"Twenty-six. You will be good enough, perhaps, to tell me how you guessed that."
"What could be easier? The tone of your voice; the pace at which your words fall. It is strange that you, a foreigner, should be such an amateur of bulls."
"Caramba!" I gasped. "You certainly do not learn that from the tone of my voice!"
"Ah! We cannot tell all our secrets," he chuckled; "we who must make a living by them."
Then in the night that had settled down he fell to telling stories, not intentionally, one would have said, but unconsciously, fascinating tales as those of the "Arabian Nights," full of the color and the extravagance of the East, the twinkle of his cigarette gleaming forth from time to time and outlining the boy seated wide-eyed on the floor at his feet with his head against his master's knee. He was as truly a minstrel as any troubadour that wandered in the days of chivalry, a born story-teller all but unconscious of his gift. When after a long time he left off, we drifted again into conversation. He was wholly illiterate and in compensation more filled with true knowledge and wisdom than a houseful of schoolmen. His calling for five and twenty years had been just this of roaming about Spain telling his colorful stories.
"Were you born so?" I asked late in the evening.
"Even so, señor."
"A sad misfortune."
"You know best, señor," he answered, with a hearty laugh. "I have no notion how useful this feeling you call sight may be, but with those I have I live with what enjoyment is reasonable and find no need for another."
The crippled old crone, who seemed neither to have known any other life than this nor ever to have been attired in anything than the piece-meal rags that now covered her, dragged the heap of burlap from the corner and spread it in three sections on the stone floor. On one she threw herself down with many sighs and the creaking of rusty joints, the second fell to my lot, and the blind man and his boy curled up on the third. The arriero carried his own blanket and had long since fallen to snoring with his head on the saddle of his ass and his alforjas close beside him.