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.
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