"It will be cold at Pampeluna!" muttered the General from within the hood of his military cloak. "I pity you! yes, good-bye; close the door."
The station was full of soldiers, and their high peaked caps were at every window of the trains. It was barely yet daylight when the Sarrions alighted at the fortified station in the plain below Pampeluna.
The city stands upon a hill which falls steeply on the northeast side to the bed of the river Arga, a green-coloured stream deep enough to give additional strength to the walls which tower above like a cliff. Pampeluna is rightly reckoned to be the strongest city in Europe. It is approached from the southwest by a table-land, across which run the high roads from Madrid and the French frontier.
The station lies in the plain across which the railway meanders like a stream. Both bridges across the Arga are commanded, as is the railway station, by the guns of the city. Every approach is covered by artillery.
The sun was rising as the Sarrions' carriage slowly climbed the incline and clanked across the double drawbridges into the city. In the Plaza de la Constitucion, the centre of the town, troops of hopeful dogs followed each other from dust heap to dust heap, but seemed to find little of succulence, whilst what they did find appeared to bring on a sudden and violent indisposition. Perro gazed at them sadly from the carriage window remembering perhaps his own dust heap days.
The Sarrions had no house in Pampeluna. Unlike the majority of the Navarrese nobles they lived in their country house which was only twenty miles away. They made use of the hotel in the corner of the Plaza de la Constitucion when business or war happened to call them to Pampeluna.
They went there now and took their morning coffee.
"Two months," said Sarrion, warming himself at the stove in their simply furnished sitting-room. "Two months, they have given that scoundrel Pacheco to make his preparations."
"Yes--"
"So that Juanita must make her choice at once."