And in Bayonne the Carlist plotters schemed without let or hindrance.
"So long as he is away we need not be uneasy about Juanita," said Marcos.
"He cannot return to Saragossa without my hearing of it." And one evening a casual teamster from the North, whose great two-wheeled cart, as high as a house and as long as a locomotive, stood in the dusty road outside the Posada de los Reyes, dropped in, cigarette in mouth, to the Palacio Sarrion.

In Spain, a messenger delivers neither message nor letter to a servant.

A survival of mediaeval habits permits the humblest to seek the presence of the great at any time of day.
The Sarrions had just finished dinner and still sat in the vast dining-room, the walls of which glittered with arms and loomed darkly with great portraits of the Spanish school of painting.
The teamster was not abashed.

It was a time of war, and war is a great leveler of social scales.

He had brought his load through a disturbed country.