Upon this the old man sat down beside Sergeant Cardono, or, as his new friends knew him to be, Jose Maria the brigand. He did not talk about the intended attack as the Sergeant hoped he would. Being impressed by the greatness of his guest, he entered into a minute catalogue of the captures he had made, the men he had slain as recorded on the butt of his gun or the haft of his knife, and the cargoes he had successfully "run" across the mountains or beached on the desolate sands of Catalunia. "I am no inlander," he said, "I am of the sea-coast of Tarragona. I have never been south of Tortosa in my life; but there does not live a man who has conducted more good cigars and brandy to their destination than old Pepe of the Eleven Wounds!" The sergeant with grave courtesy reached him a well-rolled cigarette. "I have heard of your fame, brother," he said; "even at Ronda and on the Madrid-Seville road your deeds are not unknown. But what of this venture to-night? Have you enough men, think you, to overpower the town watchmen and the palace-guards?" The old gipsy tossed his bony hands into the air with a gesture of incomparable contempt. "The palace guards are fled back to Madrid," he cried, "and as to the town watch they are either drunk or in their dotage!" Meantime the main body of the gipsies waited patiently in the background, and every few minutes their numbers were augmented by the arrival of others over the various passes of the mountains. These took their places without salutation, like men expected, and fell promptly to listening to the conversation of the two great men, who sat smoking their cigarettes each on his own stone in the wide wild corrie among the rocks of the Guadarrama which had been chosen as an appropriate rendezvous. Singularly enough, after the sergeant had shown the scarlet mark of the strangling ring about his neck, no one of all that company doubted for a moment that he was indeed the thrice-famous Jose Maria of Ronda. None asked a question as to his whence or whither. He was Jose Maria, and therefore entitled not only to be taken at once into the secrets of Egypt, but also, and it pleased him, to keep his own.