When Morano said that the days were good Rodriguez set out to find them, or at least that one that for some while now lay waiting for them on the plain.  He strode down the slope at once and, endowing nature with his own impatience, he felt that he heard the morning call to him wistfully.  Morano followed.

For an hour these refugees escaping from peace went down the slope; and in that hour they did five swift miles, miles that seemed to run by them as they walked, and so they came lightly to the level plain.  And in the next hour they did four miles more.  Words were few, either because Morano brooded mainly upon one thought, the theme of which was his lack of bacon, or because he kept his breath to follow his master who, with youth and the morning, was coming out of the hills at a pace not tuned to Morano’s forty years or so.  And at the end of these nine miles Morano perceived a house, a little way from the road, on the left, upon rising ground.  A mile or so ahead they saw the narrow wood that they had viewed in the morning from the mountain running across the plain.  They saw now by the lie of the ground that it probably followed a stream, a pleasant place in which to take the rest demanded by Spain at noon.  It was just an hour to noon; so Rodriguez, keeping the road, told Morano to join him where it entered the wood when he had acquired his bacon.  And then as they parted a thought occurred to Rodriguez, which was that bacon cost money.  It was purely an afterthought, an accidental fancy, such as inspirations are, for he had never had to buy bacon.  So he gave Morano a fifth part of his money, a large gold coin the size of one of our five-shilling pieces, engraved of course upon one side with the glories and honours of that golden period of Spain, and upon the other with the head of the lord the King.  It was only by chance he had brought any at all; he was not what our newspapers will call, if they ever care to notice him, a level-headed business man.  At the sight of the gold piece Morano bowed, for he felt this gift of gold to be an occasion; but he trusted more for the purchase of the bacon to some few small silver coins of his own that he kept among lumps of lard and pieces of string.

And so they parted for a while, Rodriguez looking for some great shadowy oak with moss under it near a stream, Morano in quest of bacon.

When Rodriguez entered the wood he found his oak, but it was not such an oak as he cared to rest beneath during the heat of the day, nor would you have done so, my reader, even though you have been to the wars and seen many a pretty mess; for four of la Garda were by it and were arranging to hang a man from the best of the branches.

“La Garda again,” said Rodriguez nearly aloud.

His eye drooped, his look was listless, he gazed at other things; while a glance that you had not noticed, flashed slantingly at la Garda, satisfied Rodriguez that all four were strangers:  then he walked straight towards them merrily.  The man they proposed to hang was a stranger too.  He appeared at first to be as stout as Morano, and he was nearly half a foot taller, but his stoutness turned out to be sheer muscle.  The broad man was clothed in old brown leather and had blue eyes.