The other made a mysterious gesture with a tiny hand peeping from under his cloak.  His hat hung very much at the side of his head.  “Senor,” he said without any preliminaries.  “Caution!  It is a positive fact that one-eyed Bernardino, my brother-in-law, has at this moment a mule in his stable.  And why he who is not clever has a mule there?  Because he is a rogue; a man without conscience.  Because I had to give up the macho to him to secure for myself a roof to sleep under and a mouthful of olla to keep my soul in this insignificant body of mine.  Yet, senor, it contains a heart many times bigger than the mean thing which beats in the breast of that brute connection of mine of which I am ashamed, though I opposed that marriage with all my power.  Well, the misguided woman suffered enough.  She had her purgatory on this earth—­God rest her soul.”

Byrne says he was so astonished by the sudden appearance of that sprite-like being, and by the sardonic bitterness of the speech, that he was unable to disentangle the significant fact from what seemed but a piece of family history fired out at him without rhyme or reason.  Not at first.  He was confounded and at the same time he was impressed by the rapid forcible delivery, quite different from the frothy excited loquacity of an Italian.  So he stared while the homunculus letting his cloak fall about him, aspired an immense quantity of snuff out of the hollow of his palm.

“A mule,” exclaimed Byrne seizing at last the real aspect of the discourse.  “You say he has got a mule?  That’s queer!  Why did he refuse to let me have it?”

The diminutive Spaniard muffled himself up again with great dignity.

“Quien sabe,” he said coldly, with a shrug of his draped shoulders.  “He is a great politico in everything he does.  But one thing your worship may be certain of—­that his intentions are always rascally.  This husband of my defunta sister ought to have been married a long time ago to the widow with the wooden legs.” {1}

“I see.  But remember that; whatever your motives, your worship countenanced him in this lie.”

The bright unhappy eyes on each side of a predatory nose confronted Byrne without wincing, while with that testiness which lurks so often at the bottom of Spanish dignity —

“No doubt the senor officer would not lose an ounce of blood if I were stuck under the fifth rib,” he retorted.  “But what of this poor sinner here?” Then changing his tone.  “Senor, by the necessities of the times I live here in exile, a Castilian and an old Christian, existing miserably in the midst of these brute Asturians, and dependent on the worst of them all, who has less conscience and scruples than a wolf.  And being a man of intelligence I govern myself accordingly.  Yet I can hardly contain my scorn.  You have heard the way I spoke.  A caballero of parts like your worship might have guessed that there was a cat in there.”