He spoke in Spanish, which is my native tongue—­although not my ancestral one.  And as I crouched to pass the archway I found time to speculate on his business in this cavern.  For clearly he had not come hither to drink, and as clearly he had nothing to do with either army.  At first glance I took him for a priest; but his bands, if he wore them, were hidden beneath a dark poncho fitting tightly about his throat, and his bald head baffled any search for a tonsure.  Although a small book lay open on his lap, I had interrupted no reading; for when I came upon him his spectacles were perched high over his brows and gleamed upon me like a duplicate pair of eyes.  He was patently sober, too, which perhaps came as the greatest shock of all to me, after meeting so many on my path who were patently the reverse.

I answered his salutation.  “But you will pardon me, excellent sir, for saying that you perhaps mistake the entertainment I seek.  We gentlemen of Spain are temperate livers, and I will confess that curiosity alone has brought me—­or say, rather, the fame of your wonderful cellars of Rueda.”

I put it thus, thinking he might perhaps be some official of the caves or of the castle above.  But he let the shot pass.  His lean hands from the first had been fumbling with his poncho, to throw back the folds of it in courtesy to a stranger; but this seemed no easy matter, and at a sign from me he desisted.

“I can promise you,” he answered, “nothing more amusing than the group with which you paused to converse just now by the road.”

“Eh?  You saw me?”

“I was watching from the path outside; for I too can enjoy a timely laugh.”

No one, I am bound to say, would have guessed it.  With his long scrag neck and great moons of spectacles, which he had now drawn down, the better to study me, he suggested an absurd combination of the vulture and the owl.

“Dios! You have good eyes, then.”

“For long distances.  But they cannot see Salamanca.”  His gaze wandered for a moment to the entrance beyond which, far below and away, a sunny landscape twinkled, and he sighed.  But before I could read any meaning in the words or the sigh, his spectacles were turned upon me again.  “You are Spanish?” he asked abruptly.

“Of Castile, for that matter; though not, I may own to you, of pure descent.  I come from Aranjuez, where a Scottish ancestor, whose name I bear, settled and married soon after the War of Succession.”

“A Scot?” He leaned forward, and his hands, which had been resting on his lap, clutched the book nervously.  “Of the Highlands?”

I nodded, wondering at his agitation.

“Even so, senor.”

“They say that all Scotsmen in Spain know one another.  Tell me, my son “—­he was a priest, then, after all—­“tell me, for the love of God, if you know where to find a certain Manuel McNeill, who, I hear, is a famous scout.”