"That was Antonio Villarobledo," said Quesada; "a man who has long lived alone. He was almost a father to me when I was a boy."
Everywhere they went in the barrio, everywhere in the cold clay cabanas, Death had stalked before them on bony rickety legs, a chill damp on his forehead, his emaciated fingers picking at the coverlets of the sick, shutting their eyes to desire and despair. A great illness was on the serranos—a foul plague that caused them to double up with stomach cramps and vomit a gray pasty whey; that turned their skins to blue and purple and swatted them off, like flies, within twelve and twenty-four hours.
It was the scourge the nut-brown Gypsy Paquita had foreseen on the little white beach in the barranca. But surely she could have had no hand in bringing it about! Quesada had explained that the plague lifted its fanged and evil head wherever the water was impure, and there were errors in diet, and the atmosphere changed abruptly from damp to sudden heat and back again.
Yet the wonder remains how the Gitana even could have predicted it. To be sure, cholera was forever sweeping the high hills. Was her magic on the white beach, then, only a natural supposition, a bit of logical deduction and reasonable ratiocination? Or did it partake of something more, something uncanny, impious and pagan—some real and diabolical warlockry? Dios hombre only knows!
But John Fremont Carson, the American, thought that he understood the reasons for the plague.
"What these folk need is education," he remarked thoughtfully to Morales. "Education can do everything!"
It was identically what he had said amid the squalor and squall in the Gypsy camp.
"Education, si!" returned Morales, even as he had on that occasion. "But what they need more is some one with a lion heart, a great golden arrogant heart, to lead them in the fight, to lead them up!"
Jacques Ferou said nothing; but again, despite the pitiful agonies and shocking horrors about them, he had the flinty hardihood to smile his calculating and very superior smile.
They came at last, in the course of their rounds, to the cabana where Quesada's mother had died and where the girl, Felicidad, now was living. They discovered her sitting up on the straw-matted bed, looking more wan than ever, a hot sweat beading the roots of her golden hair, her white febrile fingers gripping the side of the tick, and her whole ivory and gold form shaking like a mountain aspen with retching seizures.