"Hush, nino!" he said tenderly. "You have still Jacinto Quesada to look after you!"
The boy quieted. Gratefully he looked up at the salteador with black eyes that smoldered in deep-sunken pits. When Carson, in the course of his rounds, offered him a preparation of cornstarch and milk to alleviate the pangs of his stomach, he swallowed it readily.
"It is not safe to use opium in any form in the cases of children," explained the American to Quesada.
There was a sudden stir behind them. Coruncho Lopez, the picador, who had been nursing the sick, was taken with an unexpected and brutal seizure. He held his stomach and doubled up. In intense agony, he moaned, "Water, water!"
Carson hurried out to draw fresh water. In the short wait the disease made astonishing progress on the man. His muscled frame jackknifed with acute cramps. By the time Carson returned with the water, his face had darkened to a purple hue, and the skin wrinkled up as if it would crack.
They sat him upon the edge of one of the platforms, but he fell back. His body was all at once cold. He was in the asphyxial stage, all animation suspended, no beat of pulse, apparently dead.
Carson held an open bottle of ammonia beneath his nose. It had no effect; the man was not breathing. He forced brandy down his throat, but the picador lay still and chilly cold. He was dead.
Thus, swift and silent as the pounce of a condor, strikes the terrible cholera!
It was almost impossible to believe that the man was dead. Only an ace of time before, he had moved about, so valiant to aid, so tender to nurse. Death had come too cruelly abrupt. It was appalling.
Carson looked about in the sudden and apprehensive silence. He did not note the tall athletic form of the Frenchman darkening on the moment the doorway. His blue eyes were blunted, somber with gloom; his rugged face was very gray.