I stayed long and left with difficulty. Gregarious is man, and on Sunday, when all the world about him is at rest, even the pedestrian finds it hard to exert himself. A league beyond I came upon the Sevillians lolling in the shadow of another isolated peon dwelling in what seemed once to have been a village.
Jesús in his eleven-day beard hailed me from afar; moreover, the Sunday languor was still upon me. I stretched out with them in the shade of the building, but the flies prevented us from sleeping. We crawled into a peasant's cart under the shed--but the flies quickly found us out. We crossed the road to the ruin of a church, split almost exactly through the middle of tower and all, and one side fallen. Within it was a grassy corner where the sun never fell, and even a bit of breeze fanned us. But the flies had made this their Spanish headquarters. We decided to go on.
In that only were we unanimous, for the Sevillians wished to follow the railroad, a furlong away, and I the carretera. I had all but won them over when a freight train labored by.
"Ay! Ay! Los toros!" shouted the two in chorus.
"Where?" I asked, seeing no such animals in sight.
"En las jaulas, hombre! In the cages!" cried Jesús, pointing to a flat-car on which, set close together, were six tightly-closed boxes each just large enough to hold a bull.
"We go by the railroad!" shouted Gásparo, decisively. "Alma de Dios! Who knows but we may be able to hide ourselves on a train that is carrying toros to the córrida!"
We separated, therefore, and struck northward, though we marched side by side within hailing distance until we were all three swallowed up in the city of Manzanares.
The bare-faced, truly Manchegan town was half-deserted, though the reason therefor was not hard to guess, for the bullring in the outskirts was howling as I passed. For all its size the place did not seem to boast an eating-house of any description. At last I halted before an old man seated in a shaded corner of the plaza, to inquire:
"Señor, what does a stranger in your town do when he would eat?"