“Ah, you were talking of those three drunkards?  Well, they must have emerged by following this very path.”

“Impossible.”

“Excuse me, but for a scout whose fame is acknowledged, you seem fond of a word which Bonaparte (we are told) has banished from the dictionaries.  Ask yourself, now.  They were assuredly drunk, and your own eyes have assured you there is no wine between us and daylight.  My son, I have inhabited Rueda long enough to acquire a faith in miracles, even had I brought none with me.  Along this ledge our three drunkards strolled like children out of the very womb of earth.  They will never know what they escaped:  should the knowledge ever come to them it ought to turn their hair grey then and there.”

“Children and drunkards,” said I.  “You know the byword?”

“And might believe it—­but for much evidence on the other side.”

But I was following another thought, and for the moment did not hear him closely.  “I suppose, then, the owners guard the main entrances, but leave such as this, for instance, to be defended by their own difficulty?”

“Why should any be guarded?” he asked, pausing to untie a second candle from the bunch he had suspended from his belt.

“Eh?  Surely to leave all this wine exposed in a world of thieves—­”

The reverend father smiled as he lit the new candle from the stump of his old one.  “No doubt the wine-growers did not contemplate a visit from two armies, and such very thirsty ones.  The peasants hereabouts are abstemious, and the few thieves count for no more than flies.  For the rest—­”

He was stooping again, with his candle all but level with the ledge and a few inches wide of it.  Held so, it cast a feeble ray into the black void below us:  and down there—­thirty feet down perhaps—­as his talk broke in two like a snapped guitar-string, my eyes caught a blur of scarlet.

“For God’s sake,” I cried, “hold the light steady!”

“To what purpose?” he asked grimly.  “That is one whom Providence did not lead out to light.  See, he is broken to pieces—­you can tell from the way he lies; and dead, too.  My son, the caves of Rueda protect themselves.”

He shuffled to the end of the ledge, and there, at the entrance of a dark gallery, so low that our heads almost knocked against the rock-roof, he halted again and leaned his ear against the wall on the right.

“Sometimes where the wall is thin I have heard them crying and beating on it with their fists.”

I shivered.  The reader knows me by this time for a man of fair courage:  but the bravest man on earth may be caught off his own ground, and I do not mind confessing that here was a situation for which a stout parentage and a pretty severe training had somehow failed to provide.  In short, as my guide pushed forward, I followed in knock-knee’d terror.  I wanted to run.  I told myself that if this indeed