With swift harsh hands, Don Jaime rubbed desperately the boy's arms, legs and spine. But Gabriel's pulse was dying; rapidly his skin was turning to a blue tinge; like dew chilling to frost, the surface of his body was freezing icily. The injection of morphia failed to impact on the nerve centers. It was without effect.
On a sudden the little fellow kicked out, then lay rigid as one who stiffens in the petrifying clutch of death. All the breath had fled his nostrils. He was in the asphyxial stage of the cholera.
Don Jaime, kneeling beside the collapsed form, tore with his harsh hands at jaw and brow to force open the vised mouth. Between the boy's clenching teeth, he wedged the blunt end of the silver syringe. Then he strove to force air into the sunken empty lungs. He strove brusquely yet carefully, as one strives over a drowning man. He lifted the reedlike arms above the boy's head, then back to his sides and up again.
He worked feverishly, he worked heroically. He reached for the black leather box he had thrown behind him. The broken straps on that box showed where it had been torn with sudden violence from the cantle of his saddle.
Quesada hastened to aid his groping hand. He picked up the box and held it open.
"Ammonia!" snapped the doctor. "Hold it to his nose!"
Quesada withdrew from the box a labeled blue bottle. As Don Jaime worked the puny arms up and down with a certain circumspect precision, Quesada held the pungent salts beneath the slightly fluttering nostrils.
"Build a fire! Heat water!" Don Jaime exploded, never ceasing his labors. "Quick! We must give the boy a hot bath to circulate the blood and save him from dying!"
"We have a fire going night and day," returned Quesada. "We have only to remove the heated stones to the bathing pool."
"Where is it, this pool? Lead the way!"