HKB
barber bearded again. He begged the curate to teach him the charm that could produce such a miracle, and the curate promised he would. Then they proceeded on the journey.
The curate now began to wonder about the road (all this was pre-arranged) and said that in order to go to the kingdom of Micomicon, they had to take the road to Cartagena, where they would embark on a ship. That, he said, would take them through his own village, and from there it was a journey of nine years to Micomicon. Here the Princess corrected him, saying that it had taken her only two years to make the journey here, in quest of the noble and famous knight who had now sworn to restore her kingdom to her.
Don Quixote at this moment happened to observe the light attire of the curate, and was curious to know the reason for it. Whereupon the curate (having learned of the incident through Sancho) related how he and Master Nicholas, on their way to Seville, had been held up by a gang of liberated galley-slaves. These criminals, it was said, had been set free by a man on horseback, as brave as he was bold, for he had fought off all the guards, single-handed. The curate criticized this man heartlessly, called him a knave and a criminal for having set himself against law and order and his king, and expressed a belief that he could not have been in his right mind. The Holy Brotherhood, he said further, was searching for him now, and he himself was afraid that the man's soul would be lost. He finished his story by calling upon the Lord to pardon this unregenerate being who had taken away the galley-slaves from the punishment that had been meted out to them by justice.
Don Quixote seemed to take the curate's sermon to heart, and bent his head humbly, not daring to admit that he was the culprit, and not knowing that the curate knew it.