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!"