They set forth at once in the yellow light of the waning moon, Marcos leading the way up a pathway hardly discernible amid the rocks and undergrowth.  Once or twice he turned to help Juanita over a hard or a dangerous place.  But they did not talk, as conversation was not only difficult but inexpedient.  They had climbed for two hours, slowly and steadily, when the barking of a dog on the mountainside above them notified them that they were nearing their destination.

“Who is it?” asked a voice presently.

“Marcos de Sarrion,” replied Marcos.  “Strike no lights.”

“We have no candles up here,” answered the man with a laugh.  He only spoke Basque and it was in this language that Marcos gave a brief explanation.  Juanita sat on a rock.  She was tired out.  There were three men—­short, thick-set and silent, a father and two sons.  They stood in front of Marcos and spoke in monosyllables after the manner of old friends.  Under his directions they brought a heap of dried bracken and hay.  In a shed, little more than a roof and four uprights, they made a rough couch for Juanita which they hedged round with heaps of bracken to protect her from the wind.

“You will see the stars,” said the old man shaking out the blanket which Marcos had carried up from the cottage at the ford.  “It is good to see the stars when you awake in the night.  One remembers that the saints are watching.”

In a few minutes Juanita was sleeping, like a child, curled up beneath her blanket, and heard through her dreams the low voices of Marcos and the peasants talking hurriedly in the half-ruined cottage.  For Marcos and these three were the only men who knew the way over the mountains to Torre Garda.

The dawn was just breaking when Marcos awoke Juanita.

“Oh,” she said plaintively.  “I have only been asleep ten minutes.”

“You have slept three hours,” replied Marcos in that hushed voice in which it seems natural to speak before the dawn.  “I am making coffee—­come when you are ready.”

Juanita found a pail of water and a piece of last year’s yellow soap which had been carefully scraped clean with a knife.  A clean towel had also been provided.  Juanita noted the manly simplicity of these attentions with a little tender and wise smile.

“I know what it is that makes men gipsies,” she said, when she joined Marcos who was attending to a fire of sticks on the ground at the cottage door.  “I shall always have a kindly feeling for them now.  They get something straight from heaven which is never known to people who sleep in stuffy houses and get up to wash in warm water.”

She gave a little shiver at the recollection of her ablutions, and laughed a clear, low laugh, as fresh as the morning itself.

“Where are the men?” she asked.

“One has gone to Pampeluna, one has taken a note to the officer commanding the reinforcements sent for by Zeneta.  The third has gone down to fetch his mother up here to bake bread all day.  There will be a little army here to-night.”