Struggling up from where the stones had knocked him down, Don Quixote spoke to his squire. “Sancho, there is a saying I have always heard. Doing good to wicked men is pouring water into the sea. Had I listened to you, I would have been spared this.”
Sancho knows his master will never take care. The Santa Hermandad, he begged, cares not two coins for knights errant, so they must hide at once. Don Quixote agreed to follow his advice this once, but told him never to tell anyone that he had retreated out of fear.
The two of them went into the Sierra Morena, which lay close by. The knights in the books met their adventures in just such places, so the deeper the mountains grew, the brighter Don Quixote’s heart became. Sancho sat sideways on his donkey, busily filling his belly with food from the sack, food he had taken from the priests’ pack mule.