"Carai! Caramba! Car——! This bantam will outface us on our own dung-hill! Close in there, Pedro! Take down the iron spit to him, JosÉ! Heaven's curses on his long arm! A foreigner to challenge us to fight with the knife, or with the sword, or with the pistol!"

From the kitchen of the venta at San Vicencio, just where the track up the Montblanch takes its first spring into the air, came these and other similar cries. It was a long and narrowish apartment—the upper portion merely of a ground-floor chamber, which occupied the whole length of the building.

Part of the space was intended for horses and mules, and indeed was somewhat overcrowded by them that night. These being alarmed by the tumult and shoutings, were rearing so far as their short unsinkered head-stalls permitted them, and in especial making play with their feet at the various machos or he-mules scattered among them. These gladly retaliated, that being their form of relaxation, and through the resulting chaos of whinnying, stamping, neighing, and striking of sparks from pavement stones, skirmished a score of brown imps, more than half naked, each armed with a baton or stout wand with which he struck and pushed the animals entrusted to their care out of the reach of harm, or with equal good-will gave a sly poke with the sharp spur of the goad to a neighbour's beast, by way of redressing any superiorities of heels or teeth.

But all the men had run together to the kitchen end of the apartment. Where the stable ended there was a step up, for all distinction between the abode of beasts and of men. Over this step most of those who had thus hasted to the fray incontinently stumbled. And in the majority of instances their stumble had been converted into a fall by a blow on the sconce, or across the shoulders, from the flat of a long sword wielded by the arm of a youth so tall as almost to reach the low-beamed ceiling along which the spiders were scuttling, in terror doubtless of the sweeping bright thing on which the firelight played as it waved this way and that.

First in the fray were a round dozen of Migueletes, come in from an unsuccessful chase, and eager to avenge on a stranger the failure and disgrace they had suffered from one of their own race. Next came a young butcher or two from the killing-yards, each already a toreador in his own estimation. The rest were chiefly arrieros or carriers, with a stray gipsy from the south, dark as a Moor; but every man as familiar with the use of his long curved sheath-knife as a cathedral priest with his breviary.

Meanwhile the tall young man with the long sword was not silent. His Spanish was fluent if inelegant, and as it had been acquired among the majos of Sevilla and the mule-clippers of Aragon rather than in more reputable quarters, his speech to the critical ear was flavoured with a certain rich allusiveness of personality and virility of adjective which made ample amends (in the company in which he found himself) for any want of grammatical correctness.

With the Spanish anathemas that formed the main portion of his address, he mingled certain other words in a foreign tongue, which, being strong-sounding and guttural, served him almost as well in the Venta of San Vicencio as his Carais and Carambas.

"Dogs of dog-mothers without honour! Come on, and I will stap twal inches o' guid steel warranted by Robin Fleming o' the Grassmarket doon your throats! A set o' gabbling geese—tak' that! With your virgins and saints! Ah, would you? There, that will spoil your sitting down for a day or two, my lad! Aye, scart, gin it does ye ony guid?"

A knife in his left hand, and in his right the long waving sword, bitter and sometimes unknown and mysterious words in his mouth, this youth kept his enemies very successfully at bay, meeting their blades six at a time, and treading and turning so lightly that as he lunged this way and that, there was a constant disorganisation among the opposing ranks, as one and the other sprang back to elude his far-reaching point.

"He is of the devil—a devil of devils!" they cried. "We shall all perish," wailed an old woman, shrinking back further into the chimney-corner, and wringing her hands.

Meanwhile the youth apostrophised his blade.

"My bonny Robin Fleemin'—as guid as ony Toledan steel that ever was forged! What do you think o' that for Leith Links? And they wad hae made me either a minister or a cooper's apprentice!"

As he spoke he disarmed one of his chief opponents, who in furious anger snatched a pistol and fired point-blank. The shot would indubitably have brought down the young hero of the unequal combat, had not a stout ruddy-faced youth, who had hitherto been leaning idly against the wall, knocked up the owner's arm at the moment the pistol went off.

