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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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!"

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

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 circ.u.mspect 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 pa.s.sed 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.