“Dancaïre gave me his hand. He was a man of fifty.
“‘To the devil with love affairs!’ he cried. ‘If you had asked him for Carmen, he’d have sold her to you for a piastre. There’s only two of us now; how shall we manage to-morrow?’
“‘Let me do it all alone,’ I replied. ‘I snap my fingers at the whole world now.’
“We buried Garcia and pitched our camp again two hundred yards away. The next day Carmen and her Englishman passed, with two muleteers and a servant.
“I said to Dancaïre:
“‘I will take care of the Englishman. Frighten the others—they are not armed.’
“The Englishman had pluck. If Carmen had not struck his arm, he would have killed me. To make my story short, I won Carmen back that day, and my first words to her were to tell her that she was a widow. When she learned how it had happened:
“‘You will always be a lillipendi!’ she said. ‘Garcia ought to have killed you. Your Navarrese guard is all folly, and he has put out the light of better men than you. It means that his time had come. Yours will come too.’
“‘And yours,’ I retorted, ‘unless you’re a true romi to me.’
“‘All right,’ said she, ‘I’ve read more than once in coffee grounds that we were to go together. Bah! let what is planted come up!’