Said Quesada with a restrained but natural touch of pride, "My mother taught me letters when I was but five. My poor mother attended, when a child, the convent of Santa Ursola in Granada."
With no less zeal but more earnest calmness, he went on:
"What medicines the medical book tells me you shall need, I shall get for you from the chests and racks of the senor doctor. I shall leave word with old Pedro or the childish Teresa that, immediately Don Jaime returns, he is to come up here. All we ask, Senor Carson, all we expect, is that you do what good you can until the hidalgo doctor himself arrives. Mediante Dios, you can do much!"
Intense longing, a hungry expectancy trembled beseechingly in the eyes of each man. They felt suddenly inferior to Carson, dependent on his knowledge, in sore need of his aid. He could not kill that earnest hope and sincere, almost pitiful trust in him. With characteristic decision, he exclaimed.
"By gad, I'll do it!"
And in Spanish fashion, Morales added, "With the help of the Dios hombre!"
The Frenchman, listening avidly to all, only smiled once more his calculating and very superior smile.
CHAPTER XXIII
Even as his father had hurried down the mountainside many years before, even so Jacinto Quesada wended his descending way, that morning, on an enterprise of forlorn desperation. He was bound for the casa of Torreblanca y Moncada outside Granada. He did not wait to borrow one of the village mules which the serranos used to sleigh their cords of pine down to the lower torrents and to carry their panniers of white-flowered manzanilla into the towns of the plains. His long mountaineer's legs were swifter to move and even more tireless than the slow hoofs of any stupid borrico. His descent proved far more rapid than had been the arduous climb of the nine cabalgadores.