After pondering over the question for as long a time as would be necessary to work out a rather difficult mathematical problem, he answered that he had.
“Then,” said I, “let me hear it.”
He grinned. “Do you think,” he said, “that it is a thing to be spoken in half a dozen words? I have not come all this distance merely to say that the moon came in dry, or that yesterday, being Friday, Doña Demetria tasted no meat. It is a long story, señor.”
“How many leagues long? Do you intend it to last all the way to Montevideo? The longer it is the sooner you ought to begin it.”
“There are things easy to say, and there are other things not so easy,” returned Santos. “But as to saying anything on horseback, who could do that?”
“Why not?”
“The question!” said he. “Have you not observed that when liquor is drawn from a cask—wine, or bitter orange-juice to make orangeade, or even rum, which is by nature white and clear—that it runs thick when the cask is shaken? It is the same with us, señor; our brain is the cask out of which we draw all the things we say.”
“And the spigot—”
“That is so,” he struck in, pleased with my ready intelligence; “the mouth is the spigot.”
“I should have thought the nose more like the spigot,” I replied.