He was not quite penniless.  Those who had helped in his escape from Edinburgh had provided him gold.  But, his voyage paid for, he must buy at Vigo fresh apparel and a horse.  When at last he rode eastward and northward he was poor enough!  Food and lodging must be bought for himself and his steed.  Inns and innkeepers, chance folk applied to for guidance, petty officials in perennially suspicious towns—­twenty people a day stood ready to present a spectral aspect of leech and gold-sucker!  He was expert in traveling, but usually he had borne a purse quite like that of Fortunatus.  Now he must consider that he might presently have to sell his horse—­and it was not a steed of Roland’s, to bring a great price!  He might be compelled to go afoot into France.  He might be sufficiently blessed if the millennium did not find him yet living by his wits in Spain.  It was Spanish, that prospect!  Turn what?  Ian asked himself.  Bull-fighter—­fencing-master—­ gipsy—­or brigand?  He played with the notion of fencing-master.  But he would have to sell his horse to provide room and equipment, and he must turn aside to some considerable town.  Brigand would be easier, in these wild forests and rock fortresses that climbed and stood upon the sky-line.  Matter enough for perplexity!  But the sweep of forest and mountain wall was admirable—­admirable the air, the freedom from the Edinburgh prison.  Except occasionally, in the midst of some intensification of annoyance, he rode and maneuvered undetected.

Past happenings might and did come across him in waves.  He remembered, he regretted; he pursued a dialectic with various convenient divisions of himself.  But all that would be lost for long times in the general miraculous variety of things!  On the whole, going through Spain in the autumn weather, even with poverty making mouths alongside, was not a sorry business!  Zest lived in pitting vigor and wit against mole hills threatening an aggregation into mountains!  As for time, what was it, anyhow, to matter so much?  He owned time and a wide world.

Delay and delay and delay.  In one town the alcalde kept him a week, denying him the road beyond while inquiries were made as to his identity or non-identity with some famed outlaw escaping from justice.  Further on, his horse fell badly lame and he stayed day after day in a miserable village, lounging under a cork-tree, learning patois.  There was a girl with great black eyes.  He watched her, two or three times spoke to her.  But when she saw how he must haggle over the price of food and lodging she laughed, and returned to the side of a muleteer with a sash and little bells upon his hat.

All along the road fell these retardations.  Then as the mountains loomed higher, the spirit of contradiction apparently grew tired and fell behind.  For several days he traveled quite easily.  “My Lady Fortune,” asked Ian, “what is up your sleeve?”