"It is none of these things, God forgive me, Don Juan. It is that I am worrying selfishly about Jacinto Quesada alone. When you mentioned the stream through the gorge carrying away the debris of the two infected cabanas, it set my mind back. I thought of the two policemen down in that gorge. Don Juan, they are waiting for me!"
"It is not that Jacinto Quesada is afraid, surely!"
"Carajo, no! I fear these Guardias Civiles no more than I fear the plague, and you know, senor, I do not fear the plague. The Wolf of the Sierras has become too long used to death to be afraid to die. But, Don Juan, I fear what these men say. They would kill me for crimes I have never done. It is not just, my friend, to be hounded for acts you never perpetrated. They would kill me for the crimes of some other man, a sneaking masquerader, a loathsome, brutal, sacrilegious creature! Mother of God, I worry because I do not understand!"
"Worry is poison," said the American dogmatically. "Every moment you worry is as if you poured a glass of poison into your system. Jacinto, do you want to make yourself liable to the scourge?"
It was a grim warning. Quesada shook his head vehemently. He could not answer. A scream as of intolerable agony precluded, for the moment, further speech. They were nearing the dingy, whitewashed, thatch-and-mud chapel of the village. On the heels of the awful scream, saddening their ears continuously, now breathed a dull low monotone of pain.
They entered the sick bay. On either side, down the whole length of the chapel from doorway to wooden white-painted altar, was a raised platform of pine slabs with a slight pitch toward the central passageway between. Swathed in blankets side by side on the platforms, doubling up with cramps in arms and legs and abdomen, groaning in acute anguish, or lying fearfully still in stages of collapse, were fully a score of sick and dying—men, young and old; girls in their teens and mothers of families; and one little tad of a boy. He was the lad, Gabriel, who had announced the plague when first the party of cabalgadores had gained the village.
Quesada discovered a difficulty in breathing; he felt his head reel. The air was close and offensive with sweaty bilious odors and the sharp pungent smell of turpentine. He noted two candles burning wanly upon the dingy altar.
Carson had left him to go from sufferer to dying with the balm of his new-found drugs. When Morales came forward to greet him, the bandolero remarked:
"Those candles there, friend Manuel! They add to the stifling closeness of the place."
"They are a symbol of our religion."