“Hombre, no! I cannot go home now. I might carry the disease to the señora and the little Carmen. I must stay here. And,” he added, “you too, Padre.”
Josè’s heart turned to lead. “But, the boy?” he exclaimed, pointing toward the bed.
“When it is dark, Padre,” replied Rosendo, “we will take him out through the back door and bury him beyond the shales. Hombre! I must see now if I can find a shovel.”
Josè sank down upon the threshold, a prey to corroding despair, while Rosendo went out in search of the implement. The streets were dead, and few lights shone from the latticed windows. The pall of fear had settled thick upon the stricken town. Those who were standing before their houses as Rosendo approached hastily turned in and closed their doors. Josè, in the presence of death in a terrible form, sat mute. In an hour Rosendo returned.
“No shovel, Padre,” he announced. “But I crept up back of my house and got this bar which I had left standing there when I came back from the mountains. I can scrape up the loose earth with my hands. Come now.”
Josè wearily rose. He was but a tool in the hands of a man to whom physical danger was but a matter of temperament. He absently helped Rosendo wrap the black, distorted corpse in the frayed blanket; and then together they passed out into the night with their grewsome burden.
“Why not to the cemetery, Rosendo?” asked Josè, as the old man took an opposite course.
“Hombre, no!” cried Rosendo. “The cemetery is on shale, and I could not dig through it in time. We must get the body under ground at once. Caramba! If we put it in one of the bóvedas in the cemetery the buzzards will eat it and scatter the plague all over the town. The bóvedas are broken, and have no longer any doors, you remember.”
So beyond the shales they went, stumbling through the darkness, their minds freighted with a burden of apprehension more terrible than the thing they bore in their arms. The shales crossed, Rosendo left the trail, cutting a way through the bush with his machete a distance of several hundred feet. Then, by the weird yellow light of a single candle, he opened the moist earth and laid the hideous, twisted thing within. Josè watched the procedure in dull apathy.