Carson paid no heed to the mutterings all about him. Alone and unassisted, he swathed the body in a new clean blanket.
"That will stop communication of the disease from the body to the bearers," he said. He surveyed the group about him. "Now, who will carry out the dead?"
The men looked at one another. No one stepped forward to volunteer.
Jacinto Quesada, standing in the background, sensed immediately, then, to what a stage things had come. He elbowed through the throng. Quietly he picked up the blanket-swathed figure.
"Senor Carson," he said, as he turned around, the form of the picador held before him in his arms; "you are doing the correct thing. Cremation is the sanitary expedient."
The American thanked him with his eyes. He followed Quesada out the doorway. They went down the uneven village street. The men of the cuadrilla trooped after. From the cabanas on either hand serranos, stirred up by the insidious Ferou, crept out like wolves stretching forth from their dens.
Carson never looked back. He could hear the men muttering behind him; he realized some dark scheme was pulsing in their brains; yet he never looked back. He strode, at the head of all that muttering milling throng, down the street toward the rock.
As they neared the rock, suddenly he swung about. The men stopped, huddled back from him.
"Get wood!" he shouted. "Anything inflammable!"
The men shoved forward, crowded together, and eyed him with furtive, wily eyes. No one moved to obey.
"Go ahead, Don Juan!" shouted a voice from behind. "I'll collect the wood!"
It was Manuel Morales, proving bigger in the emergency than any superstitious dread. A deep-throated muttering went up from the men. But his quick courageous action had robbed them, for the moment, of that focus of interest, anger, and insubordination which leads to mob violence.
Carson swung round to start on again. As he did, he saw that Quesada, behind his back, had deposited the dead burden upon the muddy ground and was stooping and cupping up water from the old Moorish flume to quench his hot thirst.
"Stop!" he cried, his voice chill with warning and terrible dread. "Jacinto, you are in a sweat! Don't you know that copious drinking of cold water while in this condition is one of the direct causes of cholera!"
Quesada stepped back, momentarily aghast. The sweat quickened and poured from his brown youthful face. Suddenly he laughed.
"It is no importa," he said, with returned calmness. He strode on under the weight of his gruesome burden.
Carson followed at his heels and, at the heels of the American, straggled like so many famished wolves, the men of the cuadrilla and the serranos of the pueblo.
Quesada was in haste to deposit the body upon the rock. He felt a strange dizziness in his head. He did not want to admit it, yet he feared it foretokened an attack of the pestilence. At this crucial time, he did not want the dizziness to show in his actions. That would evidence the plague. And were the men to note it, they would think it the hand of God striking him down for aiding in the cremation. It would precipitate them into some insensate and ferocious act.
He held himself severely erect. There were spots dancing before his eyes, yet he made out that one of the cuadrilla, a short thick-set banderillero named Baptista Monterey, had stepped forward from the mob. The banderillero, his ordinary black street clothes rendering him inconspicuous in the mob, had been standing quietly alongside the tall blond Frenchman. It was Ferou himself who had shoved him forward. The man spoke.
"You cannot burn the body, senor caballero of my heart! Cremation is a desecration of the earthly vessel of the soul. It is against our religion!"
"Jacinto Quesada himself has given you the reason for the need of it," returned Carson coldly. "Cremation is the sanitary expedient."
"But the body belongs to the Espiritu Santo! You cannot—"
"What is this, Baptista Monterey!" came a new voice, an astonished and wrathful voice.
Quesada found himself unable to see its owner. An opaque blackness was fogging his eyes. But he knew that the voice belonged to Manuel Morales.
"Put down the wood, Manuel!" he heard Carson say. There was a strange note in the American's voice, a grim metallic note. "Go away. Get more wood, Manuel. Leave me alone. They tell me I cannot burn the dead. They are rebellious. I'll show them!"
Quesada gripped himself that he might bear on. There was a rushing and pounding of blood in his ears. The voices seemed fainting low and dim with distance, as if the speakers were drifting away from him.
"Senor Carson," feebly he heard Morales say, "this is your affair, but I am stanchly behind you. When you took up this task of cleansing the scourge from the barrio, I said that Manuel Morales and all his cuadrilla would be yours to command. It is so; theyareyours; they must obey you! I go away; I leave them to you. Do with them what you will. Teach them!"
Like the noise of a remote waterfall came to Quesada's ears a muffled crash. It might have been the sudden casting upon the rock of a bundle of faggots. He only knew, of a sudden and all at once, that he was reeling. The water he had drunk seemed turned to liquid fire; his stomach was burning up, his whole tottering frame was burning up!
As from far away, he heard a shout. He could not see.
"Heart of God—look! Jacinto Quesada! He is falling! He has got it, he has got it!"
Quesada felt himself pitching forward and falling, falling, falling as if from one of the cinder-gray precipices of the sierras. A rush of sound boomed in his ears:
"It is the hand of God! Aupa, aupa! It is a divine sign that we are right! Porvida, men! Down the sacrilegious Americano! Sweep him from the rock! Kill him, kill him! He must not burn our dead!"
A tremendous sound seemed to burst the membranes of the bandolero's ears. Perhaps it was the report of an automatic. At any rate, as if a bullet had thudded on his own frontal bone, he felt a sudden dazzling crash against his forehead. He had banged down upon the rock!
John Fremont Carson stood upon the great rock at the brink of the village and surveyed, above the ugly snub nose of his automatic, the surge of men before him. One shot from that automatic had garroted the rebellion. At his feet sprawled the short thick-set form of Baptista Monterey, a tiny flaming crater in his right temple where a steel-jacketed bullet had found his life.
Behind Carson lay Jacinto Quesada, stricken and spread-eagled from the plague. The men stood staggered and cowed before him, fascinated with fear and deep awe.
"Quick, one of you!" exploded the American. "Carry Quesada to the sick bay!"
There was a sudden stir among the apprehensively huddled men. The tall gray-suited Frenchman stepped forward,
"Allow me, monsenor."
With a gentle concern, astonishing from him, he rolled the long-legged form of the bandolero snugly in his serape and then, staggering under the weight, leaden with unconsciousness, started off up the uneven street toward the chapel.
Carson flourished his automatic.
"Pronto!" he yelled. "Into your huts, you serranos! You of the cuadrilla, back to your work in the hospital!"
The men dispersed like a foggy neblina under the rays of the sun.
Ferou was some distance ahead of the cuadrilla as it tramped, bowed of head, back up the street. Carson and Morales remained on the rock, busying with the fire which would cremate the remains. There was no one to see.
The Frenchman seized the opportunity. With one hand, he reached under the long mountaineer's shawl that swathed Quesada's body; he reached into the inside pocket of the sheepskin zamarra. He drew forth a small mahogany-colored leather purse. That purse had once been his own.
Without bothering to open it, he thrust it into a pocket of his gray tweed suit. He knew. Within, in that small mahogany-colored leather purse, was the tightly wound roll of five-thousand peseta bills he had stolen from Don Jaime de Torreblanca y Moncada!
When Carson hurried up, a short spell later, to tend to Quesada, Ferou was awaiting him in the hospital, apparent anxiety upon his ashy-hued face.
"Monsenor Carson," he said deferentially, "to-day must have taught you a lesson. It is not wise that these bullfighters and serranos should be armed. They might rise again. I would some advice give you. Collect all the arms in the barrio and keep them under your own hand."
