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.
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