The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories by Geoffrey Household Page A

junction. He told me it was far harder than explaining to a child. Don Macario might have stepped into the signal box out of the sixteenth century. Ramon could take nothing for granted in his explanations. He said that he spent half the time explaining that wires were not hollow and that electricity did not trickle along inside them, but ran—well, however it does run.
    Don Macario insisted upon Ramon’s accepting some favor in return. Ramon protested, but at last accepted a few rose cuttings from the garden. It was clever, for he kept the old man late in the evening planting them for him. That was the only evening on which Don Macario missed his cinema performance. He would not leave until the last cutting was planted.
    For the Honor of the Queen had been withdrawn long since, but there was a regular succession of Wild West dramas, one so like another that the distributors must have found it hard to devise a different poster for each of them. They held Don Macario’s imagination. But he had little time to indulge his imagination .
    Later on, the pair of us began to take him with us for walks. He tired very quickly, so Ramon borrowed the innkeeper’s mule for him, a staid old beast that had once belonged to a fat abbot of Tarragona. That he might not feel embarrassed, we mounted a pair of mules ourselves, saying that our horses were lame.
    We were returning to Ventas one afternoon, and were near the edge of the valley in which it lay. Ventas itself was hidden. Before and behind us stretched the desolate plateau: in color soft as gold, if gold could rust; in shape and outline forbidding, for the earth was alive with boulders. Groves of olive and eucalyptus marked the course of the streams. They ran over bare rock in narrow, shallow cañons, their waters darkened by the cover of the unshining leaves. There were mills among the trees, and the beating of the water wheels could be heard from far off. Houses there were few, perhaps one to every six square miles, and those were taverns where the passing carrier could halt his train of mules and wash the dust out of his throat. Neither more nor less was seen by Cervantes, and well he knew the effect of that fantastic loneliness upon the reason.
    Ahead of us on the track we saw a party of countrymen jogging briskly along on donkeys which they were taking down to the town to be sold next day in the cattle market. They rode bareback and their legs nearly touched the ground. The golden dust eddied and swirled around the slender, tapping hoofs. There was a girl with them. She was evidently taking the opportunity to bring her vegetables to the town, for two huge panniers packed with green stuff hung on the flanks of the donkey. She sat on top of the lot, her legs sticking out parallel to the ground, since the pannier was too wide to allow them to bend at the knee. Her voluminous skirt covered the donkey, and under the load his back looked as broad as that of an elephant. The men were joking with her in deep, quiet voices, and her laughter and little shrieks of protest carried over them in a harsh treble.
    Once she cried out very loud in simulated anger. Don Macario heard her. He rammed his heels into the abbot’s mule and urged it into a sedate canter. He was well ahead of us before we realized that we had better follow him closely, but then our mules refused all effort except a rapid walk. He cantered, shouting, into the midst of the group, and tried to catch the girl by the waist and swing her on to his saddlebow. “Saved!” he cried. “Saved!” He could not lift her, and she, while he was off his balance, swung her arm and caught him a back-handed blow which knocked him off his mule.
    The men, with the swift understanding of peasants, recognized Don Macario for what he was, and knew that there was no easy explanation of this attack. They picked him up gently and set him on his mule again, calling the girl brute and savage. Before we could come up