"I have resigned from the guardia," he said in explanation of his un-Spanish curiosity, "and in three months I go to make cigars in your Tampa, in la Florida. Spain can no longer feed her children."
I sketched briefly the life in the new world, not forgetting to picture some of the hardships such a change must bring a man of the fixed habits of forty, and took leave of him with the national benediction.
For some hours I trudged on across a country similar to that of the day before. The heat was African. The Spanish summer resembles an intermittent fever; with nightfall comes an inner assurance that the worst is over, and infallibly with the new day the blazing sun sends down its rays seemingly more fiercely than before. The reflection of how agreeable would be a respite from its fury was weaving itself into my thoughts when I swooped suddenly down upon a railway at a hamlet named Gobantes. I had no hope of covering all Spain afoot. Away among the hills to the north the whistle of a locomotive that moment sounded. I turned aside to the station and bought a ticket to Málaga.
The train squirmed away through howling, arid mountains, abounding in tunnels and tumbled bottomless gorges; then descending headlong to the plain, landed me at the seaport in mid-afternoon. Even Malaga on the seashore suffers from the heat. Her Alameda was thick in dust as an Andalusian highway; beneath the choking trees that bordered it the stone benches were blistering to the touch. The excursion was rewarded, however, if by nothing more than the mighty view of the sail-flecked Mediterranean from the summit of the Gibilfaro, reached by a dripping climb through shifting rubble and swarms of begging gypsy children. Africa was visible, dimly but unmistakably. Below simmered the city, unenlivened by a single touch of green; to the right the vega stretched floor-level to the foot of the treeless Alhama. Directly beneath me, like some vast tub, yawned the bullring, empty now but for a score of boys playing at "torero," flaunting their jackets in the face of an urchin fitted with paper horns, and dashing in pretended terror for the barrier when he turned upon them. The ascent of the Gibilfaro must certainly be forbidden on Sunday afternoons. From this height the struggle in the arena, visible in its entirety, yet purged by distance of its unpleasing details, would be a scene more impressive than from the best seat in the tribunes.
When I reached the station next morning the platform gate was locked and the train I had hoped to take was legally departed. A railway hanger-on, in rags and hemp sandals, however, climbed the iron picket fence and shouted a word to the engineer. Then beckoning to me to follow, he trotted back into the building and rapped authoritatively on the closed window of the ticket-office.
"Señor," he said, as the agent looked out upon us, "be kind enough to sell this caballero a ticket."
"The train is gone," answered the agent.
"Not so, señor," replied the bundle of rags haughtily; "I am having it held that this cavalier may take it."
"Ah, very well," responded the official; and having sold me the ticket, he handed to the hanger-on the key to the platform gate. As I passed through it the latter held out his hand, into which I dropped a copper.
"Muchísimas gracias, caballero," he said, bowing profoundly, "and may your grace forever travel with God."