The suggestion met with accord from the American. Readily he could see its precautionary value against future rebellion.
"Just a little, and I'll be finished doing all I can for Jacinto; then I'll be with you."
Together they made a round of the cabanas. They requisitioned ancient muzzle-loading smooth-bores, Mannlichers, Mauser carbines, revolvers, old-fashioned pistols, and guns with muzzles wide as the mouth of a French horn. In Quesada's choza, where Felicidad slept and hourly gained strength, they found a modern smokeless breech-loading hunting gun, a cordite repeater.
They were tireless and microscopically thorough in the search. Despite the mutterings and scowls of the serranos, they seized every instrument which might be used as a weapon of offense. They collected Manchegan knives, navajas, razors, and even alpenstocks and shovels. Against the cork-oak tree in the center of the pueblo street, they made a heap of the conglomeration.
They had circled back to the hospital, and Ferou had entered to disarm the members of the cuadrilla therein, when Carson, following at his heels, made a sudden clutch at the jamb of the door.
"Hola!" exclaimed Morales, just then coming up behind from the cremation rock at the brink of the pueblo. "Sacred blood, what's the matter, Don Juan!"
Ferou slewed swiftly round. Both men, the one within, the other without the chapel, eyed the American in the doorway. There was a strange, almost hopeful expectancy in the slate-colored eyes of the Frenchman; in the dark thick-lashed eyes of the matador a terrible voiceless dread.
Carson drew himself up. It was a visible effort. His angular face looked grayly haggard; his lips were drawn tight over his teeth.
"It is nothing," he said slowly. "I feel a little faint, that's all. I guess the excitement of this morning has upset me. It will soon pass off."
"You must lie down, mi camarada," said Morales gently but firmly. "You have not slept in two nights—since the night when that boy's mother died, and last night when Robledo of my cuadrilla slapped under. You need rest. You have been doing the work of three men, of thirty men, tending Felicidad, doctoring in here, directing and administering to all. You must lie down."
The American made to stagger through into the sick bay; but Morales stopped him with a steadying hand upon his shoulder.
"Not here," he advised softly. "We are overcrowded already. Besides, for you to lie in this atmosphere, would make you more liable to the plague. Come to Quesada's cabana. Felicidad is feeling quite strong to-day. There is an unused couch there. Felicidad will see that you want for nothing."
"But Quesada—"
"I will take care of him. Jacinto is a brave man; he has the will to live. Everything in my power I shall do, Don Juan, to see that he does live."
With one shaking hand, Carson fumbled in his pocket. He finally drew out a number of yellow printed leaves that had been torn from a book.
"Here are the instructions of what to do," he said wearily.
Morales took the yellow illumined pages. His honest Andalusian face was grave with an intenseness of sincerity.
"Senor Carson," he said almost formally, "everything you have done, I will attempt to do. You may rest easily in the knowledge and conviction that I am carrying forward all that you planned. Your methods have proved good methods. There have been deaths, true; but never, in an epidemic of cholera, have I known so few deceases, so many recoveries. Steadfastly, with fortitude and without deviation, with a stout heart and an iron hand, I shall put through your modern sanitary methods. Senor, I will even cremate the dead!"
It was enough. Guided and aided by the matador, Carson stumbled down the uneven street toward Quesada's cabana. The Frenchman looked after the two, through the chapel doorway, and smiled his calculating and very superior smile.
When Morales returned, Ferou pointed out the heaped-up scramble of weapons under the cork-oak tree and explained what he and Carson had been about.
"If the Senor Americano thought it a good plan," said Morales with promptitude and decision, "I will go through with it. My word has been given in promise. Whatever Don Juan started, that shall I attempt to finish."
He entered the hospital. Within, what remained of his cuadrilla were watching and nursing the sick. They were now only three. Of the others, the banderillero, Baptista Monterey, had been killed in the rebellion on the rock; Coruncho Lopez, the picador, was dead from the plague; and another banderillero, Alfonso Robledo, was still numbered among the blanketed patients on the platforms.
"Here, you peones," said Morales to the three. "Take off your guns and knives! It is the order of the Senor Carson."
The bullfighters darted quick glances at one another. They were nervous and suspicious. Why did the matador want them to disarm? What did he purpose doing, once he had them unarmed—punish them for their participation in that morning's rebellion? They feared to disobey the matador, yet they feared more the intent behind the command. They hesitated.
"Shed your own weapons, Don Manuel," suggested the insidious Ferou in a whisper. "Then the men will understand that it is a general order which applies to all, without favoritism."
"Dios hombre!" exclaimed Morales, growing irritated. "Must I coax my peones to obey the command of their own matador?"
"It is not that, Don Manuel. These men are only poor silly Spaniards who do not understand. They are afraid of your reason for thus asking them to disarm. If you discard your weapons, they will realize there is nothing to fear. They will follow suit. And you will have set the peones the example, like a true matador!"
"Disparate!" ejaculated Morales. "What nonsense!" But just the same, realizing that it was the simplest way to attain the end in view, he removed from about his waist the belt on which were suspended a revolver and sheathed knife.
Readily then the three bullfighters emulated his example. And Jacques Ferou carried all the weapons to the pile beneath the cork-oak tree. Outside and beyond eyeshot, he saw fit to indulge, once more, in his exasperating smile.
Chill and damp took turns about with rock-glare and sudden heat to aid and abet their deadly ally, the cholera. Thick neblinas, dank mists, and wispy rains cloaked the sierras, night and morning; the noonday sun broke through and refracted its rays with intense heat from stony gorge and crag; easterly gales or levantes swept down from the pinnacles and drove all away with dense snowstorms, abrupt and blinding, violent and icy; and all the while, inside the four mud walls of cabana and chapel, the barrio continued to retch and writhe in the grasp of the vomit.
Felicidad was showing signs of slow but evident improvement. Within the hospital, there was hope for Quesada's recovery, but imminent danger of a relapse and speedy death.
The bandolero was languishing in the third reactive stage of malignant cholera. There had come to him a surcease of the agonizing symptoms. No longer was there any want of pulse; his skin had returned to its almost normal hue; his body was once more warm. It was too warm. He was burning up with a kind of typhoid fever that kept him on his back and affected his brain.
He had weird dreams and horrible vagaries. Always was he the hounded victim of a terrible mistake. Pursued relentlessly by two beagles of the Guardia Civil, he saw himself, in one fancy, seeking sanctuary in a monastery. Under the irrevocable seal of confession, his past crimes were forgiven him. He went from monastery to seminary where he achieved in all piety the sacrament of Holy Orders.
Garbed in black chasuble, he imagined himself saying Mass, one day, when a tall, lean-faced, white-haired sergeant of police entered. As he turned from the golden pyx, containing the Host, and raised his arms in a Dominus Vobiscum, straight through the lungs the policeman shot him. Like Thomas à Becket of old, he pictured himself falling wounded to death upon the stainless cloth of the altar!
Carson was suffering, meanwhile, all the agonies he so often had witnessed and so intrepidly had tried to assuage. He had caught the cholera. The excitement of that crucial time upon the rock had over-stirred and heated him, and made of his body a hot forcing place for the virulent micro-organisms of the plague.
Ere he could be removed from Quesada's cabana to the sick bay, he was enduring all the intolerable tortures of purgatory. With that firm unshakable courage of the great-souled woman, Felicidad had offered, then, to watch over him and to nurse him back to life.
