"That proves it," Carson said. "This man got the plague from carrying out the contagious body of that boy's mother. There'll be no more carrying of dead bodies down the cliffside to cast into the stream. It isn't right to us to have to bear the infected dead so far; it isn't right to the serranos in the hills below that their stream should float diseased bodies and make them liable to the epidemic. With this death, we'll change our methods. We'll cremate the bodies, immediately below here, on the great rock of the village!"
Mutterings of dissent, abhorrence, and strong condemnation went up from the men of the cuadrilla who were assisting in the hospital. Even some of the convalescing and slightly sick rose up in their blankets to express disapproval and fearful apprehension. Their religious scruples were shocked, outraged. Cremation was to them contrary to the practices of their religion.
They did not know that the tenets of their religion—like the tenets of any professedly divine religion, or the statutes of any confessedly human law—were capable of drastic and remarkable innovations under the stress of necessity. They believed that their system of sacred services was without elasticity, firm and inexorable.
They were only ignorant. Never had most of them heard of pronunciamientos, papal bulls, nuncio rescripta which, when it was not only fit, but expedient and profitable so to do, had changed, remolded, or altogether cast out certain rites and dogmas. They were not so much devotedly pious. They were hidebound, superstitiously fearful.
Jacques Ferou, halted in the doorway, observed all with his slate-colored, calculating eyes. Slowly he smiled his superior and peculiar smile; then turned away and made for the cabanas which still sheltered well men. An insidious drama was afoot.
CHAPTER XXVI
Carson paid no heed to the mutterings all about him. Alone and unassisted, he swathed the body in a new clean blanket.
"That will stop communication of the disease from the body to the bearers," he said. He surveyed the group about him. "Now, who will carry out the dead?"
The men looked at one another. No one stepped forward to volunteer.