Cid Hamete relates that after that talk Don Quixote raised his eyes and saw some dozen men on foot strung by the neck like beads on a great iron chain, with manacles on their hands, two horsemen with wheel-lock muskets, and two on foot with javelins and swords. Sancho names it a chain of galley slaves going by force of the king's orders. Quixote asks how the king uses force against anyone. Sancho says they are condemned for their crimes. Then, says the knight, they go where they are taken not of their own will, and here is a case for his office: to put down force and succour the wretched. Sancho reminds him that Justice, which is the king himself, is not doing wrong but punishing. A mounted guard will say only that they belong to his majesty. The other, more civil, says the register is no time to read, and that the fellows take a pleasure in talking about rascalities, so he may ask them themselves.
He does. The first, about four-and-twenty, of Piedrahita, was a lover of a washerwoman's basket of clean linen and goes for a hundred lashes and three years of gurapas. The second, a canary, meaning he sang under the non sancta: he confessed to cattle-stealing under torture, took six years and two hundred lashes, and the other thieves despise him because nay has no more letters than yea. The third goes for five years for want of ten ducats; twenty now would have greased the notary's pen in time to keep him in the plaza of the Zocodover. The fourth, a white-bearded pimp with a touch of the sorcerer, weeps; Quixote would make the office of pimp an inspected calling, but sorcery removes his pity, for no charm can compel the will. Sancho gives the old man a real of four. A student carried the joke too far with cousins, his and not his, and accepted six years. Last comes Gines de Pasamonte, otherwise Ginesillo de Parapilla, bound with a keep-friend and a padlock, more chains than all the rest, ten years amounting to civil death. He has written his own Life, pawned the book in prison for two hundred reals, and will finish it in the galleys, where there is leisure enough; his life is not yet finished, so neither is the book. A fig for Lazarillo de Tormes.
Quixote comes between the commissary's staff and Gines, then addresses the chain: want of courage under torture, want of money, want of advocacy, and the perverted judgment of the judge may have ruined them, and it is a hard case to make slaves of those whom God and nature have made free. He asks the guards to release them quietly, or lance and sword will compel. The commissary calls it nice nonsense and tells him to put that basin straight on his head. Quixote falls on him so suddenly that the musket-man goes down wounded. The galley slaves break the chain. Sancho helps release Gines, who takes the commissary's sword and musket and, without discharging it, drives the guards off the field under a rain of stones. Sancho, grieving, already hears the Holy Brotherhood's alarm-bell and begs his master into the sierra.
Quixote collects the riot and requires a grateful return: they are to take the chain to El Toboso and present themselves before Dulcinea, recounting the adventure in full. Gines answers for all that the demand is of all impossibilities the most impossible. They cannot go together, only singly, hiding from the Brotherhood. Ave-marias and credos they can say running or resting; to take up the chain for El Toboso is to ask pears of the elm tree. Quixote, stirred to wrath, orders Don Ginesillo de Paropillo to go alone with the whole chain on his back. Gines, convinced the knight is not quite right in his head, gives the wink. Stones bring Quixote to the ground. The student snatches the basin, strikes him on the shoulders, and knocks it almost to pieces. They strip him of the jacket over his armour, take Sancho's coat, divide the spoils, and go each his own way, more solicitous about the Brotherhood than about Dulcinea. Left on the spot are the ass with drooping head, Rocinante stretched beside his master, Sancho stripped and trembling, and Don Quixote fuming to find himself so served by the very persons for whom he had done so much.
