To Jacinto Quesada, returned after an absence of over a week, the
village of Minas de la Sierra wore an inexplicably strange appearance.
Gone utterly--mud and thatch and wooden shutters--were the chozas in
which the widowed mother of the mountain boy, Gabriel, had lain sick and
the white-haired Villarobledo had died. Where the huts had stood were
now only empty spans.
Before the other huts had been built a covered wooden flume, as for the
carrying off of sewage. Down the old Moorish gutter in the center of the
uneven street coursed a clear quick stream with cold reflections and
tiny gurgling noises that seemed to tempt one to drink.
Otherwise, nothing stirred in the chill morning sunlight. No serranos
stood in the low doorways of the cabanas or hovered about the cork-oak
tree in the center of the barrio. The village seemed a village of the
dead.
Quesada hastened across the street, muddy and slippery from the heavy
fog of the night prior. As he did, of a sudden from the direction of the
little whitewashed chapel, there drifted down to his ears a continuous
moaning and groaning. It sounded bodiless and unearthly in the thin air
of that high altitude.
He knew thereat. Carson, the American, following out his scheme of
sanitation, had segregated the sick. The tiny village chapel had been
converted into a hospital. Within in the painful obscurity, behind those
apertures that were now screened against flies with flimsy calico, men
were moving back and forth on solemn and fearful tasks.
Quesada made his way into the cabana where he had left Felicidad.
Inside, in the gloom, he found John Fremont Carson visiting the girl in
the course of his rounds.
Propped by a pillow, the golden-haired girl was sitting up in the bed.
Her cheeks were still white as ivory; but there was a brave new light in
her blue eyes. She was convalescing. Carson was holding for her, with
kind concern, a bowl of vegetable soup, thin and easily digestible.
Looking over the American's shoulder, she was the first to discover the
bandolero. With glad and genuine effusiveness, in a voice that yet
showed husky traces of the vox cholerica, she cried:
"My soul! It is Jacintito come back to us!"
The American got quickly afoot and shook hands warmly.
"Have you brought the stuff?" he greeted solicitously.
"Seguramente, si!" smiled Quesada. "And we may thank the bueno Dios that
the senor doctor, from long tending to cholera cases, had every little
thing we needed!"
He unslung, with the words, the swollen canvas bags from his shoulders
and placed them upon the leaf-stuffed couch to one side.
With care and deep concern, Carson fingered and opened the many boxes,
bottles, and preparations. It was as if each were some priceless jewel.
He made odd little sounds in his throat, expressive of discovery and
relief and infinite joy.
"Here are the pages, Senor Carson, which will tell you all about the
cholera. The book was too heavy for me to carry; I had so many other
things; and therefore I tore these pages out bodily."
The American nodded and shoved the torn pages into a pocket of his coat.
"And my father?" exclaimed Felicidad. Perhaps to her, as had happened to
Quesada himself, there was something poignantly reminiscent in this talk
of tearing pages from one of the rare old books of the hidalgo doctor.
"He is still away," answered Quesada vaguely.
The American looked up sharply from uncorking one of the cobwebbed
bottles of wine.
"You left word?"
Quesada nodded constrainedly, as if against his will. He could not say
Don Jaime must soon follow him up the mountains. He could not look at
the girl. He feared overwhelmingly for Felicidad, once her father should
arrive. He was afraid lest his Moorish eyes might betray him.
Carson mixed a narcotic of the wine and a pinch of opium, and proffered
it to the girl.
"It will relieve internal distress," he explained, "and induce
strength-building sleep."
They came out into the open--the bandolero and the American.
"How many dead?" queried the former.
"Only three. Villarobledo, of course; a seven-month-old baby; and the
widowed mother of the lad, Gabriel. She died two nights ago."
"Not so bad," commented Quesada hopefully.
"No; but we got fully twenty sick, all stages. I must get these drugs up
to them. They're suffering pitifully. On the way I can show you a bit of
what we have done, and tell you the rest."
He indicated the open stone bed of the old Moorish flume, as they
followed it up the uneven street.
"Notice how clear the water is? That comes from our nitration system. Up
above, at the top of the village, we deepened the channel in one spot.
We put a layer of large stones on the bottom of the pit, above that a
stratum of pebbles, and on top of all, a coating of fine sand. The
water, seeping through those straining layers, is purged of all foreign
substances, thoroughly purified."
The bandolero nodded his comprehension. They made on.
