This, the last of the Sarrions, was a patient looking man, with the quiet eyes of one who deals with Nature, and the slow movements of the far-sighted.  For Nature is always consistent, and never hurries those who watch her closely to obey the laws she writes so large in the instincts of man and beast.

The messenger gave his master the letter and then stood with the water rustling past his woollen stockings.  There was an odd suggestion of brotherhood between these men of very different birth.  For as men are equal in the sight of God, so are those dimly like each other who live in the open air and cast their lives upon the broad bosom of Nature.

Marcos handed his rod to the messenger, whose face, wrinkled like a walnut by the sun of Aragon, lighted up suddenly with pleasure.

“There,” he said, pointing to a swirling pool beneath some alders.  “There is a big one there, I have risen him once.”

He waded slowly back to the bank where a second crop of hay was already showing its new green, and sat down.

It seemed that Marcos de Sarrion was behind the times—­these new and wordy times into which Spain has floundered so disastrously since Charles III was king—­for he gave a deeper attention to the matter in hand than most have time for.  He turned from the hard task of catching a trout in clear water beneath a sunny sky, and gave his attention to his father’s letter.

“After all,” it read, “I want you, and await you in Saragossa.”

And that was all.  “Marcos will come,” the Count had reflected, “without persuasion.  And explanations are dangerous.”

In which he was right.  For this river, known as the Wolf, in which Marcos was peacefully fishing, was one of those Northern tributaries of the Ebro which have run with blood any time this hundred years.  The country, moreover, that it drained was marked in the Government maps as a blank country, or one that paid no taxes, and knew not the uniform of the Government troops.

Torre Garda, the long two-storied house crowning a hill-top farther up the valley of the Wolf, was one of the few country houses that have not stood empty since the forties.  And all the valley of the Wolf, from the grim Pyrenees standing sentinel at its head to the sunny plain almost in sight of Pampeluna, where the Wolf merges into other streams, was held quiescent in the grip of the Sarrions.

“We will fight,” said the men of this valley, “for the king, when we have a king worth fighting for.  And we will always fight for ourselves.”

And it was said that they only repeated what the Sarrions had told them.  At all events, no Carlists came that way.

“Torre Garda is not worth holding,” they said.

“And you cannot hold Pampeluna unless you take Torre Garda first,” thought those who knew the art of guerilla warfare.

So the valley of the Wolf awaited a king worth fighting for, and in the meantime they paid no taxes, enjoyed no postal service, and were perhaps none the worse without it.