Alone of all the directing geniuses, only Manuel Morales and Jacques Ferou were left upstanding upon their two feet. Even the three bullfighters, who had been so helpful to aid, were stretched out on the platforms in the hospital, sick and wretched and wholly impotent.
The work had settled down to a fearful routine. More than once Morales fairly cleared the hospital of healed and dead, only to find, as he breathed a sigh of relief, that new cases were falling and filling the sick bay to overflowing and pouring out into the cabanas. There had been some hundred souls in the pueblo. There still lingered fourscore.
There came a day when the boy whose mother had died and who had wailed in a corner of the chapel, sunk through a slow process of harrowing ravages into the algid stage of the scourge. Morales carried out the little fellow. The boy was chattering with subnormal cold. Morales immersed him in the steaming bathing pool.
Later, returned to the sick bay, in making an incision with a penknife to inject into one of the boy's lesser veins a solution of salt, the knife slipped beneath the matador's grasp and cut his own hand. He gave the cut no attention. He did not even bother to bind it up. Coming out into the open, to lift the lower floodgate which would allow the infected water to sluice out, he plunged the wounded member full into the hot pool.
He was surprised but no whit frightened when, an hour later, a painful throbbing began to chase up and down his arm from that open gash in his hand. He attempted quickly to close the cut by packing it with a little salt. Then, shrugging his shoulders with incomprehension, fearlessly he sought to forget about it. He busied himself doling out to his many querulous patients copious doses of aperient and astringent medicines.
By nightfall, he was stretched in the hospital, prostrated from the plague. The change in him was at once inconceivable and appalling. The man that in the morning had been so strong with firmness of spirit, fortitude of soul, and a large enveloping tenderness of heart, was now cramped with griping, unendurable pangs and as weak of pulse, voice, and body as an old, old man.
From having served so many sick, Morales knew what he needed. He called for a mild opiate.
Jacques Ferou approached the end of the platform. Save for two convalescing serranos with matted hair and irregular features who were now acting, perforce, as nurses, Ferou was the only able-bodied man in the hospital.
The Frenchman watched the sufferings of the matador with small, bright slaty eyes. The trick of the eyelids, drooping at the outer corners, lent him a calculating sinister aspect. He curled one spike of his straw-colored mustache.
"I will give you the opiate, monsenor, but you must pay for it! You must pay five hundred pesetas!"
Morales attempted to sit up. But he could not sit up.
"Wounds of Christ!" he gasped in a husky whisper. "What is this—a fancy or some mistake of my ears? Has the disease touched my brain? Tell me, tell me, Senor Ferou!" he almost supplicated.
"It is neither the mistake nor the fancy," returned the Frenchman in coldly even tones. "It is merely that you are a rich man, Monsenor Morales, and that you can afford to pay. These others are only hungry serranos and underpaid bullfighters. Even Quesada there, with his feverish imaginings, is but a poor hounded thief. He has no money."
As if he were about to smile at some choice recollection, the nostrils of his high predatory nose twitched, the hard grim lines about his mouth momentarily widened and deepened. But he did not smile. In a voice that sounded to the matador like pulsing chill points of steel, he went on:
"But you, Monsenor Morales; you withdrew a large sum by wire from the Bank of Spain. It was when we first started on this little expedition, and it was so much money we were indeed astounded. Dicenta, the Jewish cacique of Alcazar de San Juan, cashed that order for you in many peseta bills. Most of those bills you still have on your person. I could take them away from you with a little force; but I prefer to give you their value in narcotics, medicines, and soups. Sacre, monsenor, life must be worth more to you than any money, eh?"
The black eyes of the matador, deep-sunken from the quick ravages of the disease, blazed up at Ferou as if they would sear and brand his ashy face. Slowly as he looked, clamping his strong white teeth together with the effort, Morales straightened out his contracted right arm and felt, beneath the blanket, for the revolver at his waist.
An astounded look that changed in a rush to one of stupefied dismay staggered his eyes. The revolver was gone! There was not even sheathed knife or belt!
Ferou watched the matador's eyes, his lids continuing to droop with pitiless analytical scrutiny. Significantly he tapped the heavy revolver that hung at his own belt. And he laughed, a thin chill laugh.
"You forget, monsenor. I am the only man armed in the barrio. It was at my suggestion that Senor Carson went about disarming the serranos. It was at my whisper, when your cuadrilla hesitated to shed their weapons, that you angrily threw off your own belt and gun. I have hidden them all!"
He threw up his sharp cinder-hued face in an accession of pride. Just as, on the Seville-to-Madrid, he had acted with Felicidad, so now he seemed to swell with pride, to grow and strut with importance, as he bared thus his real repulsive self to Morales.
"Monsenor," he exclaimed, "you do not know me; but the French police have long dreaded me as an adept and fearsome criminal. I am a White Wolf of Paris. I use my brain. I do not conceive and carry forward a plan in the one breath. I lay strings long in advance, and then, when the time is fit and proper, parbleu! I jerk.
"Ah, you understand, I see! It is thus now. I am ruler here. I am the only man armed in the village. What I say—"
Came an abrupt and alarming interruption from down the slant of the platform. Quesada sat rigidly up. His forehead pouring sweat, his eyes stark in his head, his hands clutching his chest, in a frightful voice he cried out:
"No, no! I never did it. Kill me if you will, but by the Life, you must believe me! It was some other man ... some other man!..."
His voice fainted away. With the exertion of shouting, with the fear of his grisly fancies, his face darkened with congested blood. Completely exhausted, he fell back upon the platform.
It was as if the interruption had come to strengthen the argument of Jacques Ferou. Overwhelmingly thereat Morales saw how powerless he was. Quesada was out of his mind; John Fremont Carson was on the rack of the plague; even the peones of his cuadrilla, who obedient to his command might have aided him, were stretched out on either hand, sick and helpless. The matador was completely at the mercy of the Frenchman.
One of the uncouth serranos bent over Quesada. To mitigate the fever, he poured some concoction down his burning throat.
Morales' tossing head came to an abrupt stop on the pillow. A sudden hope bourgeoned in his distracted eyes. He was like a man falling down a cliffside, clutching madly at an adnascent shrub. His eyes glowed from their deep sockets like pulsing coals. Here was help in his hour of need. His eyes seemed fairly to devour the serrano.
Ferou, watching all, bent sharply toward him.
"But you forgot again, monsenor!" he whispered. "You have burned their dead! You have transgressed the teachings of their religion, walked roughshod over all their superstitious dreads. They are my men, heart and soul!
"Ah, Morales, I have told you, I lay the strings of my plots long in advance! It was I who gathered these serranos and egged them on at that rebellion on the rock. I have whispered to them in the long nights. They believe all your sanitary methods are tricks of the devil which have aided, rather than lessened the ravages of the plague. The fact that the cholera has stricken you and Quesada and Carson is to them as a sign from on high. With the death of you three, they look for the lifting of the scourge. Sooner than aid your recovery, they would poison you!"
A fit of retching, sudden and violent, seized Morales. Ferou moved away. When Morales recovered from the griping vice of the fit, the Frenchman was proffering a cup of some darkish mixture to the convalescing banderillero on the matador's left hand.