"Morales and his men have proved as good as their word. With their
hands, they cleaned the scum from every inch of that stone flume. Manuel
himself is simply fine, a prince!" Carson added with that touch of
familiarity which denotes the warmest appreciation.
"Then we made two cut-offs from the flume," he continued. "One supplies
that box-channel near the houses to expedite the carrying-off of sewage.
The other is in the nature of a floodgate leading into a hole, deep as
your neck." He smiled faintly. "Many's the time I've made a sluice of
this order, when I was mining for gold out in California, but never
before for this particular purpose."
"And what purpose is that?"
"Well, when somebody goes cold and collapsed from the cholera, we lift
the floodgate and let the water flow into the hole. Meanwhile, we heat a
bunch of stones in the coals of a fire. We throw the stones into the
water and then, when the bath is at the proper temperature, we lower the
patient gently into it. Hot baths usually give relief. In the case of
Gabriel's mother, they helped to prolong her life. After the bath, we
massage the limbs thoroughly to circulate the blood and take out the
kinks of the cramps."
"You have been working most arduously, Senor Carson," said Quesada.
He was looking keenly at the American. Traces of fearful toil and many
sleepless nights showed in Carson's face. His once square countenance
was thinned into bony angles; there were heavy pouches under the eyes;
and the eyes themselves were no longer merry, but severely, crisply
blue.
With uneasy characteristic modesty, the American fidgeted at the canvas
packs in his hands.
"Oh, yes; a trifle," he admitted reluctantly. "We've all been pretty
busy. We had to shovel two infected cabanas over the cliff. The stream
through the gorge carried the debris away. We've burned every rag and
soiled bit of clothes and bedding in the pueblo. I tell you, I was
mighty glad to help out in that task!"
He took the canvas packs in one hand and felt in his pocket, with the
other, for the torn pages Quesada had given him. He ran his eyes quickly
over the printed words. Presently he looked up. Quesada had not spoken
in that spell of time. He noted now a little frowning knuckle on the
young bandolero's forehead.
"You are worrying, Jacinto!" he said, sharp as an accusation.
Quesada was startled.
"Dios hombre!" he exclaimed. "It is but the truth."
"But why? The plague? Felicidad or her father?"
Quesada shook his head morosely.
"It is none of these things, God forgive me, Don Juan. It is that I am
worrying selfishly about Jacinto Quesada alone. When you mentioned the
stream through the gorge carrying away the debris of the two infected
cabanas, it set my mind back. I thought of the two policemen down in
that gorge. Don Juan, they are waiting for me!"
"It is not that Jacinto Quesada is afraid, surely!"
"Carajo, no! I fear these Guardias Civiles no more than I fear the
plague, and you know, senor, I do not fear the plague. The Wolf of the
Sierras has become too long used to death to be afraid to die. But, Don
Juan, I fear what these men say. They would kill me for crimes I have
never done. It is not just, my friend, to be hounded for acts you never
perpetrated. They would kill me for the crimes of some other man, a
sneaking masquerader, a loathsome, brutal, sacrilegious creature! Mother
of God, I worry because I do not understand!"
"Worry is poison," said the American dogmatically. "Every moment you
worry is as if you poured a glass of poison into your system. Jacinto,
do you want to make yourself liable to the scourge?"
It was a grim warning. Quesada shook his head vehemently. He could not
answer. A scream as of intolerable agony precluded, for the moment,
further speech. They were nearing the dingy, whitewashed, thatch-and-mud
chapel of the village. On the heels of the awful scream, saddening their
ears continuously, now breathed a dull low monotone of pain.
They entered the sick bay. On either side, down the whole length of the
chapel from doorway to wooden white-painted altar, was a raised platform
of pine slabs with a slight pitch toward the central passageway between.
Swathed in blankets side by side on the platforms, doubling up with
cramps in arms and legs and abdomen, groaning in acute anguish, or lying
fearfully still in stages of collapse, were fully a score of sick and
dying--men, young and old; girls in their teens and mothers of families;
and one little tad of a boy. He was the lad, Gabriel, who had announced
the plague when first the party of cabalgadores had gained the village.
Quesada discovered a difficulty in breathing; he felt his head reel. The
air was close and offensive with sweaty bilious odors and the sharp
pungent smell of turpentine. He noted two candles burning wanly upon the
dingy altar.
Carson had left him to go from sufferer to dying with the balm of his
new-found drugs. When Morales came forward to greet him, the bandolero
remarked:
"Those candles there, friend Manuel! They add to the stifling closeness
of the place."
"They are a symbol of our religion."
"I know; but there is no real need of them here. They waste the precious
air."
