“He not refuse, unless he got soldiers with him. But Hernando says they may explode the line to stop the soldiers.”
However, at eight that evening, when the engine-driver took Hi as a passenger, the line had not been exploded and no news had come of a battle. The engine-driver was a Scot from Lanark, who had seen a detachment of the Western army away in the west two days before. “They came to the siding at Zamorra,” he said, “to lift the oats stored there for the teams. Their captain was with them, a very big man, fierce-looking, with fine hands. What’s this, they call him? Manuel.”
“Yes, Manuel.”
“The damned marauding son of a gun will get his neck in a noose before he’s much older.”
“Will he?” Hi asked. “He has the right on his side.”
“Be damned to the right on his side. He’s setting up a civil war here, because he don’t like the laws of the opposition. Yon’s a damned precedent. However, he’ll be soon hanged and his moss-troopers the same. Now get in, lad, to your nest: she’s starting.”
Hi leaned out to shake hands with the girl, Uncle Philip and Hernando, who had come to see him off. He thanked them again and again.
“If you come these way again,” the girl said, “you look us up, what?”
“That indeed I will do,” Hi said. “And I wish I could thank you or repay you.”
The train’s jerk at starting flung him from his farewells into his nest among the ore, where he passed this the last night of his journey to fetch Don Manuel.