ocial standing, who seek to make
up--to bridge that narrow and unfathomable gulf--by affability. This dog
it seemed, knowing that he was not quite a pointer, sought to conciliate
humanity by an eagerness, by a pathetic and blundering haste to try and
understand what was expected of him and to perform the same without
delay, which was quite foreign to the nature of the real breed.

In Spain one addresses a man by the plain term: Man. And after all, it is
something--deja quelque chose--to be worthy of that name. This dog was
called Perro, which being translated is Dog. He had been a waif in his
early days, some stray from the mountains near the frontier, where dogs
are trained to smuggle. Full of zeal, he had probably smuggled too
eagerly. Marcos had found him, half starved, far up the valley of the
Wolf. He had not been deemed worthy of a baptismal name and had been
called the Dog--and admitted as such to the outbuildings of Torre Garda.
From thence he had worked his humble way upwards. By patience and comfort
his mind slowly expanded until men almost forgot that this was a
disgraceful mongrel.

Perro had risen from a slumberous contemplation of the tumbling water and
now stood awaiting orders, his near hind leg shaking with eagerness to
please, by running anywhere at any pace.

Marcos never spoke to his dog. He had seen Spain humbled to the dust by
babble, and the sight had, perhaps, dried up the spring of his speech.
For he rarely spoke idly. If he had anything to say, he said it. But if
he had nothing, he was silent. Which is, of course, fatal to social
advancement, and set him at one stroke outside the pale of political
life. Spain at this time, and, indeed, during the last thirty years, had
been the happy hunting ground of the beau sabreur, of those (of all men,
most miserable) who owe their success in life to a woman's favour.

This silent Spaniard might, perhaps, have made for himself a name in the
world's arena in other days; for he had a spark of that genius which
creates a leader. But fate had ruled that he should have no wider sphere
than an obscure Pyrenean gorge, no greater a following than the men of
the Valley of the Wolf. These he held in an iron grip. Within his deep
and narrow head lay the secret which neither Madrid nor Bayonne could
ever understand; why the Valley of the Wolf was neither Royalist nor
Carlist. The quiet, slow eyes had alone seen into the hearts of the wild
Navarrese mountaineers and