“It is impossible,” said Ramon coldly. “We are shut in here, and my sun must rise or set to-morrow. This is my last stand.”
“But your wife—your children! Think of them.”
“I have thought of nothing else, waking and sleeping,” said the Don coldly. “But my wife would not look upon me if I forsook my country, and my children shall not live with the knowledge that Ramon’s is a coward’s name.”
“Is this your decision?” said the messenger of bad tidings.
“Yes. Captain Reed, my brave true friend, look at him. He is half-dead with hunger and exhaustion. Can you give him water and food?”
“He shall share what we have, sir, and I am sorry that we cannot give him better fare than biscuit and water; but the rations we brought with us were small, and they are nearly at an end. Don Miguel, I ask your pardon for me and mine. You will forgive us our rough treatment? We were fighting for your friend.”
“I know,” said the visitor faintly, and he took and grasped the captain’s hand.
A few minutes later he was sharing Don Ramon’s shelter, and struggling hard to recoup nature with the broken biscuit he was soaking in a pannikin of water, while Fitz and his companions returned to their old station to resume the watch.
They sat for some time thinking, for nobody seemed disposed to talk, even the carpenter, the most conversational of the trio, seeming to prefer the society of the piece of dirty-looking black tobacco which he kept within his teeth; but the silence became so irksome, for somehow the firing seemed to have driven every wild creature to a distance, that Fitz broke it at last.
“I don’t know when I felt so nervous,” he whispered. “I felt sure that something that would have seemed far more horrible than the fight was about to occur.”