Jacinto Quesada, standing in the background, sensed immediately, then, to what a stage things had come. He elbowed through the throng. Quietly he picked up the blanket-swathed figure.
"Senor Carson," he said, as he turned around, the form of the picador held before him in his arms; "you are doing the correct thing. Cremation is the sanitary expedient."
The American thanked him with his eyes. He followed Quesada out the doorway. They went down the uneven village street. The men of the cuadrilla trooped after. From the cabanas on either hand serranos, stirred up by the insidious Ferou, crept out like wolves stretching forth from their dens.
Carson never looked back. He could hear the men muttering behind him; he realized some dark scheme was pulsing in their brains; yet he never looked back. He strode, at the head of all that muttering milling throng, down the street toward the rock.
As they neared the rock, suddenly he swung about. The men stopped, huddled back from him.
"Get wood!" he shouted. "Anything inflammable!"
The men shoved forward, crowded together, and eyed him with furtive, wily eyes. No one moved to obey.
"Go ahead, Don Juan!" shouted a voice from behind. "I'll collect the wood!"
It was Manuel Morales, proving bigger in the emergency than any superstitious dread. A deep-throated muttering went up from the men. But his quick courageous action had robbed them, for the moment, of that focus of interest, anger, and insubordination which leads to mob violence.
Carson swung round to start on again. As he did, he saw that Quesada, behind his back, had deposited the dead burden upon the muddy ground and was stooping and cupping up water from the old Moorish flume to quench his hot thirst.