"D'artagnan! D'artagnan, are you listening?"
His head shot up as if he were just awakened from a trance. Realizing that Porthos had been trying to tell him something (and, in fact, he had been trying to tell D'artagnan things for the last day or so with no luck) he nodded politly and told him to "go on".
Sighing, Porthos, once again, repeated what he was saying.
"Very fine, Porthos...very fine..." D'artagnan said half-heartedly. "If only you would not look over the slight flaws in your plans so carelessly, you may be able to come up with one that may just work!"
From his place at the table in the front of the large room, Arimis chuckled. "And the day that you come with a plan that may actually work will be the day the King is beheaded by peasants!"
Porthos tried to bottle his anger at this (rather unsuccessfully) and shot back at him something that D'artagnan did not hear. He was absorbed once again in his own thoughts. It was long before he managed to pull himself from his silent trance and by then it was growing late. D'artagnan sighed as he mouned his horse thinking, another wasted day...
Taking a detur through the woods and in no real hurry to get home, D'artagnan's sidetracked mind accidentally made him take a turn in the road which he had not ever seen before.
Not knowing where he was or why he was there, D'artagnan did not turn back. He had made a blunder, and he was determined to find a way out of this that did not involve turning back.
He was thrown from his horse (along with the saddle, which he had carelessly put on that morning) when he found a man all in black lying in the road.
The man in the road moaned again.
D'artagnan rattled his sword in his metal-tipped scabbord and tapped the stranger in the arm with the tip of his boot.
"Do you have a death wish?! I suspect you must for that is the only reason that a man would be lying in the middle of a back road, in black, at this time of night to get run over!"
"Seņor, please stop doing that!" cried the man in black as he was jabbed again.
"Seņor?! Well, now it makes sense! A Spaniard might do this if they were not in the best of moods! What sort of mood are you in, Monseuir?" D'artagnan jabbed the man once more.
As you can guess, the man in black was becoming rather annoyed. Being jabbed by someone he did not know in the dark, and not even knowing where he was, was not something he had expected or wanted.
"Seņor, I am not a Spaniard even though I did spend three years in Spain. I am a Californiano and my name is Don Diego de la Vega!"
"Impossable!" Cried the man, finally stepping back and letting him stand. "There is no such place as California!"
Diego was thrown back at this. No such place? He thought. Then the idea struck him like a boulder. "Seņor, what year is it, por favor?"
"The year is 1628..."
