Centaur violently, accompanying his affirmation with a string of
tongue-blistering vocables. "In Madrid there is nothing but rascality.
What do they send us soldiers for? To squeeze more contributions out of
us and a couple of conscriptions afterward. By all that's holy! if there
isn't a rising there ought to be. So you"--he ended, looking banteringly
at the young man--"so you are Dona Perfecta's nephew?"

This abrupt question and the insolent glance of the bravo annoyed the
young man.

"Yes, senor, at your service."

"I am a friend of the senora's, and I love her as I do the apple of my
eye," said Caballuco. "As you are going to Orbajosa we shall see each
other there."

And without another word he put spurs to his horse, which, setting off
at a gallop, soon disappeared in a cloud of dust.

After half an hour's ride, during which neither Senor Don Jose nor Senor
Licurgo manifested much disposition to talk, the travellers came in
sight of an ancient-looking town seated on the slope of a hill, from the
midst of whose closely clustered houses arose many dark towers, and,
on a height above it, the ruins of a dilapidated castle. Its base was
formed by a mass of shapeless walls, of mud hovels, gray and dusty
looking as the soil, together with some fragments of turreted walls, in
whose shelter about a thousand humble huts raised their miserable
adobe fronts, like anaemic and hungry faces demanding an alms from the
passer-by. A shallow river surrounded the town, like a girdle of tin,
refreshing, in its course, several gardens, the only vegetation that