But what a death! Ouch! the brute water... _Caramba!_
Altogether improper for a man who has escaped from a great many battles
and the winter of Russia.... The snow, Senor...."

He drowsed, garrulous, with the blackened end of his cigarette hanging
from his lower lip, swayed sideways--and let himself go over gently,
pillowing his head on the stump of his arm. The thin, viperish blade,
stuck upwards from under his temple, gleamed red before the sinking
fire.

I raised a handful of flaring twigs to look at Sera-phina. A terrible
night raged over the land; the inner arch of the opening growled,
winking bluishly time after time, and, like an enchanted princess
enveloped in a beggar's cloak, she was lying profoundly asleep in the
heart of her dominions.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The first thing I noted, on opening my eyes, was that Castro had
gone already; I was annoyed. He might have called me. However, we had
arranged everything the evening before. The broad day, penetrating
through the passage, diffused a semicircle of twilight over the
flooring. It extended as far as the emplacement of the fire, black and
cold now with a gray heap of ashes in the middle. Farther away in the
darkness, beyond the reach of light, Seraphina on her bed of leaves did
not stir. But what was that hat doing there? Castro's hat. It asserted
its existence more than it ever did on the head of its master; black and
rusty, like a battered cone of iron, reposing on a wide flange near the
ashes. Then he was not gone. He would not start to walk three leagues,
bare-headed. He would appear presently; and I waited, vexed at the