“I’m an American,” explained Cartaret. “The innkeeper down in the valley told me your castle was near here, so I thought that this was you. I’m rather caught here by the darkness. I wonder if——” He noted Eskurola’s eye and did not like it. “I wonder if there’s another inn—one somewhere near here.”
The Basque frowned. For a moment he said nothing. When he did speak it was in the slow, but precise, English that Cartaret had first heard from the lips of the Lady of the Rose.
“You, sir, are upon my land——”
“I’m very sorry,” said Cartaret.
“And,” continued Don Ricardo, “I could not permit to go to a mere inn any gentleman whom darkness has overtaken upon the land of the Eskurolas. It is true: on my land merely, you are not my guest; according to our customs, I am permitted to fight a duel, if need arises, with a gentleman that is on my land.” He smiled: he had, in the torchlight, a fearsome smile. “But on my land, you are in the way of becoming my guest. Will you be so good as to accompany me to my poor house and accept such entertainment as my best can give you?”
Cartaret accepted, and, in the act, thought the acceptance too ready.
“Pray remount,” urged Eskurola.
But Cartaret said that he would walk with his host, and so the still trembling mare was given to an unencumbered torch-bearer to lead, and, by the light of the pine-knots, the party began its ten-mile climb.
The night air, at that altitude, was keen even in Summer, and the way was dark. The American had an uneasy sense that he was often toiling along the edges of invisible abysses, and once or twice, from the forest, he heard the scurry of a fox and saw the green eyes of a lynx. He tried to make conversation and, to his surprise, found himself courteously met more than half way.
“I know very little of this part of Spain,” he said: “nothing, in fact, except what I’ve learned in the past few days and what the innkeeper down there told me.”