"Here, Alfonso Robledo," he said quite loudly. "Drink this narcotic, and you will sleep like a babe. It is only fine old brandy with a pinch of opium."
It was just the mild form of opiate Morales craved. Ferou looked over at the matador with the words. He was tormenting Morales with the afflictions of a Tantalus. He went down the lane between the platforms, most solicitously dosing each sufferer in turn.
Behind the Frenchman's back, surreptitiously, the banderillero Alfonso Robledo proffered his opiate to Morales. Morales shook his head.
"I thank you a thousand times, my son," he said in a feeble husky whisper; "but it is not right that I should rob you of that which your debilitated system needs. We are both sick men."
"But I am recovering, growing stronger hourly. Maestro, you have just slapped down!" The banderillero became quietly yet earnestly impassioned. "Ah, it breaks my heart to see my brave espada so weak! I want to help. Should you die through sacrifice to me, I will not care to live! I am only a peon of your cuadrilla; you are the great matador. My loss will not be felt! Take it, take it, please, Don Manuel of my soul!"
Morales hesitated. But only for a trice.
"No," he decided with heroic stubbornness. "This Frenchman can't have so black a heart. Seguramente, no! He is but teasing me to test my caliber. If I must, rather than rob you, Alfonso, I shall pay the hawk!"
"Eh?" broke in the thin nasal voice of Ferou. Unaware, he had returned and overheard Morales' words. "And you have changed your mind, Don Manuel? You are willing to pay? That is good! Now let me see; what was it you wanted?"
"I think your joke a little cruel, Senor Ferou. I would have you give me a mild opiate."
"Ah, yes; brandy and an opium pill. That will cost you now just one thousand pesetas! This wait, which you think such a cruel joke, Monsenor Morales, has cost you precisely five hundred pesetas more!"
The man was altogether inhuman.
"You hawk, you vulture of the slime, you blood-leech!" execrated Morales in a furious voice that shook through his lungs like a hoarse wind. "I shall rot in hell before ever I put one centesimo into your filthy claws!"
The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders. His face was stiff and livid with restrained bile.
"I leave you now, Don Manuel," he said with acid politeness, "to visit that other Eldorado, Senor Carson. Perhaps mon Americain won't think so much of his peseta bills. And who knows? Perhaps the great espada will also change his mind by the time I return!"
At the door, he turned and called out bitingly to the two sullen serranos:
"You will see, mis paisanos, that Monsenor Morales, who burned your dead, will want for everything and get nothing! When he changes his mind, one of you may come for me!"
He smiled toward Morales his peculiar aggravating smile; then, twisting the spikes of his straw mustache, swaggered out the doorway.
There was a soft thud up near the altar at the end of one platform. The mountain boy, Gabriel, had rolled off upon the ground. On discolored hands and knees quaking from the disease, he came creeping with stealthy quietude and laborious feebleness down the passageway. Half-tilted between rigid teeth, he held a tin cup containing a preparation in wine of powdered aromatic chalk.
He had achieved half the length of the runway when, on the sudden, one of the serranos discovered him. The fellow roughly swung the boy up under one arm. The contents of the tin cup was spilled. The boy began a frenzied squirming and kicking. In a tumult of febrile revolt and piteous pleading, he wailed:
"Let me go, let me go to him—to Don Manuel of my heart! He is good, he is brave, he is like the very God Himself! He is sick only because he helped me and the knife slipped! Ah, Diego Lerida, I have known you since I was born. Won't you let me go, won't you let me give him something to ease the pain? He did the same for the wife of you, ere the good Dios called her. Only a little chalk, Tio Diego, only a little chalk and wine.
"No? You won't let me go! Then may Satanas claim you for a gnat of a dunghill—you and all your vile spawn! And may the Christ and His Compassionate Mother bring hope and health to my own brave espada—"
Came a hoarse shout from Morales: "Hola, my brave little golden one! I drink to you, Gabriellito!"
And accepting the lesser of the two sacrifices, Morales lifted from between the banderillero and himself the cup containing the partly finished brandy, and quaffed it down in one great draught.
He was none too soon. With an oath of commingled surprise, anger and dismay, the second serrano leaped forward and lunged at the matador. He only succeeded in knocking the empty cup from Morales' hand.
Save then for the feverish Quesada and those who slept under the influence of narcotics or the cold pall of death, the whole sick bay chortled with nightmare hoarseness at the frustrated and suddenly apprehensive serranos.
The hours snailed by. While Manuel Morales tossed and mumbled in painful slumber, the mountain boy watched him steadily from down the lane of blanketed figures. There was in his unblinking, deep-socketed eyes that highest emotion one can exercise toward another human being. Morales had called him his dorado, his brave little golden one! In his eyes was a reverence that amounted to venerating love, wistful adoration!
It was a strangely assorted trio. Over the lip of the great rock on the brink of the village of Minas de la Sierra extended the athletic shoulders and sharp ashy face of Jacques Ferou, lying flat on his stomach. Below in the gorge at the foot of the corkscrew goat path, straining their necks backward and looking up, were the two Guardias Civiles, Pascual Montara and Sergeant Esteban Alvarado. All three were deeply absorbed in a distance-spanning conversation.
"That Americain lied!" the Frenchman was shouting down with heated earnestness. "Jacinto Quesada is himself in this village. He has been sick with the great illness and with a mad fever, too; but this morning his head is once more his own, and he is repairing rapidly in strength. He is here, I tell you!"
"Muy bueno!" shouted back the old sergeant with glad resolution. "We will come up for him immediately!"
"Non, non, mi sargento! There is the pestilence to fear, and there is also my revolver which barks no, no!"
"What would you, then?" asked sullenly that apelike one, Montara.
Now, so thoroughly were the trio engrossed in the matter of words, that their minds were completely monopolized and all other perceptions were excluded from their senses. They did not hear the clatter of a horse's hoofs approaching up the gorge. When that clatter abruptly ceased, their unheeding ears received no sensation of change or difference.
They did not know that, five yards behind the policeman, concealed from above by the leafy branches of pines and alders and from the guardsmen ahead by a thick underwood of tall buckthorn and entangled genista, a horseman had halted and now, leaning his two hands upon the pommel of the saddle, was observing them attentively.
He was quite a rememberable-looking man. His hair was white; his skin from exposure to wind and weather was a deep swarth; and his eyes were gray. Not many Spaniards have gray eyes. The eyes of Don Jaime de Torreblanca y Moncada were a clear, cold, agate-gray. All in all, there was about his appearance, especially the long aquiline nose, the stony eyes and pointed white beard, something which seemed to hearken back to the days of ruffs and ready swords—the days of the terrible Spanish infantry, the Armada, the Bigotes, the "Bearded Men," the Conquistadores.
He strained his eyes through the greeny plait above him. Suddenly, as he glimpsed the man sprawled on the great rock, his narrow face blanched as if gutted of blood; a look of savage ferocity leaped into his eyes; and his hand strayed back to the heavy horse pistol slung from the saddle.
But abruptly his reaching hand stopped. A few random words of the trio's conversation had impinged upon his ears and aroused his curiosity.
"There is something foul going forward here!" he breathed vehemently. "I shall listen. Of what use to snap off the snake's head, now and impetuously? Let him bare his fangs. With cold patience, even as the Christ waits for his Judgment Day, I will wait for my moment of vengeance on this creature!"
