Page:Stories by Foreign Authors (Spanish).djvu/156

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152
MOORS AND CHRISTIANS.

of countenance, although his eyes were blue as the sky, and his beard yellow as the African sunlight, which had bronzed his originally fair complexion.

"Good-morning, Manos-gordas!" cried the renegade, as soon as he perceived the Moor.

And his voice expressed the melancholy pleasure the exile feels in a foreign land when he meets some one with whom he can converse in his native tongue.

"Good-morning, Juan Falgueira!" responded Ben-Carime, in ironical accents.

As he heard this name the renegade trembled from head to foot, and seizing the iron bar of the plough prepared to defend himself.

"What name is that you have just pronounced?" he said, advancing threateningly toward Manos-gordas.

The latter awaited his approach, laughing, and answered in Arabic, with a courage which no one would have supposed him to possess:

"I have pronounced your real name; the name you bore in Spain when you were a Christian, and which I learned when I was in Orán three years ago."

"In Orán?"

"Yes, in Orán. What is there extraordinary in that? You had come from Orán to Morocco; I went to Orán to buy hens. I inquired there concerning your history, describing your appear-