“Anselmo.”
“Oh, Anselmo,” the man said, “the plice you see over there?”
“No; over there,” Hi said, turning to point. Some instinct told him to look out, but it came a fraction of a second too late. He never knew certainly what happened next, because he was knocked unconscious by a blow on the point of his jaw, which ended the world for him for four minutes.
When he came to himself, with a dizzy head full of confusion, he tried to stand, but found that his feet hurt. Groping down to find out why, he found that his shoes were gone. Instead of them, a pair of old white deck shoes, with rubber soles, lay beside him in the track. Then a certain slackness at his waist seemed unaccustomed. He put his hand to his waist and found that his money belt was gone; then he found that his pockets had been searched: he had been robbed. He called aloud at this. Then he looked about for his companion, whom he at once judged to be the thief. There was neither sight nor sound of him. He had vanished into the night where he belonged. There was no sound of anyone running, no noise of steps, nor of bushes being thrust aside. The bird was still making a plaintive call in the tree.
“I can’t think what has happened,” Hi said. He sat down to try to compose himself. When he began to know that he had been knocked out, he wondered, “for how long?” The stars had not changed position much, so far as he could see, and there was still some warmth or so he thought in the toes of the shoes.
“He knocked me out and robbed me,” he thought. “I’d gladly have gone halves with him. I don’t know what the deuce to do now. Well, I must get to Anselmo, that’s the first thing. And it must be nearly midnight by this time and I’m further from Anselmo than I was when I started.”
He put on the deck shoes. There was a meanness in the theft of his shoes which hurt him more even than the loss of his precious pocket-book with the sprig of hermosita. When he had put on the shoes and felt their discomforts, as well as their kind, which was specially loathsome to him, he walked back to the town, he could not afterwards tell why. He had no very clear thought of what he was doing nor of what he ought to do, for the brains were still shaky in his head from the knock upon his jaw.
When he turned into the street in front of the city hall, he saw some of the lancers, followed by a mob, riding uphill towards him. He turned uphill away from them, till he was out of the town, in a rocky path near a pine wood. The lancers paused at the city hall, as though to bivouac. Hi felt a deadly weariness overcoming the need of reaching Anselmo.
“I am done,” he thought. “I have done nothing, but I have been through a good deal to-day. I must rest for a bit before I go on.” He was cold as well as weary, for the cold sea breeze was blowing. “It must be midnight,” he thought. “I will rest for just an hour among those rocks. If I had only not spoken to that officer at La Boca, I would have been fifty miles on beyond Anselmo by this.”
He was so stupid from fatigue and the blow that he paid little heed to his going, as he pushed through the scrub towards what looked like shelter. Suddenly he caught a whiff of scent, a rustle of movement and a gleam of something: he was aware that people were hiding there. A startled somebody, speaking intensely, in a hiss of anxiety, said “Padre? . . . padre mio?”