His wife waited until after he had dismissed the laborers² to ask him what was the matter, when he responded by showing her a leaden tube with a cover, somewhat like the tube in which a soldier on furlough keeps his leave, from which he drew a yellow parchment covered with crabbed³ handwriting, and carefully unrolling it said, with imposing⁴ gravity:

 

"I don't know how to read, even in Spanish, which is the easiest language in the world, but the devil take me if this was not written by a Moor⁵."

 

"That is to say that you found it in the tower?"

 

"I don't say it on that account alone, but because these spider's legs don't look like anything I ever saw written by a Christian⁶."

 

The wife of Juan Gomez looked at the parchment, smelled it, and exclaimed, with a confidence as amusing as it was ill-founded:

 

"By a Moor it was written!"

 

After a while she added, with a melancholy⁷ air:

 

"Although I am but a poor hand myself at reading writing, I would swear that we hold in our hands the discharge of some soldier of Mohammed who is now in the bottomless pit."

 

"You say that on account of the tube."

 

"On account of the tube I say it."

 

"Well, then, you are altogether wrong, my dear Torcuata, for such a thing as conscription was not known among the Moors⁸, nor is this a discharge. This is a—a—"

 

Uncle Hormiga glanced around him cautiously, lowered his voice, and said with air of absolute certainty:

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