The country, moreover, that it drained was marked in the Government maps as a blank country, or one that paid no taxes, and knew not the uniform of the Government troops.
Torre Garda, the long two-storied house crowning a hill-top farther up the valley of the Wolf, was one of the few country houses that have not stood empty since the forties.

And all the valley of the Wolf, from the grim Pyrenees standing sentinel at its head to the sunny plain almost in sight of Pampeluna, where the Wolf merges into other streams, was held quiescent in the grip of the Sarrions.
"We will fight," said the men of this valley, "for the king, when we have a king worth fighting for.

And we will always fight for ourselves." And it was said that they only repeated what the Sarrions had told them.
At all events, no Carlists came that way.
"Torre Garda is not worth holding," they said.
"And you cannot hold Pampeluna unless you take Torre Garda first," thought those who knew the art of guerilla warfare.
So the valley of the Wolf awaited a king worth fighting for, and in the meantime they paid no taxes, enjoyed no postal service, and were perhaps none the worse without it.
There were Carlists over the mountains on either side of the valley.
Eternal snow closed the northern end of it and fed the Wolf in the summer heats.

Down at the mouth of the valley where the road was wide enough for two carts to pass each other, and a carriage could be driven at the trot, there often passed a patrol from the Royalist stronghold of Pampeluna.
But the Government troops never ventured up the valley which was like a mouse-hole with a Carlist cat waiting round the corner to cut them off.
Neither did the Carlists hazard themselves through the narrow defile where the Wolf rushed down its straightened gate; for there were forty thousand men in Pampeluna, only ten miles away.
Which reasons were sound enough to dictate caution in any written word that might pass from the Count in Saragossa to his son at Torre Garda.
A white dog with one yellow and black ear--a dog that might have been a nightmare, a bad, distorted dream of a pointer--stood in front of Marcos de Sarrion as he read the letter and seemed to await the hearing of its contents.
There are many persons of doubtful social standing, who seek to make up--to bridge that narrow and unfathomable gulf--by affability.

This dog it seemed, knowing that he was not quite a pointer, sought to conciliate humanity by an eagerness, by a pathetic and blundering haste to try and understand what was expected of him and to perform the same without delay, which was quite foreign to the nature of the real breed.
In Spain one addresses a man by the plain term: Man.