Don Jaime was a grandee of Spain, one entitled to wear his hat in the presence of his monarch. Well now, as he applied his ear to the conversation, his stony eyes filled with a profundity of contempt that none but a grandee could plumb. Carajo! this was no ordinary conversation he was overhearing. It was the bartering for money of the living body of a man!
Shouted down Ferou, repeating the last question of Montara:
"What would I, what would I have you do? Oh, a very little, monsenores policemen—I would merely have you attend to the simple matter of my reward. I will do all the rest. For the reward, I will deliver Quesada up to you—I will deliver him walking upon his own two legs, so you will not have to touch his infectious clothes. It is good, what? And you will give me the reward of ten thousand pesetas, eh?"
"When you have done all that you say you will do," returned the old sergeant, sternly noncommittal, "then, and not before, shall you have earned the ten thousand pesetas. But you need have no fears for the money! When I shoot down this sacrilegious swollen toad of a Quesada, I shall make my report to headquarters at Getafe. Your name—"
"It is Jacques Ferou."
"I will remember, Senor Don Jacques Ferou. You shall be given all due credit. In two weeks' time from the day you deliver Jacinto Quesada to us, you can collect the reward by presenting yourself at Getafe. Most certainly, Spain shall consider herself the best off in the bargain!"
"Tres bien!" exclaimed the Frenchman, lapsing with emotion into his native tongue; then recovering: "It is good. I agree."
"When may we expect you with the heretical dog?" asked Montara.
"To-morrow at noon. When this great rock is hot with midday glare, I will force him out here, my gun nuzzling his back. You policemen can shoot him from below."
Vigorously the old sergeant nodded his polished tricorn hat.
"Muy bueno!" he approved heartily. Then in adieu: "Go thou thy way with God!"
"Always at the feet of the Guardia Civil who keep the peace of Spain," ended the man on the rock, after the fashion of Spanish courtesy. He withdrew from view, thereupon, much as a turtle's head withdraws from view between its carapax and plastron shells.
Don Jaime crashed his rawboned old horse through the tall buckthorn and entangled genista.
"Alto a la Guardia Civil!" thundered Montara, springing back and jerking his carbine to his shoulder.
"Down, you apelike one!" commanded the aged sergeant. "Can't you see? It is the hidalgo doctor, Don Jaime de Torreblanca y Moncada!" And he swept his tricorn hat off his close-clipped white head.
Don Jaime reined in his horse to a quick stop. He disdained altogether the mortified Montara. He looked down at the bared white head, the knife-sharp white beard, and the lean and haughty face of the aged sergeant.
It was, then, as if he looked down upon a singular edition of himself. Don Jaime was a grandee by birth and breeding, and these things amount in Spain; but the old sergeant was no less grand with adamantine adhesion to principle, with eagle-sternness and eagle-haughtiness. They eyed each other with mutual recognition and respect. They were both of the same old Spanish imperial school, unforgiving of injury, inexorable to avenge.
Said the doctor, "Peace be to you, mi sargento."
"And to you peace, Don Jaime of my soul."
"But what is this scheme I hear you hatching?"
"It is a way we have of keeping the peace of Spain."
"Cannot you drag down the Wolf-Cub without the aid of this blood-hound, Ferou?"
"We of the Guardia Civil are not podencos that can drag down the Wolf in the open. Senor Don Dios! we have tried and each time failed!"
"But the man Ferou is a human leech! Oh, I overheard your secret talk. I tell you, the Frenchman sucks life-blood for money!"
"It is thief catch thief, Don Jaime. The Wolf-Cub, Quesada, is a cancer in the side of Spain. And Spain must be healed. We will loose the leech to suck this evil cancer from the side of Spain!"
"You are hatching a snake's egg, mi gran caballero. The fruit of it shall stink in the nostrils of all brave Moors! You may take your oath on that, Don Esteban! I for one will be no party to it!"
"No lo quiera Dios! God forbid, proud Torreblanca y Moncada, that we of the police should expect your aid! You have a higher call. Up in Minas de la Sierra, there is wailing and much sickness—ah, so many men have slapped under and died, and so many more suffer in earthly purgatory!"
"Sea como Dios quiera!" muttered Don Jaime. "God's will be done!"
The sergeant looked up at him, old eyes alive with strange fervor.
"They say of you, Don Jaime—si, and of me, too!—that we have granite boulders for hearts. But I know. Arrogante Torreblanca y Moncada is very tender with the sick. He has hands of gold for calling one back to life and for closing softly the lids of the dying. Vaya, mi gran hidalgo doctor! Go thou in the companionship of the sublime Christ and Mary, the All Compassionate!"
He stepped to one side. Don Jaime bade him a courteous adieu. Then, with all the hauteur of one riding an Arabian barb, sitting rigid in the saddle, the senor doctor loped his rawboned old nag up the winding goat path toward the barrio.
The policeman looked after him. Pascual Montara chewed fiercely the ends of his black mustache. He muttered:
"To-morrow at noon. When that great rock is hot with midday glare, this hombre Jacques Ferou will force the Sacrilegious One out upon the brink."
"Carajo, yes!" grimly agreed the old sergeant. "And we of the Guardia Civil will shoot him from below!"
A man wasted from disease sat, all this while, in the morning sunlight on a chair tilted back against one whitewashed wall of the village chapel. His young haggard face was screwed up, and he frowned through Moorish amber eyes toward where, some distance below, the Frenchman sprawled on the great rock at the brink of the village. He could not account for the unseemly posture and gesticulating hands and head of the Frenchman.
No word of Ferou's bartering reached him. He lacked even one clue to the strange and absorbing business going forward. He did not know that the waiting members of the Guardia Civil had advanced up the gorge and now, out of sight, down at the foot of the goat path, were making cold-blooded arrangement with the Frenchman for the delivery of his own living body!
Quesada lacked the strength which would urge him boldly to investigate. And he was too weak to concentrate his mind, for any length of time, on an apparently unsolvable problem. He shrugged aside his perplexity, after a little, and sunk back into that trick of strategic plotting so natural to the feeble in body but strong in spirit.
Twisting his head about, he looked through the doorway into the hospital. Within, in that fetid moaning place where lay the sick Morales, there were no attending serranos; they had finished their rounds for the nonce. Below on the great rock, the engrossing and unaccountable business had every appearance of engaging Ferou for some time. The way was clear.
Quesada thumped down his tilted chair and walked on weakly rickety legs to where, near the cork-oak tree in the center of the uneven street, a number of the villagers were brewing a puchero in a great iron pot.
"Come, mis paisanos!" he said in a voice surprisingly commanding for one so enervated from disease. "Ladle out to me a bowl of the stew."
"We have no orders to refuse you, Don Jacinto," answered one of the men obsequiously. "We only mind that Morales and the Americano should get none."
The bandolero snorted, but held his peace. He took the steaming earthen bowl proffered him; then quaking like one palsied, exerting a deal of effort so as not to spill a drop of the precious haricot, he slowly retraced his steps toward the sick bay.
Here he glanced back over one shoulder. The serranos had returned to the business of stirring the puchero; they were not watching him. In he staggered, through the chapel doorway, to share the soup of the stew with the sick matador, Manuel Morales.
Minutes clicked by—a good ten minutes.
