There, he sits at a table, his cap still drawn over his eyes, with his friends: Arrochkoa, two or three others of the mountains and the somber Itchoua, their chief.
A festive meal is prepared for them, with fish of the Nivelle, ham and hares.

In the foreground of the hall, vast and dilapidated, near the windows, are the tables, the oak benches on which they are seated; in the background, in a penumbra, are the enormous casks filled with new cider.
In this band of Ramuntcho, which is there entire, under the piercing eye of its chief, reigns an emulation of audacity and a reciprocal, fraternal devotion; during their night expeditions especially, they are all one to live or to die.
Leaning heavily, benumbed in the pleasure of resting after the fatigues of the night and concentrated in the expectation of satiating their robust hunger, they are silent at first, hardly raising their heads to look through the window-panes at the passing girls.

Two are very young, almost children like Ramuntcho: Arrochkoa and Florentino.

The others have, like Itchoua, hardened faces, eyes in ambuscade under the frontal arcade, expressing no certain age; their aspect reveals a past of fatigues, in the unreasonable obstinacy to pursue this trade of smuggling, which hardly gives bread to the less skilful.
Then, awakened little by little by the smoking dishes, by the sweet cider, they talk; soon their words interlace, light, rapid and sonorous, with an excessive rolling of the _r_.

They talk in their mysterious language, the origin of which is unknown and which seems to the men of the other countries in Europe more distant than Mongolian or Sanskrit.
They tell stories of the night and of the frontier, stratagems newly invented and astonishing deceptions of Spanish carbineers.