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Updated: June 17, 2025
Then Itchoua, with the smile of a faun which no one had seen before, tapped his shoulder: "Oh, imprison her for one night only, my son! It will be enough, you may believe me. They are all alike, you see: the first step costs; but the second one, they make it all alone, and quicker than you may think. Do you imagine that she would wish to return to the good sisters, afterward?
At last Itchoua deigns to talk in his turn. He relates, in a tone of mystery and of confidence, a certain tale of the time of his youth, in a black night, on the Spanish territory, in the gorges of Andarlaza.
They tell stories of the night and of the frontier, stratagems newly invented and astonishing deceptions of Spanish carbineers. Itchoua, the chief, listens more than he talks; one hears only at long intervals his profound voice of a church singer vibrate. Arrochkoa, the most elegant of all, is in striking contrast with his comrades of the mountain.
What sort of a bandit is he then, to be so much afraid of justice? And what could be these things that happened long ago? After a silence between them, Ramuntcho said in a lower voice, with extreme distrust: "Imprison her you say this seriously, Itchoua? And where imprison her, if you please? I have no castle to hide her in "
A tall and large man, that Itchoua, thin, with a thick chest, clean shaven like a priest, in accordance with the fashion of the old time Basque; under the cap which he never took off, a colorless face, inexpressive, cut as with a pruning hook, and recalling the beardless personages archaically drawn on the missals of the fifteenth century.
At the twentieth stanza, at last, Itchoua interrupts them to make them rest and he orders more cider. "How have you learned?" asked Ramuntcho of the Iragola brothers. "How did the knack come to you?" "Oh!" replies Marcos, "it is a family trait, as you must know.
If it turns out badly if I am forced to quit the country after having done this thing to please you; then, you will have to give me more money than the amount agreed upon, you understand? Enough, at least, to let me seek for my bread in Spain " "In Spain! What? What are you going to do, Itchoua? I hope you have not in your head the idea to do things that are too grave."
They talk gaily, and the tall, white-haired, old chief who receives them all at this undue hour, announces that he will give to his village a beautiful square for the pelota game, the plans of which have been drawn and the cost of which will be ten thousand francs. "Now, tell me your affair," insists Itchoua, in Ramuntcho's ear. "Oh, I suspect what it is! Gracieuse, eh? That is it, is it not?
And to-night they have resolved to take into their confidence Itchoua himself, a man accustomed to suspicious adventures, valuable in assaults at night, and who, for money, is capable of everything. The place from which they start this time for the habitual smuggling expedition is named Landachkoa, and it is situated in France at ten minutes' distance from Spain.
It was time; two Spanish voices vibrate on the black shore: two carbineers, who were sleeping in their cloaks and whom the noise has awakened! And they begin to hail this flying, beaconless bark, not perceived so much as suspected, lost at once in the universal, nocturnal confusion. "Too late, friends," laughs Itchoua, while rowing to the uttermost.
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