"Hush, Gabriellito!" said Quesada tenderly, when he came up in the van. He gathered the boy to him, under one arm, and turned to the others. His young smooth brown face was priestly with pain and somberness and a great pity. In a grave voice, he said:
"There can be no mistake, senores; it is indeed the dread cholera! Like the great black wings of that lammergeyer of the air, it has closed down about my poor pueblo."
A little clatter of sound came from a yellow run of water as it trickled, after the old Moorish fashion, down the village street through an open stone gutter. In Minas de la Sierra, clinging like a cragmartin's nest to a ledge of the Picacho de la Veleta, there was naught else of sound or movement.
No old men mumbled endless talk in the cold sun beneath the cork-oak in the center; no shawled manzanilleros strode by with panniers of the white-flowered manzanilla upon their backs. From the scanty forests above came no sound of woodchoppers, no steely ring of axe on pine. Tightly closed were the wooden hatches which shuttered the windows of the mud-and-thatch cabanas. Within, no light from the great open fireplaces cleaved the darkness. There was no laugh or squeal of children.
Gabriel, the village lad, unable to restrain his nervousness and deep fear, hurriedly led them to the mud choza where his mother lay dying. It was very dark within. Strings of pimentos hung drying from the low rafters. There was a bed on either side of the cold fireplace. On one of the beds the woman was prostrated under a heap of rags.
All sap seemed to be drained from her body. She was withered and dark-hued as a burnt match. Carson stooped and felt her wrist. The pulse-beat was an almost imperceptible flutter. Quesada spoke gently to her and, with brave effort, she answered in a whisper that was as the gasping of a wind through one of the boulder-strewn passes above. That was the vox cholerica. She was in the second and usually fatal stage of malignant cholera.
They left the boy lamenting softly at the bedside of his mother.
"She is a widow," said Quesada, "and all he has left in the world."
Their fears a hideous certitude now, grimly they went through the dying village. In a nearby hut, they found an old white-haired man altogether dead. His muscles were oddly contracted; one arm was turned round, the palm of the hand out and hanging over the edge of the cornshuck tick. As very often happens after death through cholera, his body was not only still warm, but rising in temperature, burning up.
It seemed poignantly lonely in there with the solitary dead. They stumbled out of the sour darkness.