Robledo tottered forward. He took the blanketed child in his arms. Turning about, slowly back toward the hospital he made.
Quesada lifted his haggard face. With a contempt biting and goading in its virulence, he cried:
"Proceed, proud Torreblanca y Moncada! You have your high knightly honor to defend, your name and blood to purge! Shoot!"
CHAPTER XXXIII
Now it may have been because of the miraculous interposition of the Espiritu Santo, or it may have been by reason of the sudden and brutal exposure; but all at once, as he was borne away in the arms of Robledo, the boy Gabriel took an abrupt turn for the worse—a cruel cramping fit seized him in its formidable vise!
Violent spasms shook and threw him about like a tossed beanbag; his teeth clenched together with the paralysis of lockjaw; his legs and arms knotted up and flung out again as if they would tear themselves apart from his body. All in a trice, and ere Robledo could prevent, he writhed out of the bullfighter's grasp and fell rolling and squirming upon the ground, his fingers clawing at the yellow earth.
Blind to everything else, screaming his fear and horror, Quesada leaped toward him. But some one bulked before the bandolero, blocked his way, dashed head-bent for the boy's side.
That some one held in his hand an instrument of gleaming silver, needle-sharp at one end. He dropped to his knees beside the pitifully contorted Gabriel. He shoved the needle point into the boy's knotted arm above the wrist; gave it a quick jab. That some one was the hidalgo doctor, Don Jaime!
Once the hypodermic injection acted on the spinal cord and the medulla oblongata, the spasms would be checked, quieted, allayed. But there must be a circulation of blood. Too slow, altogether too slow, was the blood trickling through the lad's veins. He was sinking fast.