“You there! Why, it was the time you went to Seville!”
“Very well, I was not there. Blas told me, and there’s an end to it.”
“But of what importance is all this?” asked Quentin.
“Let them be,” interrupted the ill-tempered girl; “they’re two disagreeable old uncles!”
“Don Gil,” said Pacheco, smiling and winking his eye, “permits no one to be informed of anything he does not know about himself.”
“Well, what will you bet,” Currito presently broke out, “that you don’t know what El Golotino said when he had the lawsuit with El Manano?”
“Let’s hear, let’s hear. This is most important,” remarked Pacheco.
“Well, there isn’t much to it. El Golotino, as you know, had a herd of a couple of dozen goats, and El Manano, who was a charcoal-burner, had rented a hill; and to find out whether the goats had wandered on the hill or not, they had a lawsuit, which El Golotino lost. Don Nicanor, the clerk, was making an inventory of the property of the owner of the goats, and was adding: ‘two and four are six, and four are ten—carry one; fourteen and six are twenty, and three are twenty-three—carry two; twenty-seven and eight are thirty-five, and six are forty-one—carry four.’ El Golotino thought that when the clerk said, ‘carry one,’ he meant that he was going to carry off one goat, so he shouted tearfully: ‘Well, for that, you can carry off the whole bunch of them!’”
“That is not the way it was,” Señor Sabadía started to remark, but every one burst out laughing.
“Come, girls, we must go home,” announced Señora Rosario.