"I believe that still less. She would be in her house, and there is where I wish to go, Gabriel. You may go and see to the carrying of the wounded, or to the powder, or whatever you please, but I am going there!"
As he said this, Pirli presented himself to us in his friar's habit, already torn and hanging in a thousand fragments, and on his head the French engineer's helmet, badly battered, but plated and plumed, and making our hero look less like a soldier than a carnival figure.
"Are you coming to help carry the wounded?" he asked. "They have just killed two more for us that we are carrying to San Pablo. They need men there to open the ditch where they are burying our dead of yesterday, but I have worked enough. I am going to the house of Manuela Sancho to see if I can get a snatch of sleep. But, first, we are going to dance a little. Don't you want to come along?"
"No, we are going to San Pablo," I replied, "to bury the dead. There is enough to do."
"They say that so many dead make the air bad, and that is why there are so many ill of the fever. That is finishing them faster than their wounds, over by the other barricade. I would rather have some 'hot cakes' than the epidemic. A 'señora' wouldn't scare me, but a chill and a fever would. So then you are going to bury the dead?"
"Yes," said Augustine, "let us bury the dead."
"In San Pablo there are no less than forty wounded," answered Pirli; "and, at the rate we're going there, we'll soon be more dead than living. Don't you want a little diversion? If you are not going to work on the ditch, why not come along to the cartridge factory? All the girls will be there, and from time to time they will give us some singing, or cheer our souls with a little dancing."
"We have no fault to find with all that. Will Manuela Sancho be there too?"
"No, the girls there are the young ladies of Saragossa, the señoritas who have been called into service by the committee of safety. There are a great many of them in the hospitals too. They invite themselves for that service. And it would be a queer one who would use her eyes so little as not to make a match for herself, if not for this year, then for next!"