"How are you, captain?"
"You are in error," I answered. "I am no captain."
"What! Did I not see you take a boat for the San Margarita at Socoa?"
"That may be; but I only boarded her through curiosity."
"Do not be afraid," he whispered. "How is Don Guillermo?"
"What Don Guillermo?"
"Señor Leader. I was with him when he was wounded; I am a Carlist. I am here on the same mission as yourself; to spy what the vermin are doing."
"Ha! good; ramble on, and don't notice me. It is dangerous."
He sauntered along the causeway, hands in pockets and whistling, and presently popped into a tavern, and I re-entered the fonda. Hardly had I set foot over the threshold when I was stupefied by a welcome in a familiar voice, none other than that of Mr. William O'Donovan, who had been my comrade and amanuensis throughout the irksome beleaguerment of Paris.[F] We did not throw our arms round our respective necks, hug and kiss each other—I reserve my kisses for pretty girls, newly-washed babes, and dead male friends, and then kiss only the brow—but we did join hands cordially and long. In answer to my query as to what had brought him to this queer corner at the back of God-speed, he explained that he was acting as correspondent of a Dublin paper; for, it appeared, the people of Ireland were consumed with anxiety as to the progress of the Carlist rising—details of which, of course, they could not obtain in the mere London papers—and were particularly desirous to have record of the doings of the Foreign Legion, a great majority of whom were sons of the Emerald Isle. His younger brother, a medical student, was likely to come out to join that Legion, and as for Kaspar (a name by which we knew his brother Edmond, afterwards triumvir at Merv), he was sure to turn up. Mother Carey's chicken hovers near when the elements are at strife. He was immensely satisfied with his diggings, he said, liked the natives, and considered this a splendid chance for improving his Spanish. He was reading "Don Quixote" in the vernacular. In a sense, I looked upon his presence as a perfect godsend to us, as he came in most appropriately as a Deus ex machinâ to create the character of Barbarossa's invented friend. O'Donovan was in good standing with the Republicans of the town, as he was a staunch Republican himself, and could spin yarns of the Republics of antiquity, and of the greatness of Paris, and the glories of the United States. He was getting on famously with Castilian, and was charmed with the redundancy of its vocabulary of vituperation, which was only to be equalled by the Irish, of which his father had been such a master. I made Barbarossa and my old chum known to one another, and we dined together, pledging the past in a cup of wine tempered with the living waters which bubbled up in the sacristy of the parish church, and were distributed in bronze conduits through Irun. After the meal and the meditative smoke of custom, O'Donovan sat down to write a letter, which I guaranteed to post for him in France, and Barbarossa and I sallied forth for a walk.
We were lounging about the Calle Mayor gazing at the escutcheons over every hall-door—your bellows-mender and cobbler in this democratic town were invariably of the seed of Noah in right line—when the alarm was raised that fifty horses had been carried off by the Carlists almost at the gates, and that two shots had been heard. The bugler sounded the call "To arms," and forthwith a little company consisting of thirty-two men, the bugler aforesaid, and a captain, set out at a quick step for a high ground beside a signal-tower at one end of the town. We hurried forward with them, and passed out through one of the four gates, on the side next the mountains. The soldiers took a position on the slope of a hill a couple of hundred yards from the gate, and Barbarossa and I sheltered ourselves behind an orchard-wall, from which there was an uninterrupted view of the billowy tract of meadow and pasture land beneath, cut into patches by thick hedges. Quick on our heels emerged from the town some half-dozen intrepid "volunteers of liberty," and the inevitable small boy, a red cap stuck jauntily on three hairs of his head and a large cigarette in his mouth. One of the volunteers—he who had demanded our papers on the Plaza—looked viciously at Barbarossa, who assumed a most artistic pretence of stolidity.