“I can walk Spanish, but I can’t talk Spanish; and so I couldn’t understand him.”
“You don’t know what he said, then?”
Scott hesitated again.
“I don’t say that.”
“But you intimated that you did not understand Spanish.”
“I do know what the gentleman said as I passed him,” replied Scott.
“How could you know, without understanding the language he spoke?”
“Raimundo told me what he said; and he could understand Spanish if I could not.”
“Ah, indeed! Raimundo told you! Well, what did he tell you the gentleman said?” asked the vice-principal earnestly.
“He told me he heard the gentleman ask the principal if he had a student under his care by the name of Enrique Raimundo: that’s all he heard, and that’s all he told me about the gentleman,” replied Scott, who had said so much because he believed that this information would do his absent shipmate more good than harm.