It was for her country, too, that Augustina worked and toiled; for to the tips of her toes she was of Aragon. Her father and his father before him had watched the Ebro as it flows through the city; they had loved the olive groves by which it was surrounded, and they had stood in the arcades and market-places, their sad eyes watching the slow decay of a city which had once been the home of kings.
Cold and proud to the stranger, the Aragonese when aroused are fairly heroic in the way they fight for their country; and in 1808, when Augustina manned the gun for the sake of her playmate and lover who was slain, the same spirit burned in her heart as had in those of her ancestors centuries before, when the Berbers came and conquered.
The time crept along, but Augustina never faltered. Her clothes were torn with the unusual labour, and her hands, more used to the threads of flax and the smooth wooden bobbins, were cut and bleeding from the rough metal of the cannon. Her long black hair became loosened and hung like a veil down her back. She worked like one possessed of man-like strength. Hardly did she allow the great cannon to cool before she thrust the charge into it, and dragged another iron case to its mouth, so as to have it ready at the first moment.
It seemed to her as if she had been the whole day at her post, when there hurried along an officer making his rounds to observe the condition of things on the walls.
At sight of Augustina he stopped and looked at her with amazement.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE, MY GIRL?”—Page [289].
“What are you doing here, my girl?” he asked in no gentle tones, hardly able to credit what his eyes told him, and thinking that Augustina might perhaps be keeping watch over a sleeping soldier, and anxious to know the truth.
“I have but taken Felipe’s place, Signor Captain,” pointing with her hand to the figure lying on the stones beside the gun.
“Does—” The Captain paused in his question. Something in the still figure seemed to tell him that it was not the sleep of fatigue that held Felipe while this slender girl worked his gun.