When he reached the apartment that night, he found the outer rooms crowded with people. This convinced him that his mother must be dying; and with a sinking heart he rushed to her bedroom. The mulatto and another woman were there preparing hot applications; and he noticed also a young girl of some twenty years who appeared both pretty and respectable.
Monsalvat brushed the women aside and leaned over to kiss his mother.
"Have you sent for the doctor?" he asked turning around.
"Doctor! Why a doctor?" exclaimed the mulatto scornfully. "Here is Mamita Juana, who knows more than all your doctors put together!"
Without replying, Fernando went to the door and addressing the men gathered there asked if there was anyone who could deliver a letter for him at once. A gray-haired old fellow with a long beard, his shoulders bent, and his clothing quite disreputable, pressed forward, holding out his hand.
"Don't you remember me, Doctor Monsalvat? Don't you remember Moreno, the attorney? That's me! Why, we worked together once!"
Monsalvat remembered that he had given this man employment in his office for a short time. Later he had found the old fellow again, earning a miserable pittance from odd jobs in the law courts.
Monsalvat took a pencil from his pocket and wrote something on a card, while Moreno went on talking:
"Here I am, Doctor, still alive, and that's some job! Those days are over—my law days, I call them. Don't think I'm stuck on myself; but just the same I'm proud of the work I did back there. The law in this country of ours owes me something, Doctor! I helped it along. We took part in some big law suits, and we won them. I say 'we' because, after all, the other fellow did his share of the work. And here I am, Doctor, with ten children on my hands, poor as a rat, and going down hill fast...."