or this river, known as the Wolf, in which Marcos
was peacefully fishing, was one of those Northern tributaries of the Ebro
which have run with blood any time this hundred years. The country,
moreover, that it drained was marked in the Government maps as a blank
country, or one that paid no taxes, and knew not the uniform of the
Government troops.

Torre Garda, the long two-storied house crowning a hill-top farther up
the valley of the Wolf, was one of the few country houses that have not
stood empty since the forties. And all the valley of the Wolf, from the
grim Pyrenees standing sentinel at its head to the sunny plain almost in
sight of Pampeluna, where the Wolf merges into other streams, was held
quiescent in the grip of the Sarrions.

"We will fight," said the men of this valley, "for the king, when we have
a king worth fighting for. And we will always fight for ourselves."

And it was said that they only repeated what the Sarrions had told them.
At all events, no Carlists came that way.

"Torre Garda is not worth holding," they said.

"And you cannot hold Pampeluna unless you take Torre Garda first,"
thought those who knew the art of guerilla warfare.

So the valley of the Wolf awaited a king worth fighting for, and in the
meantime they paid no taxes, enjoyed no postal service, and were perhaps
none the worse without it.

There were Carlists over the mountains on either side of the valley.
Eternal snow closed the northern end of it and fed the Wolf in the summer
heats. Down at the mouth of the valley where the road was wide enough for
two carts to pass each other, and a carriage could be driven at the trot,
there often passed a patrol from the Royalist stronghold of Pampeluna.
But the Government troops never ventured up the valley which was like a
mouse-hole with a Carlist cat waiting round the corner to cut them off.
Neither did the Carlists hazard themselves through the narrow defile
where the Wolf rushed down its straightened gate; for there were forty
thousand men in Pampeluna, only ten miles away.

Which reasons were sound enough to dictate caution in any written word
that might pass from the Count in Saragossa to his son at Torre Garda.

A white dog with one yellow and black ear--a dog that might have been a
nightmare, a bad, distorted dream of a pointer--stood in front of Marcos
de Sarrion as he read the letter and seemed to await the hearing of its
contents.

There are many persons of doubtful s