Morales smiled slowly.
"You and I would not need the reminder of the orthodox wax candles,
Jacinto; but these serranos lack spunk. They believe they are doomed to
die, and die just to prove it. The burning candles typify the living
presence of the Lord. Their yellow flames hearten some to fight to live;
others suffer and die more patiently in their wan presence--"
A hoarse exclamation upon the part of Quesada interrupted the matador.
Quesada had noted, among the blanketed patients, one of Morales' own
cuadrilla, the banderillero, Alfonso Robledo. Shocked and violently
agitated, Quesada gripped the matador's arm.
"But this man! How comes he sick? He is a bullfighter, a banderillo, a
strong man, muscled like a leopard, stout of heart!"
Said Morales grimly, "The pestilence respects neither strength nor
weakness, race, profession, nor creed."
One of the cuadrilla attending the sick, the picador called Coruncho
Lopez, paused in his labors to remark:
"Robledo is ill through contagion. Two nights ago, the mother of the boy
Gabriel died. Alfonso and I carried the body down through the village to
the lip of the gorge. Her clothes were infected."
"Oh, mia mamacita!" wailed the lad, Gabriel, from his corner of the
sick bay. "Now I am all alone in the world and sick to die!"
The bandolero turned to him.
"Hush, nino!" he said tenderly. "You have still Jacinto Quesada to look
after you!"
The boy quieted. Gratefully he looked up at the salteador with black
eyes that smoldered in deep-sunken pits. When Carson, in the course of
his rounds, offered him a preparation of cornstarch and milk to
alleviate the pangs of his stomach, he swallowed it readily.
"It is not safe to use opium in any form in the cases of children,"
explained the American to Quesada.
There was a sudden stir behind them. Coruncho Lopez, the picador, who
had been nursing the sick, was taken with an unexpected and brutal
seizure. He held his stomach and doubled up. In intense agony, he
moaned, "Water, water!"
Carson hurried out to draw fresh water. In the short wait the disease
made astonishing progress on the man. His muscled frame jackknifed with
acute cramps. By the time Carson returned with the water, his face had
darkened to a purple hue, and the skin wrinkled up as if it would crack.
They sat him upon the edge of one of the platforms, but he fell back.
His body was all at once cold. He was in the asphyxial stage, all
animation suspended, no beat of pulse, apparently dead.
Carson held an open bottle of ammonia beneath his nose. It had no
effect; the man was not breathing. He forced brandy down his throat, but
the picador lay still and chilly cold. He was dead.
Thus, swift and silent as the pounce of a condor, strikes the terrible
cholera!
It was almost impossible to believe that the man was dead. Only an ace
of time before, he had moved about, so valiant to aid, so tender to
nurse. Death had come too cruelly abrupt. It was appalling.
Carson looked about in the sudden and apprehensive silence. He did not
note the tall athletic form of the Frenchman darkening on the moment the
doorway. His blue eyes were blunted, somber with gloom; his rugged face
was very gray.
"That proves it," Carson said. "This man got the plague from carrying
out the contagious body of that boy's mother. There'll be no more
carrying of dead bodies down the cliffside to cast into the stream. It
isn't right to us to have to bear the infected dead so far; it isn't
right to the serranos in the hills below that their stream should float
diseased bodies and make them liable to the epidemic. With this death,
we'll change our methods. We'll cremate the bodies, immediately below
here, on the great rock of the village!"
Mutterings of dissent, abhorrence, and strong condemnation went up from
the men of the cuadrilla who were assisting in the hospital. Even some
of the convalescing and slightly sick rose up in their blankets to
express disapproval and fearful apprehension. Their religious scruples
were shocked, outraged. Cremation was to them contrary to the practices
of their religion.
They did not know that the tenets of their religion--like the tenets of
any professedly divine religion, or the statutes of any confessedly
human law--were capable of drastic and remarkable innovations under the
stress of necessity. They believed that their system of sacred services
was without elasticity, firm and inexorable.
They were only ignorant. Never had most of them heard of
pronunciamientos, papal bulls, nuncio rescripta which, when it was not
only fit, but expedient and profitable so to do, had changed, remolded,
or altogether cast out certain rites and dogmas. They were not so much
devotedly pious. They were hidebound, superstitiously fearful.
Jacques Ferou, halted in the doorway, observed all with his
slate-colored, calculating eyes. Slowly he smiled his superior and
peculiar smile; then turned away and made for the cabanas which still
sheltered well men. An insidious drama was afoot.