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it was time to leave Gibraltar for Ronda. I stayed at Gibraltar two more days. She had the audacity to come to see me at my inn, in disguise. I left the city; I, too, had my plan. I returned to our rendezvous, knowing the place and hour when the Englishman and Carmen were to pass. I found Dancaïre and Garcia waiting for me. We passed the night in a wood beside a fire of pine cones, which blazed finely. I proposed a game of cards to Garcia. He accepted. In the second game I told him he was cheating; he began to laugh. I threw the cards in his face. He tried to take his gun, but I put my foot on it and said to him: ‘They say you can handle a knife like the best
jaque
in Malaga—will you try it with me?’ Dancaïre tried to separate us. I had struck Garcia two or three times with my fist. Anger made him brave; he drew his knife and I mine. We both told Dancaïre to give us room and a fair field. He saw that there was no way of stopping us, and he walked away. Garcia was bent double, like a cat on the point of springing at a mouse. He held his hat in his left hand to parry, his knife forward. That is the Andalusian guard. I took my stand Navarrese fashion, straight in front of him, with the left arm raised, the left leg forward, and the knife along the right thigh. I felt stronger than a giant. He rushed on me like a flash; I turnedon my left foot, and he found nothing in front of him; but I caught him in the throat, and my knife went in so far that my hand was under his chin. I twisted the blade so sharply that it broke. That was the end. The knife came out of the wound, forced by a stream of blood as big as your arm. He fell to the ground as stiff as a stake.
    “ ‘What have you done?’ Dancaïre asked me.
    “ ‘Look, you,’ said I; ‘we couldn’t live together. I love Carmen, and I wish to be her only lover. Besides, Garcia was a villain, and I remembered what he did to poor Remendado. There are only two of us left, but we are stout fellows. Tell me, do you want me for your friend, in life or death?’
    “Dancaïre gave me his hand. He was a man of fifty.
    “ ‘To the devil with love affairs!’ he cried. ‘If you had asked him for Carmen, he’d have sold her to you for a piastre. There’s only two of us now; how shall we manage to-morrow?’
    “ ‘Let me do it all alone,’ I replied. ‘I snap my fingers at the whole world now.’
    “We buried Garcia and pitched our camp again two hundred yards away. The next day Carmen and her Englishman passed, with two muleteers and a servant.
    “I said to Dancaïre:
    “ ‘I will take care of the Englishman. Frighten the others—they are not armed.’
    “The Englishman had pluck. If Carmen had not struck his arm, he would have killed me. To make my story short, I won Carmen back that day, and my first words to her were to tell her that she was a widow. When she learned how it had happened:
    “ ‘You will always be a
lillipendi
!’ she said. ‘Garcia ought to have killed you. Your Navarrese guard is all folly, and he has put out the light of better men than you. It means that his time had come. Yours will come too.’
    “ ‘And yours,’ I retorted, ‘unless you’re a true
romi
to me.’
    “ ‘All right,’ said she, ‘I’ve read more than once in coffee grounds that we were to go together. Bah! let what is planted come up!’
    “And she rattled her castanets, as she always did when she wished to banish some unpleasant thought.
    “We forget ourselves when we are talking about ourselves. All these details tire you, no doubt, but I shall soon be done. The life we were then leading lasted quite a long time. Dancaïre and I associated with ourselves several comrades who were more reliable than the former ones, and we devoted ourselves to smuggling, and sometimes, I must confess, we stopped people on the high-road, but only in the last extremity and when we could not do otherwise. However, we did not maltreat travellers, and we confined ourselves