"If the authorities of Saragossa are not willing to do their duty by me, Doña Guedita, between you and me, we will do it all! You take the spade and get ready to move the fragments as I dig. Look out for the beams that are still smoking. Look out for the nails!"
I was trying to interpret the signs of intelligence made me by the housekeeper, when he turned to me, saying,—
"Go to the devil! What business have you in my house? Get out of here! We understand you,—you have come to see if you can pick up anything. There is nothing here. Everything is burned up."
There was certainly no hope of taking him with me to Las Tenerias to set poor Mariquilla's mind at rest, and so, not being able to stay any longer, I went. Master and servant were working away with great vigor.
CHAPTER XX
I slept from three o'clock until daybreak, and in the morning we heard mass in the Coso. In the large balcony of a house called Las Monas at the entrance of the Calle de las Escuelas Pias all the priests had set up an altar and celebrated there the divine office. By the situation of the building, it was possible to see the priests from anywhere in the Coso. It was a profoundly moving sight, especially at the moment of the elevation of the host; and when all knelt in prayer, the low murmur of the service could be heard from one end of the street to the other.
A little while after the mass was ended, I heard a large number of people coming from the direction of the market,—an angry and noisy crowd. In the mob, and striving to quell its violence, were several friars; but it was a mob of men deaf to the voice of reason. They were yelling themselves hoarse, and as they came, they dragged along a victim who was powerless to free himself from their grasp. The maddened people took him to the place near the entrance of the Trenque where the gallows was; and in a few moments the convulsed body of a man was hanging from one of its ropes, and was jerked about in the air until it was lifeless. On the wood of the gallows an inscription soon appeared, which read,—
An assassin
of human kind,
who
kept back twenty thousand beds.
The wretch was one Fernando Estello, watchman of a storehouse of furniture. When the sick and wounded were breathing their last in the gutters and on the cold tiles of the churches, there was found a great collection of beds whose hiding the watchman Estello could not account for. The wrath of the populace was not to be restrained. I have heard that he was innocent. Many lamented his death; but when the firing in the trenches began again, no one remembered him more.