Curious he was! With a sort of glaze of the ordinary world on top, and underneath a black volcano with hell knows what depths of lava. And talking half-abstractedly from his glazed, top self, the words came out small and quick, and he was always hesitating, and saying: No? It wasn’t himself at all talking.
“What would you have done if they had killed Ramón?” she said, tentatively.
“I?”—He looked up at her in a black flare of apprehension. The volcano was rousing. “If they had killed him?—” His eyes took on that fixed glare of ferocity, staring her down.
“Would you have cared very much?” she said.
“I? Would I?” he repeated, and the black suspicious look came into his Indian eyes.
“Would it have meant very much to you?”
He still watched her with a glare of ferocity and suspicion.
“To me!” he said, and he pressed his hand against the buttons of his tunic. “To me Ramón is more than life. More than life.” His eyes seemed to glare and go sightless, as he said it, the ferocity melting in a strange blind, confiding glare, that seemed sightless, either looking inward, or out at the whole vast void of the cosmos, where no vision is left.
“More than anything?” she said.
“Yes!” he replied abstractedly, with a blind nod of the head.