He glared at me. I nodded slightly and murmured that doubtless there was
much subtle truth in his view.
The principal truth discoverable in the views of Paul the engineer was
that a little thing may bring about the undoing of a man.
"_Il ne faut pas beaucoup pour perdre un homme_," he said to me,
thoughtfully, one evening.
I report this reflection in French, since the man was of Paris, not of
Barcelona at all. At the Maranon he lived apart from the station, in
a small shed with a metal roof and straw walls, which he called
mon atelier. He had a work-bench there. They had given him several
horse-blankets and a saddle--not that he ever had occasion to ride, but
because no other bedding was used by the working-hands, who were all
vaqueros--cattlemen. And on this horseman's gear, like a son of the
plains, he used to sleep amongst the tools of his trade, in a litter
of rusty scrap-iron, with a portable forge at his head, under the
work-bench sustaining his grimy mosquito-net.
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