has no more letters in it than ‘yea,’ and a culprit is well off when life or death with him depends on his own tongue and not on that of witnesses or evidence; and to my thinking they are not very far out.”
“And I think so too,” answered Don Quixote; then passing on to the third he asked him what he had asked the others, and the man answered very readily and unconcernedly, “I am going for five years to their ladyships the gurapas for the want of ten ducats.”
“I will give twenty with pleasure to get you out of that trouble,” said Don Quixote.
“That,” said the galley slave, “is like a man having money at sea when he is dying of hunger and has no way of buying what he wants; I say so because if at the right time I had had those twenty ducats that your worship now offers me, I would have greased the notary’s pen and freshened up the attorney’s wit with them, so that today I should be in the middle of the plaza of the Zocodover at Toledo, and not on this road coupled like a greyhound. But God is great; patience—there, that’s enough of it.”
Don Quixote passed on to the fourth, a man of venerable aspect with a white beard falling below his breast, who on hearing himself asked the reason of his being there began to weep without answering a word, but the fifth acted as his tongue and said, “This worthy man is going to the galleys for four years, after having gone the rounds in ceremony and on horseback.”
“That means,” said Sancho Panza, “as I take it, to have been exposed to shame in public.”
“Just so,” replied the galley slave, “and the offence for which they gave him that punishment was having been an ear-broker, nay body-broker; I mean, in short, that this gentleman goes as a pimp, and for having besides a certain touch of the sorcerer about him.”