Now it may be that the mention of this wine soothed the anger caused in the men of la Garda by two denials, or it may be that curiosity guided them, at any rate they took the road that led away from last night’s sinister shelter, Rodriguez and five of la Garda.  Two of them stayed behind with Morano, undecided as yet which way to take, though looking wistfully the way that that wine was said to be; and Rodriguez left Morano to his own devices, in which he trusted profoundly.

Now Rodriguez knew not the name of the next village that they would come to nor the names of any of the dwellers in it.

Yet he had a plan.  As he went by the side of one of the horses he questioned the rider.

“Can Morano write?” he said.  La Garda laughed.

“Can Morano talk Latin?” he said.  La Garda crossed themselves, all five men.  And after some while of riding, and hard walking for Rodriguez, to whom they allowed a hand on a stirrup leather, there came in sight the tops of the brown roofs of a village over a fold of the plain.  “Is this your village?” said one of his captors.

“Surely,” answered Rodriguez.

“What is its name?” said one.

“It has many names,” said Rodriguez.

And then another one of them recognised it from the shape of its roofs.  “It is Saint Judas-not-Iscariot,” he said.

“Aye, so strangers call it,” said Rodriguez.

And where the road turned round that fold of the plain, lolling a little to its left in the idle Spanish air, they came upon the village all in view.  I do not know how to describe this village to you, my reader, for the words that mean to you what it was are all the wrong words to use.  “Antique,” “old-world,” “quaint,” seem words with which to tell of it.  Yet it had no antiquity denied to the other villages; it had been brought to birth like them by the passing of time, and was nursed like them in the lap of plains or valleys of Spain.  Nor was it quainter than any of its neighbours, though it was like itself alone, as they had their characters also; and, though no village in the world was like it, it differed only from the next as sister differs from sister.  To those that dwelt in it, it was wholly apart from all the world of man.

Most of its tall white houses with green doors were gathered about the market-place, in which were pigeons and smells and declining sunlight, as Rodriguez and his escort came towards it, and from round a corner at the back of it the short, repeated song of one who would sell a commodity went up piercingly.

This was all very long ago.  Time has wrecked that village now.  Centuries have flowed over it, some stormily, some smoothly, but so many that, of the village Rodriguez saw, there can be now no more than wreckage.  For all I know a village of that name may stand on that same plain, but the Saint Judas-not-Iscariot that Rodriguez knew is gone like youth.

Queerly tiled, sheltered by small dense trees, and standing a little apart, Rodriguez recognised the house of the Priest.  He recognised it by a certain air it had.  Thither he pointed and la Garda rode.  Again he spoke to them.  “Can Morano speak Latin?” he said.