He
advised the captain-general to insist upon the right of examining
every convoy passing through the gates of his city, and penned a
long letter for him in vindication of the right. Governor Manco was
a straightforward cut-and-thrust old soldier, who hated an escribano
worse than the devil and this one in particular worse than all other
escribanos.
"What!" said he, curling up his mustaches fiercely, "does the
captain-general set his man of the pen to practise confusions upon me?
I'll let him see an old soldier is not to be baffled by schoolcraft."
He seized his pen and scrawled a short letter in a crabbed hand,
in which, without deigning to enter into argument, he insisted on
the right of transit free of search, and denounced vengeance on any
custom-house officer who should lay his unhallowed hand on any
convoy protected by the flag of the Alhambra. While this question
was agitated between the two pragmatical potentates, it so happened
that a mule laden with supplies for the fortress arrived one day at
the gate of Xenil, by which it was to traverse a suburb of the city on
its way to the Alhambra. The convoy was headed by a testy old
corporal, who had long served under the governor, and was a man
after his own heart; as rusty and stanch as an old Toledo blade.
As they approached the gate of the city, the corporal placed the
banner of the Alhambra on the pack-saddle of the mule, and drawing
himself up to a perfect perpendicular, advanced with his head
dressed to the front, but with the wary side-glance of a cur passing
through hostile ground, and ready for a snap and a snarl.
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