As the wise Cide Hamete Benengeli tells it, Don Quixote and Sancho left the funeral and went into the same woods Marcela had entered. They searched for more than two hours, but she was nowhere to be found. Then they came to a meadow with a cool stream running through it and decided to rest there out of the midday heat.
They turned the horse and donkey loose to graze, and master and man emptied the saddlebags and ate their lunch together without ceremony. Sancho did not hobble Rocinante. He was such a mild and steady horse that Sancho believed all the mares of the Córdoba pastures could not turn his head.
But the devil, who does not always sleep, had other plans, the narrator writes. In the same valley a herd of ponies belonging to some Galician mule drivers was grazing. Catching the scent of the mares, Rocinante trots over to them without asking his master’s leave. The mares, it seems, cared more about grazing, and they greeted him with hooves and teeth. His girth snapped and the saddle fell off, and the drivers, thinking their mares were being harassed, ran up with clubs and beat Rocinante to the ground.