"Stop!" he cried, his voice chill with warning and terrible dread. "Jacinto, you are in a sweat! Don't you know that copious drinking of cold water while in this condition is one of the direct causes of cholera!"
Quesada stepped back, momentarily aghast. The sweat quickened and poured from his brown youthful face. Suddenly he laughed.
"It is no importa," he said, with returned calmness. He strode on under the weight of his gruesome burden.
Carson followed at his heels and, at the heels of the American, straggled like so many famished wolves, the men of the cuadrilla and the serranos of the pueblo.
Quesada was in haste to deposit the body upon the rock. He felt a strange dizziness in his head. He did not want to admit it, yet he feared it foretokened an attack of the pestilence. At this crucial time, he did not want the dizziness to show in his actions. That would evidence the plague. And were the men to note it, they would think it the hand of God striking him down for aiding in the cremation. It would precipitate them into some insensate and ferocious act.
He held himself severely erect. There were spots dancing before his eyes, yet he made out that one of the cuadrilla, a short thick-set banderillero named Baptista Monterey, had stepped forward from the mob. The banderillero, his ordinary black street clothes rendering him inconspicuous in the mob, had been standing quietly alongside the tall blond Frenchman. It was Ferou himself who had shoved him forward. The man spoke.
"You cannot burn the body, senor caballero of my heart! Cremation is a desecration of the earthly vessel of the soul. It is against our religion!"
"Jacinto Quesada himself has given you the reason for the need of it," returned Carson coldly. "Cremation is the sanitary expedient."
"But the body belongs to the Espiritu Santo! You cannot—"
"What is this, Baptista Monterey!" came a new voice, an astonished and wrathful voice.