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By Root 834 0

began to run across the fields, holding their burning torches, and they looked like nothing so much as the figures in masks who run about on nights of revels and celebrations. The men in mourning, caught up and swaddled in their soutanes and cassocks, could not move; and so, in complete safety, Don Quixote struck them all and drove them away against their will, for they all thought he was not a man but a devil from hell who had come to take the dead body they were carrying on the litter.

Sancho saw it all, amazed at his master’s boldness, and he said to himself:

“No doubt about it, this master of mine is as courageous and brave as he says.”

A torch was burning on the ground next to the first man who had been thrown by his mule, and in its light Don Quixote could see him; and coming over to him, he put the point of his lance to his face, telling him to yield; if not, he would kill him. To which the fallen man responded:

“I have yielded and then some; I can’t move because my leg is broken; I beg your grace, if you are a Christian gentleman, not to kill me, for you would commit a great sacrilege: I am a licentiate and have taken my first vows.”

“Then what the devil has brought you here,” said Don Quixote, “being a man of the Church?”

“What, Señor?” replied the fallen man. “My misfortune.”

“An even greater one awaits you,” said Don Quixote, “if you do not answer to my satisfaction everything I asked you earlier.”

“Your grace will easily have your satisfaction,” responded the licentiate, “and so your grace should know that even though I said before that I was a licentiate, I am only a bachelor, and my name is Alonso López; I’m a native of Alcobendas, and I have come from the city of Baeza, with eleven other priests, the men who fled with the torches; we are going to the city of Segovia, escorting the dead body that lies in that litter, a gentleman who died in Baeza, where he was originally interred, and now, as I’ve said, we are carrying his bones to his grave in Segovia, his native city.”

“Who killed him?” asked Don Quixote.

“God, by means of a pestilential fever,” responded the bachelor.

“In that case,” said Don Quixote, “Our Lord has relieved me of the task which I was going to undertake to avenge his death, if anyone else had killed him; but since he was killed by the One who killed him, there is no other recourse but to be silent and shrug one’s shoulders, which is what I should do if He had killed me. And I want your reverence to know that I am a knight from La Mancha, named Don Quixote, and it is my occupation and profession to wander the world righting wrongs and rectifying injuries.”

“I don’t know how you can speak of righting wrongs,” said the bachelor, “for you have certainly wronged me and broken my leg, which won’t ever be right again; and in rectifying my injuries, you have injured me so much that I’ll go on being injured for the rest of my life; it was a great misadventure for me to run across a man who is seeking adventures.”

“Not all things,” responded Don Quixote, “happen in precisely the same way. The harm, Señor Bachelor Alonso López, lay in all of you coming as you did, at night, dressed in those surplices, holding burning torches, and praying, and draped in mourning, for you indeed appeared to be evil beings from the next world; as a consequence, I could not fail to fulfill my obligation and attack you, and I should have attacked even if I had known for a fact you were all demons from hell, which is what I deemed and considered you to be.”

“Since this is what fate had in store for me,” said the bachelor of arts, “I implore your grace, Señor Knight Errant (who has treated me with such errancy), to help me out from under this mule, for my leg is caught between the stirrup and the saddle.”

“I might have talked until morning!” said Don Quixote. “How long would you have waited to tell me of your plight?”

Then he called to Sancho Panza, who took no notice, because he was busy going through the provisions on a pack mule that belonged to those good gentlemen and was well-supplied with things to