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be interpreted by one of our race. Thus they saw clear, from a height, the road they would go by, but not one
of all the events to which it would lead them.
"Master," said Morano, "shall we have more adventures to-day?"
"I trust so," said Rodriguez. "We have far to go, and it will be dull journeying without them."
Morano turned his eyes from his master's face and looked back to the plain. "There, master," he said, "where
our road runs through a wood, will our adventure be there, think you? Or there, perhaps," and he waved his hand
widely farther.
"No," said Rodriguez, "we pass that in bright daylight."
"Is that not good for adventure?" said Morano.
"The romances teach," said Rodriguez, "that twilight or night are better. The shade of deep woods is
favourable, but there are no such woods on this plain. When we come to evening we shall doubtless meet some
adventure, far over there." And he pointed to the grey rim of the plain where it started climbing towards hills.
"These are good days," said Morano. He forgot how short a time ago he had said regretfully that these days
were not as the old days. But our race, speaking generally, is rarely satisfied with the present, and Morano's
cheerfulness had not come from his having risen suddenly superior to this everyday trouble of ours; it came from
his having shifted his gaze to the future. Two things are highly tolerable to us, and even alluring, the past and the
future. It was only with the present that Morano was ever dissatisfied.
When Morano said that the days were good Rodriguez set out to find them, or at least that one that for some
while now lay waiting for them on the plain. He strode down the slope at once and, endowing nature with his
own impatience, he felt that he heard the morning call to him wistfully. Morano followed.
For an hour these refugees escaping from peace went down the slope; and in that hour they did five swift
miles, miles that seemed to run by them as they walked, and so they came lightly to the level plain. And in the
next hour they did four miles more. Words were few, either because Morano brooded mainly upon one thought,
the theme of which was his lack of bacon, or because he kept his breath to follow his master who, with youth
and the morning, was coming out of the hills at a pace not tuned to Morano's forty years or so. And at the end of
these nine miles Morano perceived a house, a little way from the road, on the left, upon rising ground. A mile or
so ahead they saw the narrow wood that they had viewed in the morning from the mountain running across the
plain. They saw now by the lie of the ground that it probably followed a stream, a pleasant place in which to take
the rest demanded by Spain at noon. It was just an hour to noon; so Rodriguez, keeping the road, told Morano to
join him where it entered the wood when he had acquired his bacon. And then as they parted a thought
occurred to Rodriguez, which was that bacon cost money. It was purely an afterthought, an accidental fancy,
such as inspirations are, for he had never had to buy bacon. So he gave Morano a fifth part of his money, a large
gold coin the size of one of our five-shilling pieces, engraved of course upon one side with the glories and honours
of that golden period of Spain, and upon the other with the head of the lord the King. It was only by chance he
had brought any at all; he was not what our newspapers will call, if they ever care to notice him, a level-headed
business man. At the sight of the gold piece Morano bowed, for he felt this gift of gold to be an occasion; but he
trusted more for the purchase of the bacon to some few small silver coins of his own that he kept among lumps
of lard and pieces of string.
And so they parted for a while, Rodriguez looking for some great shadowy oak with moss under it near a
stream, Morano in quest of bacon.
When Rodriguez entered the wood he found his oak, but it was not such an oak as he cared to rest beneath
during the heat of the day, nor would you have done so, my reader, even though you have been to the wars
and seen many a pretty mess; for four of la Garda were by it and were arranging to hang a man from the best of
the branches.
"La Garda again," said Rodriguez nearly aloud.
His eye drooped, his look was listless, he gazed at other things; while a glance that you had not noticed,
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