"Yes, but this is a case of 'He that asks does not err, and I ask if they bury the dead with the deceased?'"
"What I mean is, when did you leave your house, and how did you happen to fall in with the partida?"[170]
"Ya! those are other questions, Lopez. Some French horsemen came here—they call them colaseros (cuirassiers)—my wife was more afraid of them than of a contagion, and every time she heard the clarionets, she would say to me, in a fright, 'They are sounding the charge.' 'No, wife,' I would tell her, 'they are sounding the premonition.' One day the cornet—they used to call him Trompi—came in tipsy, and insulted my wife. I, who was not afraid of any three that might come, and never stopped to think of consequences, said to him, 'Out of here, little soul of a pitcher, and Barabbas cut a slice from you!' With that he drew his sword, and would have cut me, but I snatched my knife, and finished him at once; and then, catching up mantle and blanket, took the wind for the mountains. I stopped in Benamahoma with the Padre Lovillo—and there you have it all."
"The Padre Lovillo was the captain of the partida?" questioned a youth.
"Yes, the Padre Lovillo. Candela! That was a man you could call a man! No talker—not he; but the words he used were few and good. If any one wanted to brag of his doings, he would say, 'Let them be seen, not heard. You understand, cackler? Stabs with steel, not with the tongue; balls of lead, not of wind.' Sirs, that man was ready for everything, as you would have declared with two tongues if you had had them. When we were going to attack the French, he used to say, 'Listen, sons, our fathers died for their country, and we are not to be less than they.' Then, drawing his sword, he would shout, 'Now let us see who has pluck!' and charge like another Santiago,[171] and we after him, as if he had led us to Paris in France. We felt neither hunger nor weariness; it was a fight without drum or trumpet, but it made the Frenchmen shiver. They named us the 'Briganes[172] of the Black Mountain,' and were more afraid of us than of the trained soldiery.
"Don 'Turo, who knew that I had been a brigan, called me into the parlor one evening, and, when he had squeezed himself into a chair, told me to sit down. I began to wonder where all these Masses were going to end.[173] Surely, I thought, he cannot want me to clean his gun! But I waited for the mountain to bring forth, and presently he asked me to explain the trafica[174] of guerilla fighting. When I saw him come out with that ladder, I got angry, and told him, 'No;' that my pronouncing was very bad, and his understanding worse. But all the others insisted, and, not to seem disobliging, I repeated a very good and well-versed poem, that was going the rounds then."
"And what was it about, Uncle Bartolo?"
"It relates a conversation between Malapart[175] and that Indian, Munrá, Duke of Ver."[176]
"Go on, uncle, say it," exclaimed all present.
The following romance, which the old guerilla recited, was very popular at that time among the people. It owes its humor to the fact that neither its unlettered composer, nor those who recited it, had any suspicion that they were giving a caricature. They considered it a simple and probable account of what would take place between Napoleon and Murat when they saw their last troops vanquished. Even the conclusion is in no way inconsistent with their ideas of the antecedents and characters of the personages: