There was work to do in Saragossa. In Pampeluna there were only suspicions to arouse. Juanita was in Sor Teresa's care and could scarcely come to harm, holding in her hand as she did a strong card to be played on emergency.
All Spain seemed to be pausing breathlessly. The murder of Prim had shaken the land like an earthquake. The king had already made enemies. He had no enthusiasm. His new subjects would have preferred a few mistakes to this cautious pause. They were a people vaguely craving for liberty before they had cast off the habit of servitude.
No Latin race will ever evolve a great republic; for it must be ruled. But Spain was already talking of democracy and the new king had scarcely seated himself on the throne.
"We can do nothing," said Sarrion, "but try to keep order in our own small corner of this bear-garden."
So he remained at Saragossa and threw open his great house there, while Marcos passed to and fro into Navarre up the Valley of the Wolf to Torre Garda.
Where Evasio Mon might be, no man knew. Paris had fallen. The Commune was rife. France was wallowing in the deepest degradation. And in Bayonne the Carlist plotters schemed without let or hindrance.
"So long as he is away we need not be uneasy about Juanita," said Marcos. "He cannot return to Saragossa without my hearing of it."
And one evening a casual teamster from the North, whose great two-wheeled cart, as high as a house and as long as a locomotive, stood in the dusty road outside the Posada de los Reyes, dropped in, cigarette in mouth, to the Palacio Sarrion. In Spain, a messenger delivers neither message nor letter to a servant. A survival of mediaeval habits permits the humblest to seek the presence of the great at any time of day.
The Sarrions had just finished dinner and still sat in the vast dining-room, the walls of which glittered with arms and loomed darkly with great portraits of the Spanish school of painting.
The teamster was not abashed. It was a time of war, and war is a great leveler of social scales. He had brought his load through a disturbed country. He was a Guipuzcoan--as good as any man.