With a light, graceful step the girl walked to the edge of the cliff. A straggling path led down to the beach where an old, patched boat lay on its side. On a shelf of clean sand, below a tiny, ill-kept kitchen garden, lay an elderly man dressed in good black clothes—it was Sunday. The girl, evidently his daughter, called him to come in, the sun had gone down, he would catch cold. The old fellow obstinately refused to move; he was very comfortable where he was. Then, seeing us, he scrambled to his feet:
“Olá, olá! Engerlish, Engerlish!” he hailed us gleefully, waving an arm over his disreputable head. Two grave men of his own class, who passed at that moment, reproved him sternly, but he was in the incorrigibly merry stage and continued to wave and shout:
“Engerlish, Engerlish! How much? Very dear, goddam.”
“This is my third visit to Spain,” said J., “and that is the first drunken man I have seen even here.”
“Claro,” said Don Jaime, “we are not afflict with that vice of drunkenness.”
A rusty brown water spaniel, lying near the old drunkard, rose, yawned, stretched itself fore and aft, and sniffed at Patsy’s boots.
“Notice where the hair is worn off his back?” Patsy murmured, taking a burr out of the dog’s long, flapping ear. “A strap has done that—a strap, I suspect, that fastens together two little water-tight kegs filled with tobacco from Gibraltar. Smuggler! Is the old fellow your partner? Where’s the entrance to the smuggler’s cave? Don, we’ve discovered a contrabandista’s den!”
“May be!” laughed Don Jaime.
The spaniel lost interest in us and sat down to search for fleas. The girl had persuaded her father to come indoors. She supported him as he staggered towards the house.
“I’m off; it must mortify her to have us see him.” Patsy strode ahead; we followed. Soon the fierce, prickly blades of the blue cactus hid the house from view.