This we learned as one night we unharnessed our mules at a posada, less than a day’s journey from Toledo. Scarce had Sir Richard Pendragon received this information than he beat his stave on the water-cart and vowed that high heaven was smiling upon our enterprise. Indeed he declared that the victory was already in our hands. It was vain for me to seek an interpretation of this dark saying; yet by now I was determined to accept all that was urged by this formidable character, whom I had come to regard either as one of the wildest hare-brains of the age or one of its foremost intelligences. CHAPTER XXX OF OUR ADVENTURES AMONG THE CASTILIAN HOST I HAVE deemed it proper in the narration of that which follows to show my own feelings precisely as they afflicted me at the time, and not as they came to be modified by the strange things that happened. In the end it was given to me to learn that Sir Richard Pendragon, so far from being a hare-brain, was a very deep and masterful schemer. But in so far as his designs passed beyond my comprehension at the period of which I now treat, I have deemed it right not to anticipate that final tribute which it will be necessary to pay to his character in the appointed time and season. On setting out that morning from the posada, at Sir Richard’s behest we filled the cart and the skins with water and turned the heads of our mules in the direction of the King of Castile’s army. I yielded to these dispositions because, having come so far and having already obeyed in many things, I felt there was no other course to be taken; yet it was rather with the sense of being in a dream that I awaited the manifestation of this new extravagance. What fantasy was this that possessed our comrade? What new disorder of the mind had come upon him? As towards evening we entered the lines of the Castilian army it ran in my heart to revile the Count of Nullepart bitterly. It had come upon me that he had permitted the Englishman to betray our embassy. For trusting Sir Richard Pendragon so little it seemed to me that here was his clear design. Yet a moment’s reflection showed that if the Englishman was come to betray a mission that had failed so lamentably it would profit him not at all. He must certainly lose his life; and further, the means he had taken to accomplish his act of treachery would hardly have been accompanied by this degree of masquerade. When I heard the challenge, “Who goes there?” from the King’s soldiers I felt a sudden chill upon my heart. Yet it was no more than a passing cowardice, the fruit of circumstances so gravely remarkable, for our leader was prompt to show himself as true to his trust and also as infinitely cunning.