be compensated for their silence of
a moment ago.

But Ramuntcho remains mute and without a smile. This sudden savagery
chills him, although he has known it for a long time; it plunges him
into dreams that worry and do not explain themselves.

And then, he has felt to-night once more how uncertain and changing is
his only support in the world, the support of that Arrochkoa on whom
he should be able to count as on a brother; audacity and success at the
ball-game will return that support to him, doubtless, but a moment of
weakness, nothing, may at any moment make him lose it. Then it seems to
him that the hope of his life has no longer a basis, that all vanishes
like an unstable chimera.

CHAPTER IX.

It was New Year's eve.

All the day had endured that sombre sky which is so often the sky of the
Basque country--and which harmonizes well with the harsh mountains, with
the roar of the sea, wicked, in the depths of the Bay of Biscay.

In the twilight of this last day of the year, at the hour when the fires
retain the men around the hearths scattered in the country, at the hour
when home is desirable and delicious, Ramuntcho and his mother were
preparing to sit at the supper table, when there was a discreet knock at
the door.

The man who was coming to them from the night of the exterior, at the
first aspect seemed unknown to them; only when he told his name (Jose
Bidegarray, of Hasparitz) they recalled the sailor who had gone several
years ago to America.

"Here," he said, after accepting a chair, "here is the message which I
have been asked to bring to you. Once, at Rosario in Uruguay, as I was
talking on the docks with several other Basque immigrants there, a man,
who might have been fifty years old, having heard me speak of Etchezar,
came to me.

"'Do you come from Etchezar?' he asked.

"'No,' I replied, 'but I come from Hasparitz, which is not far from
Etchezar.'

"Then he put questions to me about all your family. I said:

"'The old people are dead, the elder brother was killed in smuggling,
the second has disappeared in America; there remain only Franchita and
her son, Ramuntcho, a handsome young fellow who must be about eighteen
years old today.'

"He was thinking deeply while he was listening to me.

"'Well,' he said at last, 'since you are going back there, you will say
good-day to them for Ignacio.'

"And after offering a drink to me he went away--"

Franchita had risen, trembling and pal