ON the morrow Don Carlos was promptly called upon to redeem his forfeit. Rafael was so much better that he had been lifted over to his father’s hammock, where, propped against pillows, he sat almost upright, taking, for the first time since his illness began, his usual breakfast of chocolate and bread. Pilarica, in celebration of this happy event, had waited to breakfast with him, and the two children were having great fun, throwing back their heads in unison as they dipped the long strips of bread into their bowls of cinnamon-flavored chocolate, so thick that it clung to the bread in a sticky lump. They were very dexterous in whirling up the bread-sticks and directing the sluggish brown trickle into their mouths without spilling a drop, afterwards biting off the chocolate-laden end of the bread and hungrily dipping again.

“And now for the heroes!” called Rafael.

“You didn’t say please,” rebuked Pilarica.

“Heroes, please,” amended the boy, “but girls ought not to correct their brothers.”

“Do me the favor to excuse me,” apologized Pilarica.

“There is no occasion for it,” returned Rafael with his best Andalusian manner.

“A thousand thanks,” responded Pilarica. And now that this series of polite phrases, taught in every Spanish nursery, was duly accomplished, Rafael called again for the heroes.

“One at a time,” responded the father, throwing out his hands with a gesture of playful remonstrance. He had just come back from his morning walk with Rodrigo, whom he liked to accompany for at least a part of the way to the Institute, and was warm from the return climb. “One hero a day, like one breakfast a day, is quite enough for Don Anybody.”

Then he told them stories of a champion who was mighty in Spain eight hundred years ago.

“If I were one hundred times as old as I am,” cried Rafael with sparkling eyes, “perhaps I would have seen him.”

“Perhaps,” smiled Don Carlos, and went on to tell the children that this warrior’s name was the name of their own brother, Rodrigo, though he had other names, too, as Ruy Diaz de Bivar, and was most often called the Cid, or Lord, a title given him by the five Moorish kings whom he conquered all at once.

“Five—Moorish—kings!” exclaimed Rafael in rapture, while Pilarica, to help her imagination, propped up five tawny breadsticks in a row.

So their father told them how the Cid, when a stripling not twenty summers old, had ridden forth on his fiery horse, Bavieca, followed by a troop of youthful friends, against those five royal Moors who, with a great army, were plundering Castile, and how he overthrew them and set their host of Christian captives free.

“Our Rodrigo would have done that, too,” declared Rafael proudly, while Pilarica, with one valiant dab of her forefinger, tumbled the five bread-sticks into the dust. Later, remembering Tia Marta, she picked them up and polished them off with a handful of rose-petals before restoring them to the plate.

Finding his hero so popular, Don Carlos recited what he could remember of an old Spanish ballad that tells of the Cid’s offer to give Bavieca to the King of Castile.

Rafael’s mind was still full of the Cid when, two or three days later, he was well enough to take a short ride on Shags outside the garden. The rough-coated, mouse-colored donkey carried his young master jauntily, being apparently well pleased to see him out again. Don Carlos, racking his memory for more ballads of the Cid, was walking beside Shags, when Pilarica, who had tripped on ahead and turned a corner, uttered a cry of distress. The father sprang forward and found the child on her knees in the dust of the highway, her face streaming with tears, while she held up her clasped hands in entreaty to a sullen-faced fellow who was brutally beating his ass. The poor creature, hardly more than skin and bones, was so cruelly overladen with sacks of charcoal that he had stumbled on a steep and stony bit of the road and broken the fastenings of one of the sacks, whose contents were merrily making off downhill like little black imps on a holiday. The peasant, in a fury, was dealing the ass great fisticuffs on the tender nose, and between the eyes, shut in patient endurance of the blows.

Don Carlos had often seen animals beaten and had usually passed by with a shrug of annoyance, but the anguish of pity in his little daughter’s face and attitude suddenly smote him with an intolerable feeling, as if that horny fist were pounding his own heart.

“Hold, there, my friend!” he protested. “Enough is as good as a feast. If you kill your donkey, who will carry the load?”

The charcoal seller, his arm raised for another blow, stared in astonishment at the speaker.

“You would do well to put your tongue in your pocket,” he growled. “This ass is mine, to beat if I choose and to kill if I choose. I am thinking that is what I will do, for his skin is the best of him now.”

Pilarica rose and rushed to her father, her eyes their deepest pansy purple with beseeching.

“Oh, dearest father, if you please! If you would kindly do me the favor! Instead of the doll with golden hair, if only you would give me this sweet, beautiful donkey!”

Her father lifted her in his arms, so that the flushed, wet face was pressed against his own.

“Do you mean it, Honeydrop? Think again. Do you really wish me to buy you this wretched ass in place of the wonderful dolly with Paris clothes, in the Granada shop? I am afraid there is not money enough for both.”

“Oh, yes, yes!” entreated Pilarica. “The doll is happy in the shop-window, where she can see the children smile at her as they go by, but the donkey—oh, father, the donkey!”

The peasant, whose arm had fallen to his side and who had been listening shrewdly, now stepped forward, touching his hat with a surly civility.