Within the cabana where Carson convalesced, Felicidad was sitting in a chair at the American's bedside, her golden head nodding with drowsiness, when theblutof approaching feet on the earthen floor startled her into alertness. She saw the slim gray-suited form of the Frenchman darkening the doorway. Her blue eyes widened and filled with apprehension and deep abhorrence. She shuddered involuntarily and shrunk back in the chair.
But Ferou only bowed in mock respect.
"Senor Carson," he addressed the American, "my serranos are stewing, out in the street, a fine savory ragout of meat and lentils. Would you care for some of the soup? It would be very strength-giving."
Carson, his angular hollow-cheeked face white as the pillow pressed about it, made no answering movement of head or mouth. With eyes deep-sunken and chilly blue as high mountain lakes, he looked up at the Frenchman unblinkingly.
"It will be very simple, monsenor," continued Ferou suavely, the hard lines deepening about his mouth in a grim smile. "All you have to do is to give me one of your five-thousand peseta bills! Since yesterday, the price of lentils and meat has soared on these mountains. But to you who are so rich, that is no importa. Only five thousand pesetas for a bowl of soup!"
All at once, like an unexpectedly loosed avalanche, the girl was on her feet, her blue eyes coldly ablaze like points of steel.
"You—you thief! You know he has left only one bill of five thousand pesetas! You have taken all the others! Oh, you rapacious hawk, you vile, vile vulture!" she cried out, shuddering with horrid remembrance and a sudden increase of detestation. "You would rob him of his all, everything! You would have him end his days in want and misery, just like the pobre padre of me!"
The Frenchman did not wither beneath her scorn. He shoved his sharp blond head nearer her. And his face livid with stirred-up bile, his slate-colored eyes narrowed to mere blazing slits, he bared his long white teeth in a passionate carnivorous snarl of envenomed hate.
"You baggage, you treacherous snake! I'll show you what! When I get done my work in this barrio, you'll go with me. Mon Dieu, I'll show you how an Apache Parisien treats one such as you!"
The movement was unexpected. Sudden as the sweep of a hawk, he bent his tall athletic body forward sharply and made a grab at her wrist!
She recoiled from him. The nostrils of his high predatory nose twitching and working, his whole ashy face working and grimacing with fury like a horrible mask of rubber, he leaped after her. She sidled along the edge of the bed. Trembling in every limb like a terrorized doe, she retreated out the doorway.
Bent sharply forward, bounding from spot to spot like a leopard, the Frenchman followed.
The American attempted to lift his head from the pillow. He fell back like a load of lead. He worked his hands together and groaned aloud at his helplessness.
Came a sudden clatter of horse's hoofs out in the village; then the loud shaking voice of a man:
"Alto! Halt, you nameless wench! You have soiled my honor, profaned my name, defiled my blood! Heart of God, you must die!"
It was not the voice of the Frenchman. It was the voice of Don Jaime de Torreblanca y Moncada. The terrible doctor had come!
Sitting stark upright upon his horse on the great rock at the brink of the village, his narrow face a cinder-gray, Don Jaime was leveling his huge horse-pistol at the backing form of the golden-haired girl!
"Ha!" exclaimed the Frenchman, his eyes lighting up like sunlight on ice, his grimacing face wreathing into an outrageous smile. "It is the haughty hidalgo come to wipe out his dishonor in the blood of ma chérie Felicidad!"
With a laugh that was worse than brutal, that was pitiless and fiendish at such a time, he sprung back into the dark shelter of the doorway.
The frail slip of a girl was left, unaided and alone, to face the avenger.
Attracted by the vibrant loud outcry of the terrible doctor, Jacinto Quesada put down the earthen bowl of stew, left the bedside of the sick Morales, and showed himself in the doorway of the hospital. With weakness his rickety legs tottered under him; with weakness the world reeled and swam before his eyes. He shaded his eyes with a pale and unsteady hand and peered out into the cold sunlight.
He understood the threat. Down at the end of the uneven street, on the great rock at the brink of the village, bulked Calamity on horseback!
Quesada clutched at the jamb of the door. Shaking like a tag of paper in an ugly wind, for an intolerable moment he clung there. Then all at once, in a blind broken-legged stagger, out into the street he lurched.
With every leaden stride, he seemed to gather to his need what scattered rags and tatters of strength he yet possessed. His legs straightened under him somewhat; his heavy toppling shoulders came up.
On the sudden, he slewed completely round. Back the way he had come, back toward the sick bay, he pitched.
But again and all on a sudden, he halted. He threw his arms aloft, he lifted drawn face to the cold gray sky. Hoarsely he cried out:
"Give me strength! Senor Don Dios, give me strength to do that which I now must do!"
On he sped back toward the hospital. And his feet pounded down and up, down and up without infirmity, without numb and leaden shuffle. Gone were the staggering lurch, the sagging shoulders, the rolling giddying head. Gone utterly all the various stigmata of disease-engendered weakness!
He was like a man who, suddenly overwhelmed by an ocean of water, casts off his clogging garments and strikes out nimbly and heartily. He was altogether a new man, agile to move, galvanically energized. He was mighty with an unwonted strength.
It was not a body strength. It was a strength above body strength, a strength beyond body strength. It was that strength secreted deep down but seldom drawn upon, that strength which lifts some men up and steels them to their endeavors in moments of prodigious stress. It was that epic strength which makes of weaklings, cold-eyed and high-handed heroes!
Something must be done to thwart the granite will of the implacable Don Jaime. There was need for a man. There was no time to lose.
Quick as an ape, Quesada bounded through the hospital doorway. Down the runway between the platforms and the dying men, he dashed. At the end of the smelly place, near the dingy altar, he halted. There, on the slant of the pine slabs, lay the disease-wasted form of little Gabriel, the mountain boy.
He bent over the pitifully sick child. Carefully, round and round the puny little body, he swathed the tossed and crumpled blanket. Then up in his two arms he lifted the blanketed boy and bore him back along the runway, out the hospital door.
The child rested his head like an infant in Quesada's neck; he raised to the gaunt face of the bandolero, two dull and feebly wondering eyes. A great pity smote Quesada. Convulsively his arms tightened about the boy. He felt suddenly weak, almost unmanned. For the moment he could not continue on.
He put his mouth close to the cradled head of the boy.
"Ah, forgive me, nino of my soul!" he whispered fervently. "I do not desire to be brutal. I desire only to save our good Felicidad from cruel death at her father's hands."
Gabriel smuggled his arm about the bandolero's neck. It was a mute but trustful answer. Quesada looked over one shoulder to call back through the doorway:
"Alfonso Robledo! You can walk. Lend a hand here, man! Follow me!"
Then down the long uneven street he ran, the blanketed form of Gabriel borne before him in his tight but tender arms.
Everything was happening with breathless velocity, in a rush, in hardly an appreciable flicker of time.
As Quesada went by, from deep in the shadowy doorways of their cabanas, the mountaineers of Minas de la Sierra peered forth at him. They were like so many beady-eyed lizards in so many dark crevices. At the first rustle of danger they had hid themselves.
No sound came from the huts. But once Quesada had put them behind two by two, there breathed up, from each cabana, an aghast whisper:
"Ah, God in Heaven! There goes Jacinto Quesada, and our own little Gabriel in the two brave arms of him! And Alfonso—Alfonso Robledo tottering after! What would they? Turn the hidalgo doctor from his terrible purpose? Ave Maria Purissima!"
