Half the dwellers on the Alhambra hill and a swarthy troop from the gypsy caves flocked down to the railroad station with them. The English consul tucked into Rodrigo’s pocket a tiny purse through whose silken meshes came a yellow glint.
“My wife knit it last night for the finest lad we know,” he said. “If she had had more time, it would have been larger; but it serves to hold a little English gold, which is a good weapon everywhere.”
Arnaldo was in their following, and Leandro. Even Xarifa had a smile for the young soldier, but when he waved his cap to Zinga with a blithe compliment—“throwing flowers,” as the Spaniards say—the girl’s fierce eyes misted over. At the station were Rodrigo’s professors all praising him till his face was as red as a pomegranate blossom, and there, puffing and wheezing, was the Geography Gentleman, with a little case of medicine to ward off the Cuban fever, and there, just as the train was about to start, was a clumsy young peasant, who all but dropped the jar of honey he handed up to Rodrigo, and a gaunt woman, weeping like a fountain as she pressed upon her son’s deliverer a package of cheese-cakes made from milk of her one goat.
Both the children were so spell-bound by the cheering and the music, the strange faces and the dramatic scenes that were being enacted all about them, that they hardly realized what the moment meant when their father lifted them up for the good-bye kisses to Rodrigo, who, boyish and merry, stood squeezed in among his fellow-conscripts on the platform of the car. The children cried a little, but their father hushed them with a few grave words and drew them to one side, away from the press of people about the train.
“Nobody will hurt Rodrigo?” asked Pilarica, with a sudden terror knocking at her heart.
“No, my darling,” answered her father. “Nothing can hurt Rodrigo.”
“Is that because he is a hero?” queried Rafael, trying hard to get his voice safely through the fog in his throat.
“Yes,” assented Don Carlos. “That is because he is a hero. He has won his battle already.”
And with that the engine whistled, and the long train, packed close with smiling, singing, wet-eyed lads, each young figure leaning forward to wave a hand, to throw a kiss, to catch a rose, rumbled out of the station, while all along the line there rose a tumult of farewells.
“Bravo! Bravo!”