“But two days from the hospital,” said he; “yet every one who can stand has need to fight if we wish to save Zaragoza and Our Lady of the Pillar.”
“If you can bear through the night, I will come again in the morning. If it were not for my mother, I would not leave here now.”
“Surely you have done your best. No one could ask more; and as for the poor lad whose place you took, there are few who have been more faithful than he.”
“It is for that very reason that I come again,” said Augustina. “Never shall it be said that Felipe’s gun was silent while I am able to stand beside it—and while Felipe guards it himself,” she added in a lower tone. She kneeled and looked long into the face of her dead comrade, and leaving the mantilla still covering his face, walked steadily off, wiping away with her tired hand the few tears that fell over her cheeks.
Bareheaded and alone, she walked to her home, climbed to the door of their rooms, and then, overcome with sorrow and fatigue, rushed in and threw herself on her knees beside her mother.
“Oh, my child, my dearest child!” and fondling and kissing her, her mother tried to give comfort and cheer to the weeping girl.
“To think that my little girl should be so brave! and, child, how came you to know how to load and fire one of those fearful guns?”
“I saw Felipe do it, mother, and he said that his gun spoke oftenest of any on the walls. So I saw to it that it did not become silent, that was all!”
“Sit here, loved one”; and Augustina’s mother put the tired girl into her own chair, and hurried away to get something for her to eat, and to light the brazier to warm her chilled frame, all her own weakness forgotten in the sight of her child’s sorrow. Nearly all the night they talked, the mother trying in vain to keep Augustina from her resolve to return and serve the cannon the next day. But Augustina simply said,—
“I promised Felipe before I left him, mother dear, and I must go. Besides, I must do my share, and there are few enough to help on the walls.”