Harshly the sound cracked against the ears of Jacinto Quesada. His running body lurched forward in a desperate spurt. He stumbled against the startled nag. He held up in his arms to the doctor the blanketed form of Gabriel. And hoarsely he cried out:
"God forbid, Don Jaime! Wait—for the love of Our Lady of Pity, wait! You are a physician, and we are sick here. We are sick with the dread cholera, sick unto death. Your first duty is to us. You must help us. We need you, urgently, woefully—"
Again everything was happening with breathless velocity, in a rush, in hardly an appreciable flicker of time. Quesada's voice rose almost to a scream:
"Turn your eyes upon this dying boy, Torreblanca y Moncada! Look at the glassy eyes, the deep eye pits! Look at the cheek bones bursting through the paper-dry skin! Have pity on him, Don Jaime. Eleven years old, innocent as a babe at the breast, and yet wrinkled and wan and all crumpled in a heap like a disease-riddled old man!
"Ah, Blood of Christ, Don Jaime, you are no Barbary savage to turn away from the outreaching hands of a dying child! You are a priest of the body, a servant of mankind! Your first duty is to this mortally sick child, to all the mortally sick in this village. After that, if you must, you may kill!"
Quesada trembled violently with the ardor and hunger of his entreaty. The dark-eyed, pasty-faced Gabriel shook in his uplifted arms like a poor played-out doll of rags. An end of the blanket slipped from about the boy's shoulder, dragged free from him, fell in a heap upon the rock. Aloft to the doctor, Quesada held the little fellow stark naked in the full light of day!
Quesada fell to his knees, clawed frantically for the blanket. The child lifted slow deep-sunken eyes to the stony eyes of the grandee, as if dimly wondering what it was all about.
Quesada raised one end of the blanket to enwrap the boy, then suddenly hesitated. He had appealed to the honor of the physician. Well he knew how dear was that professional honor to Don Jaime!
Don Jaime was the sort of physician who looks upon his business of serving the ailing as a sacred commission from on high. He was like one who had taken Holy Orders with his doctor's degree. No Jesuit was more slave to his oaths; no Jesuit worked with more zeal for God and the Society than did Don Jaime for Humanity and Science.
Quesada thought, now, to essay farther. With the little fellow standing upon his own reedlike legs and clinging desperately to him, the bandolero lifted his gaunt face to the granite face of the hidalgo. In a low patient voice, he said: