But again and all on a sudden, he halted. He threw his arms aloft, he lifted drawn face to the cold gray sky. Hoarsely he cried out:
"Give me strength! Senor Don Dios, give me strength to do that which I now must do!"
On he sped back toward the hospital. And his feet pounded down and up, down and up without infirmity, without numb and leaden shuffle. Gone were the staggering lurch, the sagging shoulders, the rolling giddying head. Gone utterly all the various stigmata of disease-engendered weakness!
He was like a man who, suddenly overwhelmed by an ocean of water, casts off his clogging garments and strikes out nimbly and heartily. He was altogether a new man, agile to move, galvanically energized. He was mighty with an unwonted strength.
It was not a body strength. It was a strength above body strength, a strength beyond body strength. It was that strength secreted deep down but seldom drawn upon, that strength which lifts some men up and steels them to their endeavors in moments of prodigious stress. It was that epic strength which makes of weaklings, cold-eyed and high-handed heroes!
Something must be done to thwart the granite will of the implacable Don Jaime. There was need for a man. There was no time to lose.
Quick as an ape, Quesada bounded through the hospital doorway. Down the runway between the platforms and the dying men, he dashed. At the end of the smelly place, near the dingy altar, he halted. There, on the slant of the pine slabs, lay the disease-wasted form of little Gabriel, the mountain boy.
He bent over the pitifully sick child. Carefully, round and round the puny little body, he swathed the tossed and crumpled blanket. Then up in his two arms he lifted the blanketed boy and bore him back along the runway, out the hospital door.
The child rested his head like an infant in Quesada's neck; he raised to the gaunt face of the bandolero, two dull and feebly wondering eyes. A great pity smote Quesada. Convulsively his arms tightened about the boy. He felt suddenly weak, almost unmanned. For the moment he could not continue on.
He put his mouth close to the cradled head of the boy.