"Perfectamente, señor; and to walk to Honda you must take the railroad."
There was nothing in the mien of either to suggest the practical joker. Yet so far as my experience carried there was not a corner of Europe where two steps on the right of way was rated less a crime than arson or housebreaking.
We reached the line not far beyond, the highway diving under by a stone-faced cutting and bearing the peasants away with it. Over the next rise their dove-tailed duet rang out again and, melting in volume and rendered almost musical by distance, filtered back to me from the deepening valleys a full quarter-hour longer.
I climbed the embankment not without misgiving. Sure enough, a track there was, beside the broad-gauge rails, covered with cinders and scarred with many imprints of donkey hoofs. A mile along it demonstrated how poor a walking kit is even a half-empty suitcase. I sat down to take stock of the contents. In the jumble was a blue flannel shirt past its prime. I fished out thread and needle and sewed a Jack-Tar seam across the garment below the armpits, amputated sleeves and shoulders with a few, slashes, and behold! a knapsack that might bear my burdens through all the kingdom of Spain, and hold its own in any gathering of shoulder-packed wayfarers. When I had stuffed my possessions into it there was still room to spare for such odds and ends as find their way into the baggage of the least acquisitive of travelers. Then pitching the suitcase spread-eagle over the bordering hedge, I cut a stick in a neighboring thicket and struck off again at the regular stride so indispensable to any true enjoyment of tramping.
Night fell soon after. A fall it was indeed; no half-hearted settling down of gloom as in our northern zone, but a descendant flood of obscurity that left the eyes blinking in dismay. To right and left, where had been rolling uplands and heathered fields sharp-cut in smallest detail, nothing--a sea of inky blackness; and ahead, the stony-blind unknown. The cinder path held firm, but only a foot rubbing along the rail guided my steps, until such time as sight resumed its leadership.
An hour or more I marched on into the summer night. Then out of the darkness ahead stole a feeble point of light, an increasing murmur of human voices, and the end of the first day's tramp was before me. Beside the way a stone building stood open, an oil torch twilighting a cobble-floored room heaped at one end with a Spanish grocer's wares. An unshaven man of fifty, a red handkerchief bound brigand-fashion about his head, bulked forward through an inner doorway.
"You furnish lodgings?"
"Sí, señor; and your burro?"
"I am walking. Is supper to be had?"
"Claro, hombre! Choose from the baskets and the señora shall cook it for you in a twinkling."