Three blazing hours passed by, and I found myself entering a rolling land of vineyards, heralding wine-famous Valdepeñas. The vines were low shrubs not trained on sticks, the grapes touching the ground. A dip in an exotic stream reduced the grime and sweat of travel, and just beyond I came again upon the railway. A half-hour along it brought me face to face with the first foreign tramp I had met in Spain,--a light-haired, muscular youth in tattered, sun-brown garb, his hob-nailed shoes swung over one shoulder and around his feet thick bandages of burlap. He was a German certainly, perhaps a modern Benedict Moll whose story would have been equally interesting in its absurdity. But he passed me with the stare of a man absorbed in his personal affairs and accustomed to keep his own counsel, and stalked away southward along the scintillant railroad.
I halted for a drink at the stuccoed dwelling of a track-walker. In the grassless yard, under the only imitation of a tree in the neighborhood, slept a roadster. Now and again the chickens that scratched in vain the dry, lifeless earth about him, marched disconsolately across his prostrate form.
"Poor fellow," said the track-walker's wife at the well, "he has known misery, more even than the rest of us. Vaya como duerme!"
I sat down in the streak of shade that was crawling eastward across him. He wore a ten-day beard and the garb of a Spanish workman of the city, set off by a broad red faja around his waist. In one bulging pocket of his coat appeared to be all his earthly possessions.
There was no evidence of overwhelming "miseria" in the cheery greeting with which he awoke, and as our ways coincided we continued in company. He was a Sevillian named Jesús, bound northward in general and wherever else the gods might lead him.
"For a long time there has been no work in Seville for nosotros, the carpenters," he explained, though with no indication of grief. "This half year I have been selling apricots and azucarillos in the bullring and on the Alameda. But each day more of Seville comes to sell and less to buy. I should have gone away long ago, but my comrade Gáspare would not leave his amiga. Gásparo is a stone-polisher and had work.