‘Whatever phantoms they be,’ answered the knight, ‘they shall not touch a hair of your head,’ replied Don Quixote soothingly. ‘If they mocked at you in the inn, it was for reason that I could not leap the fence. But here, where the ground is open, I can lay about me as I will.’
‘And what if they bewitch you, as they did that other time?’ asked the squire. ‘How much will the open ground profit you then’?
‘Trust to me,’ replied Don Quixote, ‘for my experience is greater than yours’; and Sancho said no more.
They stood a little on one side watching the lights approaching, and soon they saw a host of men clad in white riding along the road. The squire’s teeth chattered at the sight of them, and his terror increased when he was able to make out that the moving stars were flaming torches which men in white shirts carried in their hands, and that behind them followed a litter draped in black. After the litter came six other men dressed in black and mounted on mules. And Sancho had no doubt that he saw before him shadows from the next world.
Though Don Quixote’s heart quailed for a moment at the strangeness of the vision, he soon recalled his valour. In an instant his fancy had changed the litter into a bier, and the occupant into a knight who had been done to death by foul means, and whom he was bound in honour to avenge. So he moved forward to the middle of the road, and cried in a loud voice:
‘Proud knights, whoever you may be, stand and give me account of yourselves, and tell me who it is that lies in that bier. For either you have done an ill deed to some man, or else a wrong has been done to you.’
‘Pardon me, fair sir,’ answered the foremost of the white-shirted men, ‘but we are in haste, and the inn is far. We have no time for parleying.’
This reply only confirmed Don Quixote’s worst suspicions.
‘Stop, or you are a dead man,’ cried he in tones of thunder. ‘Tell me who you are and whither you are going, or else I will fight you all’; and with that he seized the mule by the bridle. The mule, not being used to such rough treatment, reared herself up on her hind legs, so that her rider slipped off her back. At this sight one of the other men ran to his aid, calling the knight all the ill names he could think of, which so inflamed the anger of Don Quixote that he laid about him with his spear on every side. Even Rozinante seemed to have gotten a new spirit as well as a new body, for he turned him about so nimbly that soon the plain was covered with flying white men, still holding the bobbing torches. The mourners who rode behind did not escape so easily, for their long skirts and cloaks hindered them from moving, and Don Quixote struck and beat them just as he would, till they took him to be a giant or enchanter rather than a man.
Sancho, as was his custom, bore no part in the fray, but stood by and said to himself: ‘Had ever any man such a master!’