Luis Fernandez bowed slightly but said nothing, while the invalid from his couch whined feebly that all the water was for him. The others might have the wine or at least some of it, but he must have all the water.
So Rollo Blair and his companion withdrew into the cool guest-chamber of the mill-house without having seen the little waving strip of red upon the roof. As soon as they were gone, however, Don Luis leaped up, and with a long fishing-pole he flaunted a strip of white beside the red, waving it this way and that for a long time, till in the close atmosphere of the strong-room the sweat rained from him in great drops.
Then he leaped down at last, muttering, "If the General is within twenty miles, as I think he is, that ought to bring him to Sarria. The angels grant that he arrive in time" (here he paused a moment, and then added with a bitter smile), "or the devils either. I am not particular, so be that he come!"
CHAPTER XIX
SIGNALS OF STORM
A long strip of Moorish-looking wall and certain towers that glittered white in the sun, advertised to Rollo that he approached the venta of Sarria. Without, that building might have passed for the palace of a grandee; within—but we know already what it was like within.
Rollo was impatient to find his companions. He had just discovered that he had most scurvily neglected them, and now he was all eagerness to make amends. But the house-place of the Café de Madrid was tenanted only by the Valiant and a clean silently-moving maid, who solved the problem of perpetual motion by finding something to do simultaneously in the kitchen, out in the shady patio among the copper water-vessels, and up in the sleeping chambers above.
Rollo's questioning produced nothing but a sleepy grunt from Don Gaspar Perico.
"Gone—no! They had better not," he muttered, "better not—without paying their score—bread and ham and eggs, to say nothing of the noise and disturbance they had occasioned. The tallest was a spitfire, a dare-devil—ah, your excellency, I did not know——"