“The fact is, my lord, that as a priest of Tarazona to whom, not long ago, I went for help in my troubles, told me, wits don’t serve against the Devil, but mum! finger on lip, many good prayers to Saint Bartholomew—who, none better, knows his knaveries—and let him have his sport; for God, who is just, and sits up thereon high, will see that all comes right in the end.
“Resolved on this course I had decided never again to say a word to any one about it,—no, not for anything; but I will do it to-day to satisfy your curiosity, and in good sooth, if, after all, the Devil calls me to account and goes to troubling me in punishment for my indiscretion, I carry the Holy Gospels sewed inside my sheepskin coat, and with their help, I think that, as at other times, I may make telling use of a cudgel.”
“But, come!” exclaimed Don Dionís, out of patience with the digressions of the shepherd, which it seemed would never end, “let the whys and wherefores go, and come directly to the subject.”
“I am coming to it,” calmly replied Esteban, and after calling together, by dint of a shout and a whistle, the lambs of which he had not lost sight and which were now beginning to scatter over the mountain-side, he scratched his head again and proceeded thus:
“On the one hand, your own continual hunting trips, and on the other, the persistency of those trespassers who, what with snare and what with crossbow, hardly leave a deer alive in twenty days’ journey round about, had, a little time ago, so thinned out the game in these mountains that you could not find a stag in them, not though you would give one of your eyes.
“I was speaking of this in the town, seated in the porch of the church, where after mass on Sunday I was in the habit of joining some laborers who till the soil in Veratón, when some of them said to me:
“ ‘Well, man, I don’t know why it is you fail to run across them, since, as for us, we can give you our word that we don’t once go down to the ploughed land without coming upon their tracks, and it is only three or four days since, without going further back, a herd, which, to judge by their hoof-prints, must have numbered more than twenty, cut down before its time a crop of wheat belonging to the care-taker of the Virgen del Romeral.’
“ ‘And in what direction did the track lead?’ I asked the laborers, with a mind to see if I could fall in with the herd.
“ ‘Toward the Lavender Glen,’ they replied.
“This information did not enter one ear to go out at the other; that very night I posted myself among the poplars. During all its hours I kept hearing here and there, far off as well as near by, the trumpeting of the deer as they called one to another, and from time to time I felt the boughs stirring behind me; but however sharply I looked, the truth is, I could distinguish nothing.