She did not know that this was one of Marcos' friends--that in the summer this colchonero took the road with his packet of cigarettes and two sticks and wandered from village to village in the mountains beating the mattresses of the people and seeing the wondrous works of God as these are only seen by such as live all day and sleep all night beneath the open sky.
Quite suddenly the polished sticks ceased playing loudly and dropped their tone to pianissimo, so that if Juanita were to speak she could be heard.
"Hombre," she said, "do you know Marcos de Sarrion?"
"I know the chapel of Our Lady of the Shadows," he answered, glancing at her through a mist of wool.
"Will you give him a letter?"
"Fold it small and throw it in the wool," he said, and immediately the sticks beat loudly again.
Juanita's hand was already in her pocket seeking her purse.
"No, no," he said; "I am too much caballero to take money from a lady."
She walked away, dropping as she passed the uncarded heap, a folded paper which was lost amid the fluff. The sticks flew this way and that, and the twisted note shot up into the air with a bunch of wool which fell across the two sticks and was presently cast aside upon the carded heap. And peeping eyes from the barred windows of the convent school saw nothing.
Marcos and his father had returned to Saragossa. They were people of influence in that city, and Saragossa, strange to say, had a desire to maintain law and order within its walls. It was unlike Barcelona, which is at all times republican and frankly turbulent. Its other neighbour, Pampeluna, remains to this day clerical and mysterious. It is the city of the lost causes; Carlism and the Church. The Sarrions were not looked upon with a kindly eye within the walls of the Northern fortress and it is much too small a town for any to pass unobserved in its streets.