“It’s not for the price of a basket of cabbages I would be selling my fine donkey. I’m a poor man, your Worship. All that God has given me for my portion in the world is morning and evening, three pennyworths of poverty, and a bushel of children with the gullets of sharks. What would become of us all without my strong, good ass?”

“I’ll give you two dollars for your dingy old rattlebones, my man, and that is twice what anybody else would be fool enough to give you,” said Don Carlos, holding out the coins.

The charcoal-seller looked at them greedily, but still hung back.

“Come, now!” spoke Don Carlos sharply. “Don’t stand hesitating like a grasshopper that wants to jump and doesn’t know where. Remember that covetousness bursts the bag. Is it a bargain or not?”

The decision of the officer’s tone and, still more, the tempting gleam of the silver prevailed, but the peasant would not give over his donkey until he had delivered the load of charcoal. So Don Carlos and Pilarica, Rafael and Shags, escorted Sooty-Face and his limping ass to the hotel hard by the Alhambra, where the sale was at last effected.

“And now the donkey, such as he is, is yours,” said Don Carlos, putting the shabby bridle into Pilarica’s hand. “Haven’t you a smile for me now?”

But the child, though she kissed her father gratefully, flung her arms about the donkey’s neck, and, pressing her cheek to the bruised nose, cried harder than ever, until Shags felt it time to interfere. That generous-minded animal, whose long ears had been responding, with various cocks and tremors, to every stage of the proceedings, now drowned Pilarica’s sobs in a resounding bray. The stranger seemed to understand this greeting better than he understood Pilarica’s endearments and took a timid step or two toward his new comrade.

“Shall we call him Bavieca?” asked Rafael, eying the sorry beast doubtfully. He certainly did small credit to the name of the peerless steed.

“Better call him Rosinante,” laughed the father, “after the forlorn old horse of Don Quixote, who was something of a hero, too, in his way. Most people, as, for instance, his fat squire, Sancho Panza, who rode a famous ass named Dapple, thought it a very foolish way.”

“Why?” questioned Pilarica, whisking off her tears with the ends of her hair-ribbon.

“Oh, he took windmills for giants, and wayside inns for castles, and flocks of sheep for armies. He rode through the country trying to right wrongs and only got knocked about and made fun of for his pains. In fact, this coming to the rescue of an abused donkey is something after his fashion.”

And Don Carlos, a little shame-faced, looked his purchase over. The ass was lame in one foot, covered with welts and fly-bites, and so weak that he seemed hardly able to walk even now that his load had been removed. But Pilarica was enchanted with him and kept lavishing caresses upon the gaunt beast, whose large, liquid eyes looked out wonderingly at her.

“I want to call him Don Quixote,” she announced. “I think Don Quixote is a lovely hero, and this is such a lovely, lovely donkey.”

“Very well!” assented her father, with a shrug. “At any rate, he’s lean enough. And now to see what Tia Marta will have to say to this performance of ours!”

But Tia Marta unexpectedly took Don Quixote to her heart. As the ass stood before her for inspection, hanging his head as if aware of his unsightliness, and now and then slowly shaking his drooped ears, she surveyed him for a moment, her squinting eyes taking account of all the marks of cruel usage, and then stamped her foot in anger.

“That charcoal-seller ought to be thrashed like wheat,” she cried. “How I wish I had the drubbing of him! I would like to split him in two like a pomegranate. But God knows the truth, and let it rest there. And this donkey is not so bad a bargain, Don Carlos. See what I will make of him, with food and rest and ointment. The blessed ass of Bethlehem, he who warmed with his breath the Holy Babe in the manger and bore Our Lady of Mercy on his back to Egypt, could have no better care from me than I will spend on this maltreated innocent.”

Tia Marta was as good as her word. Her choicest balsams were brought to bear upon the donkey’s hurts, and Leandro, whom Rodrigo asked over to see the animal, for gypsies are wise in such matters, agreed with the old woman that the ass was of good stock and might have, under decent conditions, years of service in him yet. When the charcoal stains were washed away and the discoloration of the bruises had faded out, the discovery was made, to Pilarica’s ecstasy, that Don Quixote was a white donkey. Oh, to possess a plump white donkey! The child was in such haste to see those scarecrow outlines rounded out that Tia Marta grew extravagant and added handfuls of barley to the regular rations of chopped straw. And as it would never do to feed the new-comer better than the faithful Shags, that Long-Ears, too, found his fare improved, so that, with a chum to share his cellar and a festival dinner every day, he waxed fat and frisky and often sang, as best he could, his resonant psalm of life.

Pilarica went carolling like a bird through the old garden in those blithe spring mornings, and Rafael had grown so vigorous that he was again more than a match for her at their favorite game of Titirinela. The children would clasp hands, brace their feet together until the tips of Rafael’s sandals strained against his sister’s, fling their small bodies back as far as the length of their arms would allow, and then spin around and around like a giddy top, singing responsively:

Once, as Don Carlos came to pick up his little daughter, after the whirling top had broken in two and each half had rolled laughing on the ground, Pilarica clasped her arms tight about his neck, exclaiming:

“Dearest father, are we not the very happiest people in all the world!”

But he hastily thrust an official-looking envelope into his pocket and, for his only answer, shut the shining eyes with kisses.