Where trivial anxieties talk and gesticulate, there great anxieties stand dumb and make no sign.
Thus with the two principals in the on-sweeping tragedy. Mute and motionless as boulders of basalt, they stood transfixed against that steely background of cold sky and glacial desolate mountains—the one bulking high on horseback like some black-browed Destroying Angel, the other petrified below him in the street, a pale flower of a girl.
They did not hear the whispers from the cabanas, those whispers that were like the murmurings which come with the inchoation of a great storm or an earthquake. They did not see Quesada swinging fast down the street, the blanketed form of Gabriel in his arms and the sick bullfighter, swathed Indian-like in another blanket, lurching and tottering behind him. They had ears and eyes only for the grim and calamitous business at hand.
Poor Felicidad! For a long unendurable interval, stupefied by the shock of the hidalgo's sudden coming, she stood terrorized and iced with dismay. Then the appalling desperation of her extremity struck home to her. A violent tremor shook through her ivory and gold form, her strength ebbed away, her knees gave under her, and she began to fall.
But no! Out of her memory leaped like scalding vitriol the words with which Don Jaime had greeted her.
"Halt, you nameless wench!"
And, from deep in her being, rushed forth to hearten and uphold her a new, surprising reserve of strength and courage. With an unconscious but fine little movement of hauteur, she drew herself erect.
He had called her a nameless wench. Well, she would show this harsh hidalgo there was blood and pride in her yet. She would show him she knew how to die bravely, proudly—aye, in a manner wholly befitting a Torreblanca y Moncada!
The golden head, that was so rare in one Castilian, lifted up. Up she gazed at the avenger out of fearless and scornful blue eyes.
For a vehement moment, an emphatic quivering trice, over the long glittering barrel of the horse-pistol, Don Jaime answered her gaze.
Za, he knew the jade! She had soiled his honor, profaned his name, defiled his blood! She had run off with a creature who had no more decency than to rob the father of all his money, while he stole from him also his only child! Name of God! how he despised her!
Like was he, then, to that morose and vindictive Jehovah of the ancient Jews. His hand tightened on the heavy butt. There was, in the cold stillness, the sharp click of an old-fashioned pistol being cocked!
Harshly the sound cracked against the ears of Jacinto Quesada. His running body lurched forward in a desperate spurt. He stumbled against the startled nag. He held up in his arms to the doctor the blanketed form of Gabriel. And hoarsely he cried out:
"God forbid, Don Jaime! Wait—for the love of Our Lady of Pity, wait! You are a physician, and we are sick here. We are sick with the dread cholera, sick unto death. Your first duty is to us. You must help us. We need you, urgently, woefully—"
Again everything was happening with breathless velocity, in a rush, in hardly an appreciable flicker of time. Quesada's voice rose almost to a scream:
"Turn your eyes upon this dying boy, Torreblanca y Moncada! Look at the glassy eyes, the deep eye pits! Look at the cheek bones bursting through the paper-dry skin! Have pity on him, Don Jaime. Eleven years old, innocent as a babe at the breast, and yet wrinkled and wan and all crumpled in a heap like a disease-riddled old man!
"Ah, Blood of Christ, Don Jaime, you are no Barbary savage to turn away from the outreaching hands of a dying child! You are a priest of the body, a servant of mankind! Your first duty is to this mortally sick child, to all the mortally sick in this village. After that, if you must, you may kill!"
Quesada trembled violently with the ardor and hunger of his entreaty. The dark-eyed, pasty-faced Gabriel shook in his uplifted arms like a poor played-out doll of rags. An end of the blanket slipped from about the boy's shoulder, dragged free from him, fell in a heap upon the rock. Aloft to the doctor, Quesada held the little fellow stark naked in the full light of day!
Quesada fell to his knees, clawed frantically for the blanket. The child lifted slow deep-sunken eyes to the stony eyes of the grandee, as if dimly wondering what it was all about.
Quesada raised one end of the blanket to enwrap the boy, then suddenly hesitated. He had appealed to the honor of the physician. Well he knew how dear was that professional honor to Don Jaime!
Don Jaime was the sort of physician who looks upon his business of serving the ailing as a sacred commission from on high. He was like one who had taken Holy Orders with his doctor's degree. No Jesuit was more slave to his oaths; no Jesuit worked with more zeal for God and the Society than did Don Jaime for Humanity and Science.
Quesada thought, now, to essay farther. With the little fellow standing upon his own reedlike legs and clinging desperately to him, the bandolero lifted his gaunt face to the granite face of the hidalgo. In a low patient voice, he said:
"Would you let this poor child endure all the agonies of purgatory and wretchedly die, while you carry out your cruel scheme of vengeance? Look at him, Don Jaime! Give heed to the legs that are like walking-sticks, the poor thin wrists, the bony little neck, the body limp as a soaking dish towel!
"Have pity on him, Don Jaime—you who know what it is to suffer! The Senor Don Dios has been far more cruel to him than ever He has been to you! Not a month gone. He took the child's widowed mother from him; she was one of the first to be claimed by the plague. Now the poor baby is all alone in the world!"
Quesada swathed the boy in the blanket. Cradling him tenderly in his arms, he got quietly to his feet. He waited.
Don Jaime hesitated. The horse-pistol shook violently in his hand. His agate eyes softened.
Then, all at once, an appalling change swept over Don Jaime. Deep in the crypts and catacombs of his brain, old rankling memories stirred—old painful and dolorous memories got up, and walked about, and paraded back and forth in somber procession. He could have screamed, so tortured was he that moment!
Why should he, the grievously outraged one, show pity? Why should he turn aside from his scheme of vengeance to succor this dying child, these wretched people? Once before had he been robbed when he sought revenge for a mortal wrong. This jade's mother had run off with a gypsy picador. And though the hand of God had intervened in that elopement as a sublime instrument of vengeance, always had he regretted, through the dreary and bitter years, that his own hand had not slain the mother of Felicidad.
Not another time would he suffer himself to be turned aside. He was like that awful Jehovah of the Jews! He would be revenged up to the hilt, paid back in full!
He tore his eyes from the piteous face of the boy Gabriel. He freshened his grip on the horse-pistol, lifted it up. Slowly over the level of it he eyed the waiting girl.
Rose suddenly a shout from Quesada:
"Take the boy away, Alfonso Robledo! He is only a peasant's sniveling cub, a mountaineer's orphan brat! What cares the grandee of Spain for our little Gabriel? Take him away; the hidalgo Don Jaime will have none of him! Let him die!"
Robledo tottered forward. He took the blanketed child in his arms. Turning about, slowly back toward the hospital he made.
Quesada lifted his haggard face. With a contempt biting and goading in its virulence, he cried:
"Proceed, proud Torreblanca y Moncada! You have your high knightly honor to defend, your name and blood to purge! Shoot!"
Now it may have been because of the miraculous interposition of the Espiritu Santo, or it may have been by reason of the sudden and brutal exposure; but all at once, as he was borne away in the arms of Robledo, the boy Gabriel took an abrupt turn for the worse—a cruel cramping fit seized him in its formidable vise!
Violent spasms shook and threw him about like a tossed beanbag; his teeth clenched together with the paralysis of lockjaw; his legs and arms knotted up and flung out again as if they would tear themselves apart from his body. All in a trice, and ere Robledo could prevent, he writhed out of the bullfighter's grasp and fell rolling and squirming upon the ground, his fingers clawing at the yellow earth.
