"And as Jack passed them I heard the divil sing not [Transcriber's note: out?]: 'Ha! Ha! Lory! it was the gray mare wanted to jump but couldn't, and it's the bay can jump but won't! It's an "oh hell!" for you and a "ha! ha!" for me this time!'
"Which, while they're still fast friends, was the last word ever passed between them on the subject of the funker and the balker."
CHAPTER XII
EL TIGRE
"A cat may look at a king, but the son of a village lawyer may not venture to bare his heart to the daughter of the Duque de la Torrevieja. And yet a man of our blood was ennobled early in the wars with the Moors, while the Duke's forebears were still simple men-at-arms, knighted under a name that in itself carries the ring of the heroic deeds that earned it."
The speaker, Mauro de la Lucha-sangre (literally "Mauro of the Bloody Battle"), stood one June morning of 1874 beneath the shade of a gnarled olive-tree on the banks of the Guadaira River, rebelliously stamping a heel into the soft turf. Son of the foremost lawyer of his native town of Utrera, educated in Sevilla at the best university of his province, already at twenty-four himself a fully accredited licenciado, Mauro's future held actually brilliant prospects for a man of the station into which he was born. And yet, most envied of his classmates though he was, to Mauro himself the future loomed black, forbidding, cheerless.
Mauro's father, by legacy from his father, was the attorney and counsellor of the Duque de la Torrevieja; and so might Mauro have been for the next Duke had there not cropped out in him the daring, the love of adventure, the pride, and the confidence that had lifted the first Lucha-sangre above his fellows. It was a case of breeding back—away back over and past generations of fawning commoners to the times when Lucha-sangre swords were splitting Moorish casques and winning guerdons.
Nor in spirit alone was Mauro bred back. He was deep of chest, broad of shoulder, lithe and graceful. His massive neck upbore a head of Augustan beauty, lighted by eyes that alternately blazed with the pride and resolution of a Cid and softened with the musings of a Manrique. Mauro was a Lucha-sangre of the twelfth century, reincarnate.
Little is it to be wondered at that, as the lad was often his father's message-bearer to the Duke, he found favor in the eyes of the Duke's only daughter, Sofia; and still less is it to be wondered at that he early became her thrall. Of nights at the university he was ever dreaming of her; up out of his text-books her lovely face was ever rising before him in class.
Of a rare type was Sofia in Andalusia, where nearly all are dark, for she was a true rubia, blue of eye, fair of skin, and with hair of the wondrously changing tints of a cooling iron ingot.