As Cardono and La Giralda departed out of the camp, the Sergeant driving before him a donkey which he had picked up the night before wandering by the wayside, El Sarria looked after them with a sardonic smile which slowly melted from his face, leaving only the giant's usual placid good nature apparent on the surface. The mere knowledge that Dolores was alive and true to him seemed to have changed the hunted and desperate outlaw almost beyond recognition. "Why do you smile, El Sarria?" said Concha, who stood near by, as the outlaw slowly rolled and lighted a _cigarrillo_. "You do not love this Sergeant. You do not think he is a man to be trusted?" El Sarria shrugged his shoulders, and slowly exhaled the first long breathing of smoke through his nostrils. "Nay," he said deliberately, "I have been both judged and misjudged myself, and it would ill become me in like manner to judge others. But if that man is not of your country and my trade, Ramon Garcia has lived in vain. That is all." Concha nodded a little uncertainly. "Yes," she said slowly, "yes--of my country. I believe you. He has the Andalucian manner of wearing his clothes. If he were a girl he would know how to tie a ribbon irregularly and how to place a bow-knot a little to the side in the right place--things which only Andalucians know. But what in the world do you mean by 'of your profession'?" El Sarria smoked a while in silence, inhaling the blue cigarette smoke luxuriously, and causing it to issue from his nostrils white and moisture-laden with his breath. Then he spoke. "I mean of my late profession," he explained, smiling on Concha; "it will not do for a man on the high-road to a commission to commit himself to the statement that he has practised as a bandit, or stopped a coach on the highway in the name of King Carlos Quinto that he might examine more at his ease the governmental mail bags. But our Sergeant--well, I am man-sworn and without honour if he hath not many a time taken blackmail without any such excuse!" Concha seemed to be considering deeply. Her pretty mouth was pursed up like a ripe strawberry, and her brows were knitted so fiercely that a deep line divided the delicately arched eyebrows. "And to this I can add somewhat," she began presently; "they say (I know not with what truth) that I have some left-handed gipsy blood in me--and if that man be not a Gitano--why, then I have never seen one. Besides, he speaks with La Giralda in a tongue which neither I nor Don Rollo understand." "But I thought," said El Sarria, astonished for the first time, "that both you and Don Rollo understood the crabbed gipsy tongue! Have I not heard you speak it together?"