Blind to everything else, screaming his fear and horror, Quesada leaped toward him. But some one bulked before the bandolero, blocked his way, dashed head-bent for the boy's side.
That some one held in his hand an instrument of gleaming silver, needle-sharp at one end. He dropped to his knees beside the pitifully contorted Gabriel. He shoved the needle point into the boy's knotted arm above the wrist; gave it a quick jab. That some one was the hidalgo doctor, Don Jaime!
Once the hypodermic injection acted on the spinal cord and the medulla oblongata, the spasms would be checked, quieted, allayed. But there must be a circulation of blood. Too slow, altogether too slow, was the blood trickling through the lad's veins. He was sinking fast.
With swift harsh hands, Don Jaime rubbed desperately the boy's arms, legs and spine. But Gabriel's pulse was dying; rapidly his skin was turning to a blue tinge; like dew chilling to frost, the surface of his body was freezing icily. The injection of morphia failed to impact on the nerve centers. It was without effect.
On a sudden the little fellow kicked out, then lay rigid as one who stiffens in the petrifying clutch of death. All the breath had fled his nostrils. He was in the asphyxial stage of the cholera.
Don Jaime, kneeling beside the collapsed form, tore with his harsh hands at jaw and brow to force open the vised mouth. Between the boy's clenching teeth, he wedged the blunt end of the silver syringe. Then he strove to force air into the sunken empty lungs. He strove brusquely yet carefully, as one strives over a drowning man. He lifted the reedlike arms above the boy's head, then back to his sides and up again.
He worked feverishly, he worked heroically. He reached for the black leather box he had thrown behind him. The broken straps on that box showed where it had been torn with sudden violence from the cantle of his saddle.
Quesada hastened to aid his groping hand. He picked up the box and held it open.
"Ammonia!" snapped the doctor. "Hold it to his nose!"
Quesada withdrew from the box a labeled blue bottle. As Don Jaime worked the puny arms up and down with a certain circumspect precision, Quesada held the pungent salts beneath the slightly fluttering nostrils.
"Build a fire! Heat water!" Don Jaime exploded, never ceasing his labors. "Quick! We must give the boy a hot bath to circulate the blood and save him from dying!"
"We have a fire going night and day," returned Quesada. "We have only to remove the heated stones to the bathing pool."
"Where is it, this pool? Lead the way!"
The haughty doctor leaped afoot. He had no thought but for the urgent business at hand. He was a thrall to grim and importunate necessity. Even as his personal honor was to him more precious than life, so was his physician's honor a covenant with Jehovah, tyrannical and imperious to command him.
Quesada, flinging his rickety legs wide apart, went swaying and floundering up the uneven street. Don Jaime followed after the bandolero, the little Gabriel in his own hidalgo arms.
The heat of the bath circulated the lad's blood. By slow degrees, he drew out of the chill collapse. Don Jaime wrapped him snug in a blanket. Once again, in his own hidalgo arms, the grandee doctor carried the boy back to the sick bay.
As he entered that fetid moaning place, a kind of shiver trembled through Don Jaime. He made along the runway between the platforms of tossing, groaning, and emaciated sick, his gray eyes darting from side to side. At the upper end of the chapel, near the dingy altar, he laid the boy down.
What of the hot bath and resultant circulation of blood, the injection of morphia was now at last achieving its purpose. No sooner had the poor lad touched the pine slabs than he passed blissfully into the dwelling place of sleep.
Don Jaime looked down the two platforms of blanketed sick. Slowly and gloomily he shook his white head. He turned to Quesada following doglike after him. His narrow face was a cinder-gray.
"You have spoken aright, son of a mangy she-wolf," he said. "I came nigh to forgetting my duty. I am a priest of the body. My first duty is to the suffering and dying here! After that—"
He paused ominously. He looked about as if in search of something. Of a sudden his roving eyes became focused, riveted; they flashed like cressets of fire. Through the hospital doorway, out into the cold sunlight he gazed.
He saw Felicidad down the village street. From the spell of terror and despair she was only then recovering. She glanced quickly about her. It was as if she had been away on a long journey and was astounded now to find everything as it had been before. She shuddered visibly like one starting to life who had been dead for intolerable moments.
Lip quivering but head held with a quiet proud demeanor, she turned toward the cabana wherein the American lay. As she entered the low doorway Jacques Ferou, lurking in the dark, sidled past her and out.
The Frenchman's whole malignant soul was bunched and crouched in his eyes. He threw after the golden form of the girl a look searing and blasting. It was as if, now that the vengeance of the hidalgo had failed him, he would kill the girl himself with that one glare from his slaty eyes.
Don Jaime's lips clicked together. Looking piercingly through the doorway, his agate eyes lunged like sharp knives at the venomous Frenchman and the white trembling girl. In a voice chill as a glacial wind, he spoke.
"After I have fulfilled here my duty to the sick," he said—"after that, by the Life, I slay!"
He would say no more. His lips tightened into a line thin and grim as if chiseled in stone.
He went down and up the line of platforms, dosing each sufferer in turn. To some he gave stimulants and astringents; to those in the more severe stages of the disease, he doled out opiates.
He went from cabana to choza outside, bringing brandy and nutritive food to the convalescing. He was leaving the choza of one villager when Quesada, dogging his steps, plucked him by the sleeve.
"You have seen, senor don hidalgo?" asked the bandolero. "The Frenchman Ferou is up here, also."
"I know," nodded Don Jaime austerely. "He is wherever trouble is. He is the scum that gathers where things are filthy, an abomination to be squashed under the heel! Za!" he ended, with profound loathing. "He is a human leech!"
Quickly then, as they approached the next cabana, he related with characteristic frankness and bitter contempt, all he had seen and heard that morning in the gorge at the foot of the goat path.
Quesada showed little surprise. What could one expect from the French vulture!
But what did surprise him not a little was to find, upon putting his hand inside his sheepskin zamarra, that the small mahogany-colored leather purse of the doctor was no longer there. Carajo! what had become of the purse and money of Don Jaime?
"It is that Frenchman!" he quickly surmised. "Don Jaime, he has stolen your money for a second time! I took the purse from him in that affair of the Seville-to-Madrid; I was holding all those five thousand peseta bills for you, my senor doctor; but while I was down sick and knew nothing, the French ferret must have gone through my pockets!"
Don Jaime only grunted.
They entered the obscurity of the next cabana. Within, Felicidad was sitting at the bedside of the convalescing American, explaining all that had occurred. At their appearance, she abruptly quieted.
Pointing to the American upon the leaf-stuffed couch, Quesada explained in a few sketchy sentences just who Carson was and all he had done. Then the bandolero told how Ferou had charged Carson for the medicines so vital to his recovery and even for the bare necessities of life.
"The Frenchman is a plunderer, an extortioner, Don Jaime. He charged prices, exorbitant prices. He robbed this man of all his ready money. Senor Don Dios, it was outrageous, detestable! There was no need of prices; the man was down on his back, helpless, well-nigh dead; there was no need of prices of any kind. But what could we do? In all the barrio, Ferou was the only one armed."
The hidalgo doctor lifted Carson's heavy hand to feel his pulse. He said no word. He never once looked toward Felicidad who had arisen to her feet and stepped to one side.