The haughty doctor leaped afoot. He had no thought but for the urgent business at hand. He was a thrall to grim and importunate necessity. Even as his personal honor was to him more precious than life, so was his physician's honor a covenant with Jehovah, tyrannical and imperious to command him.
Quesada, flinging his rickety legs wide apart, went swaying and floundering up the uneven street. Don Jaime followed after the bandolero, the little Gabriel in his own hidalgo arms.
The heat of the bath circulated the lad's blood. By slow degrees, he drew out of the chill collapse. Don Jaime wrapped him snug in a blanket. Once again, in his own hidalgo arms, the grandee doctor carried the boy back to the sick bay.
As he entered that fetid moaning place, a kind of shiver trembled through Don Jaime. He made along the runway between the platforms of tossing, groaning, and emaciated sick, his gray eyes darting from side to side. At the upper end of the chapel, near the dingy altar, he laid the boy down.
What of the hot bath and resultant circulation of blood, the injection of morphia was now at last achieving its purpose. No sooner had the poor lad touched the pine slabs than he passed blissfully into the dwelling place of sleep.
Don Jaime looked down the two platforms of blanketed sick. Slowly and gloomily he shook his white head. He turned to Quesada following doglike after him. His narrow face was a cinder-gray.
"You have spoken aright, son of a mangy she-wolf," he said. "I came nigh to forgetting my duty. I am a priest of the body. My first duty is to the suffering and dying here! After that—"
He paused ominously. He looked about as if in search of something. Of a sudden his roving eyes became focused, riveted; they flashed like cressets of fire. Through the hospital doorway, out into the cold sunlight he gazed.
He saw Felicidad down the village street. From the spell of terror and despair she was only then recovering. She glanced quickly about her. It was as if she had been away on a long journey and was astounded now to find everything as it had been before. She shuddered visibly like one starting to life who had been dead for intolerable moments.
Lip quivering but head held with a quiet proud demeanor, she turned toward the cabana wherein the American lay. As she entered the low doorway Jacques Ferou, lurking in the dark, sidled past her and out.