"Ha' done!" cried the new-comer in English; "twenty to one is bad enough, specially when that one is a fool. But pistols in a house-place are a disgrace! Stand back there, will ye?"

And with no better weapon than a long-pronged labourer's fork snatched from the chimney-corner, he set himself shoulder to shoulder with the young Scot and laid lustily about him.

That son of an unkindly soil, instead of being grateful for this interference on his behalf, seemed at first inclined to resent it.

"What call had ye to put your neck in danger for an unkenned man's sake?" he cried, crabbedly. "Couldna ye hae letten me fill thae carles' skins as fu' o' holes as a riddle?"

"I am not the man to stand and see a countryman in danger!" said the other, while the broad sweeps of his companion's sword and the energetic lunges of his own trident kept the enemy at a respectful distance.

Suddenly a thought struck the Englishman. Without dropping the fork, he rushed to the hearth, where the ollas and pucheros of the entire company bubbled and steamed, he caught the largest of the pots in one hand and threatened to overturn the entire contents among the ashes and dÉbris on the floor.

"I speak their lingo but ill," he cried to his companion; "but tell them from John Mortimer, that if they do not cease their racket, I will warrant that they shall not have an onion or a sprig of garlic to stink their breaths with this night. And if that does not fear them, nothing will—not Purgatory itself!"

The young man communicated this in his own way, and though every man among his assailants was to the full as brave as himself, the threat of the Englishman did not fail in its effect. The arrieros and Aragonese horse-clippers drew off and consulted, while the Scot who had caused all the disturbance, dropped his point to the floor, and contented himself with wrapping his cloak more tightly about his defensive arm. He had evidently been some time in the country, for he wore the dark capa and red boina of Navarra, and answered the deputation which now came forward with readiness and composure. Whoever gave in, it would certainly not be he. That, at least, was the impression given by his attitude.

"Certainly, most certainly," he said. "I will be glad to meet any one of you anywhere. I will stand to my words spoken in any language, or any field of honour, from the carpet of a prime minister to one of your infernal dusty campos, with any weapon, from pistol and sword to a tooth-pick—with any Spaniard, or Frenchman, or mongrel tyke that ever lifted wine pot."

"Is this a way to speak to gentlemen—I put it to you, caballeros?" cried one of the deputation, a huge rawboned Galician, angrily.

The Scot instantly detected the accent of the speaker and, dismissing him with the gesture one uses to a menial, called out, "Caballeros, indeed! What needs this son of the burden-bearing animal to speak of Caballeros? Is there any old Castilian here, of the right ancient stock? If so, let him arbitrate between us. I, for one, will abide by his decision. The sons of gentlemen and soldiers will not do wrong to a soldier and a stranger!"

Then from the darkest and most distant corner, where he had sat wrapped in his great striped mantle with the cape drawn close about his head, rose a man of a little past the middle years of life, his black beard showing only a few threads of grey, where the tell-tale wisdom tuft springs from the under lip.

"Young sir," he said courteously, "I am an Old Castilian from Valladolid. I will hear your cause of quarrel, and, if you so desire, advise my compatriots, if they in their turn will consent to put their case into my hands."

There was some demur at this among the rougher gipsies and muleteers, but every one was anxious for the evening meal, and the fragrant earthen pipkins and great iron central pot gave forth a good smell. Also a red-waistcoated man-servant ran hither and thither among them, whispering in the ear of each belligerent; and his communication, having presumably to do with the stranger's quality and condition, had a remarkable effect in casting oil upon the waters. Indeed, the Migueletes had withdrawn as soon as the Castilian came forward, and presently he of Galicia, having consulted with his fellows, answered that for his part he was quite prepared to submit the causes of strife to the noble cavalier from Valladolid, provided the stranger also would abide by the decision.

"I have said so," put in the Scot fiercely, "and my custom is not to make a promise at night for the purpose of breaking it in the morning!"