Ropes was in his seat, coated and legginged once more in leather, and so well goggled that there was no reason why he should be associated in any mind with that Mr. George Smith who had threatened to air his wrongs in The Times. He had seen the other car go, so we must follow. We crossed the Arlanzon and I looked back regretfully at the citadel of Burgos, rising in the middle of the town. We had had no time to visit that castle in which so much history has been made. There the Cid was married; there he held prisoner Alfonso of Leon; there was Edward the First of England married to Eleanor of Castile; and there Pedro the Cruel first saw the light. But if there was one regret more pressing than another, it was that I could not go to the Town Hall and pay my respects to those bones of the Cid, and Ximena his wife, so strangely restored to Burgos, after their extraordinary wanderings to far Sigmaringen.
“Who is this Thith you all keep talking about?” demanded Dick, as the car spun along the river bank.
“Heavens, don't tell me that you've been brought up in ignorance of our national hero!” I exclaimed. “If I'd dreamed of such a thing, I couldn't have made a friend of you. Why, this was his town. He was married in the citadel. He—”
“How do you spell him?” asked Dick, cautiously.
“C-i-d, of course.”
[pg 093] “Great Scott! you don't mean to say my old friend the Cid was the Thith all the time, and I never knew it? What a blow! I don't see why C-i-d shouldn't spell Cid, even in Spanish; as a Thith I can't respect him.”
“Then let him go to the grave with you as the Cid,” said I. “But you know, or ought to know, that ‘C,’ and ‘Z,’ and sometimes ‘D’ are ‘th’ with us.”
“I never bothered much with trying to pronounce foreign languages,” said Dick. “I just wrestle with the words the best I can in plain American. But now—I always thought it rude to mention it before—I understand why you Spaniards seem to lisp, and hiss out your last syllables like secrets. As for the place we're going to next—”
“Valladolid?” I pronounced it as a Spaniard does, “Valyadoleeth.”
“Yes. That beats the Thith. My tongue isn't built for it, and I shall call it simply Val.”