Pastiri explained the matter for El Bizco's benefit; the confederates were to place bets and then proclaim in a loud voice that they had won. Then he'd see to making the spectators eager to play.

"All right. We know what to do," said Vidal.

"You agree to the scheme?"

"Yes, man."

Pastiri gave them three pesetas apiece and the four left the tavern, crossed the Ronda and made their way in the crowds of El Rastro.

Every once in a while Pastiri would stop, thinking he had caught sight of a prospective dupe; El Bizco or Manuel would place a bet; but the fellow who looked like an easy victim would smile as he saw them lay the snare or else pa.s.s on indifferently, quite accustomed to this type of trickery.

Soon Pastiri noticed a group of rustics with their broad hats and short trousers.

"_Aluspiar_, here come a few birds and we may work them for something," he said, and he planted himself and his card table directly in the path of the country-folk and began his game.

El Bizco bet two pesetas and won; Manuel followed suit with the same results.

"This fellow is a cinch," said Vidal in a loud voice, turning to the group of hayseeds. "Have you seen all the money he's losing? That soldier there just won six duros."

Hearing this, one of the rustics drew near, and seeing that Manuel and El Bizco were winning, he wagered a peseta and won. The fellow's companions advised him to retire with his winnings; but his greed got the best of him and he returned to bet two pesetas, losing them.

Then Vidal bet a duro.

"Here's a five-peseta piece," he declared, ringing the coin upon the ground, He picked out the right card and won.

Pastiri made a gesture of anoyance.

The rustic wagered another duro and lost; he glanced anxiously at his fellow countrymen, extracted another duro and lost that, too.

At this moment a guard happened along and the group broke up; noting Pastiri's movement of flight, the hayseed tried to seize him, grabbing at his coat, but the trickster gave a rude tug and escaped in the crowd.

Manuel, Vidal and El Bizco made their way across the Plaza del Rastro to Embajadores Street.

El Bizco had four pesetas, Manuel six and Vidal fourteen.

"And what are we going to return to that guy?" asked El Bizco.

"Return? Nothing," answered Vidal.

"Why, that would be robbing him of his whole year's profits," objected Manuel.

"What of it? Deuce take him," retorted Vidal. "We came darn near getting caught ourselves, with nothing for our trouble."

It was lunch hour and they wondered where to go; Vidal settled it, saying that as long as they were on Embajadores Street, the Society of the Three, in plenary session, might as well continue on the way down till they got to La Manigua restaurant.

The suggestion was accepted and the a.s.sociates spent that Sunday afternoon in royal fashion; Vidal was splendid, spending Pastiri's money right and left, inviting several girls to their table and dancing all the _chulo_ steps.

To Manuel this beginning of his free life seemed not at all bad. At night the three comrades, somewhat the worse for wine, ambled up Embajadores Street, turning into the surrounding road.

"Where am I going to sleep?" asked Manuel.

"Come over to my house," answered Vidal.

When they came in sight of Casa Blanca, El Bizco left them.

"Thank the Lord that tramp has gone," muttered Vidal.

"Have you had a sc.r.a.p with him?"

"He's a beastly fellow. He lives with La Escandalosa, who's an old fox in truth, sixty years at the very least, and spends everything she robs with her lovers. But she feeds him and he ought to have some consideration for her. Nothing doing, though; he's always kicking her and punching her and p.r.i.c.king her with his dirk, and one time he even heated an iron and wanted to burn her. If he takes her money, well and good; but what's the sense of his burning her?"

They reached Casa Blanca, a squalid section consisting of a single street; Vidal opened a door with his key; he lighted a match and the pair climbed up to a tiny room with a mattress placed on the bricks.

"You'll have to sleep on the floor," said Vidal. "This bed belongs to my girl."

"All right."

"Take this for your head," and he threw him a woman's rolled-up skirt.

Manuel pillowed his head against the skirt and fell asleep. He awoke at dawn. He opened his eyes and sat down upon the floor without a thought as to where he might be. Through a tiny window came a pale glow. Vidal, stretched out on the mattress, was snoring; beside him slept a girl, breathing with her mouth wide open; long streaks of rouge stained her cheeks.

Manuel felt nauseated by the excess of the previous day's drink; he was deeply dejected. He gave serious thought to his life-problems.

"I'm not made for this," he told himself. "I'm neither a savage like Bizco nor a brazen, carefree lout like Vidal. What am I going to do, then?"

A thousand things occurred to him, for the most part impossible of attainment; he imagined all manner of involved projects. Within him, vaguely, his maternal inheritance, with its respect for all established custom, struggled against his anti-social, vagrant instincts that were fed by his mode of living.

"Vidal and Bizco," he said to himself, "are luckier chaps than myself.

They don't hesitate; they have no scruples. They've got a start on their careers...."

In the end, he considered, they would come to the gallows or to the penitentiary; but in the meantime the one experienced no suffering because he was too beastly to know what it meant, and the other because he was too lazy, and both of them let themselves float tranquilly with the stream.

Despite his scruples and his remorse, Manuel spent the summer under the protection of El Bizco and Vidal, living in Casa Blanca with his cousin and his cousin's mistress, a girl who sold newspapers and practised thievery at the same time.

The Society of the Three carried on its operations in the suburbs and Las Ventas, La Prosperidad and the Dona Carlota section, the Vallecas bridge and the Four Roads; and if the existence of this society never came to be suspected and never figured in the annals of crime, it is because its misdemeanours were limited to modest burglaries of the sort facilitated by the carelessness of property owners.

The three a.s.sociates were not content to operate in the suburbs of Madrid; they extended the radius of their activities to the nearby towns and to all places in general where crowds came together.

The market and the small squares were test localities, for the booty might be of a larger quant.i.ty but on the other hand the police were especially vigilant.

In general, they exploited the laundries more than any other place.

Vidal, like the clever fellow he was, managed to Convince El Bizco that he was the most gifted of the three for the work. The cross-eyed thug, out of sheer vanity, always undertook the most difficult part of the task, seizing the booty, while Vidal and Manuel kept a sharp lookout.

Vidal would say to Manuel, at the very moment of the robbery, when El Bizco already had the stolen sheet or chemise under his coat:

"If anyone happens along, don't say a word; nothing. Let them arrest him; we'll shut up tight as clams, absolutely motionless; if they ask anything, we know nothing. Right-o?"

"Agreed."