Good-night, mother--Oh, we shall not be out late and, sure, I will be back before mass." Then, Franchita leaned her head on the solid shoulder of her son, in a coaxing humor almost infantile, different suddenly from her habitual manner, and, her cheek against his, she remained tenderly leaning, as if to say in a confident abandonment of her will: "I am still troubled a little by those night undertakings; but, when I reflect, what you wish is always well; I am dependent on you, and you are everything--" On the shoulder of the stranger, formerly, it was her custom to lean and to abandon herself thus, in the time when she loved him.
When Ramuntcho had gone to his little room, she stayed thinking for a longer time than usual before resuming her needlework.

So, it became decidedly his trade, this night work in which one risks receiving the bullets of Spain's carbineers!--He had begun for amusement, in bravado, like most of them, and as his friend Arrochkoa was beginning, in the same band as he; then, little by little, he had made a necessity of this continual adventure in dark nights; he deserted more and more, for this rude trade, the open air workshop of the carpenter where she had placed him as an apprentice to carve beams out of oak trunks.
And that was what he would be in life, her little Ramuntcho, so coddled formerly in his white gown and for whom she had formed naively so many dreams: a smuggler! Smuggler and pelota player,--two things which go well together and which are essentially Basque.
She hesitated still, however, to let him follow that unexpected vocation.

Not in disdain for smugglers, oh, no, for her father had been a smuggler; her two brothers also; the elder killed by a Spanish bullet in the forehead, one night that he was swimming across the Bidassoa, the second a refugee in America to escape the Bayonne prison; both respected for their audacity and their strength.

No, but he, Ramuntcho, the son of the stranger, he, doubtless, might have had pretensions to lead a less harsh life than these men if, in a hasty and savage moment, she had not separated him from his father and brought him back to the Basque mountains.

In truth, he was not heartless, Ramuntcho's father; when, fatally, he had wearied of her, he had made some efforts not to let her see it and never would he have abandoned her with her child if, in her pride, she had not quitted him.