D'Artagnan, the King Maker — page 18: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Avoid a New Inn. 1] of the penniless saltmakers and talked of lugging them off as hostages for the cess required. Upon seeing their chiefs arrested, like so many brothers, the fishers, sailors, soldiers out of uniform, and the women of the hamlet, fell upon the strangers with uncouth cries of war in sea lingo and rural dialect, and beat them off.with oars, boat hooks, rudder staves and the like. The Spanish, in order to preserve their lives, were glad to leave the captives with their friends, consoling themselves with the last word: “They would come again and give the victors rue to mix with their salt cakes !”’ It is a fact that a true nomad “marches lightly.” Being men of the ocean firstly, and saltmakers sec- ondly, they made a pyramid of the tools of their tem- porary trade and set fire to it, after a preliminary bathing with tar; then they embarked all their families, house- hold goods and gods—if these pagans worshiped any one and on any day but that of the Good Thief !—and, when the locusts returned with an army at their back, Salinas the Hale was Salinas the Wasted. To the devourers—burnt meat! The inn ought to have remained, a large structure in oak and stone; that was counted on, but you must not count on your host or his inn. As by witchcraft, that only real building of the town had disappeared. One could discern the site, for the foundation stones and tree were there; but the wood had been sawed off at every post, and the iron securing the stones against storms which would have made children’s building blocks of Trajan’s Column, had been wrenched out of the leaden sockets. As for the wine casks, said to be in its cellars, since your saltmaker is fabulously thirsty, there was not even a cellar; all the contents had been hoisted out and the breeze had steadily played at filling it to the brim with a quicksand which almost swallowed up the explorers under the eyes of their companions. We say that this solitary shelter had been depended. upon. The soldiers had been promised it as a guardhouse, and the civilians reckoned on having a portion as a cus- tom house. CONNIE OOO KS,(eo) im