He shook his white head slowly as if fixing something definite in his mind.
"To-morrow noon," he added imperiously. "To-morrow noon, he shall die!"
It was the selfsame hour Ferou himself had bargained with the Guardias Civiles for the killing of Quesada!
Don Jaime would say no more. He was as arrogantly enigmatic as the very God Himself!
CHAPTER XXXIV
Don Jaime worked that day. That night he slaved. About eventide Alfonso Robledo, the banderillero who so bravely had seconded Quesada that morning, suffered all at once a severe relapse. Perhaps it came from the overheating excitement of that crucial time upon the rock; perhaps the abrupt exposure in that intrepid try to avert Felicidad's cruel and barbarous fate, had brought it on; at any rate and all on a sudden, his weakened body began writhing in an agony of cramps.
There was nothing else for it. The hidalgo doctor gave the bullfighter a hypodermic injection of morphia. The paroxysms lessened, altogether ceased. The eyelids of the banderillero rolled down heavily, and he slumped into a deep stertorous sleep.
That reawakened in Don Jaime the Fear. He made once more a round of the hospital. He went from choza to cabana outside, seeking new cases. Where a man could not sleep or a woman persisted in moaning, he administered narcotics.
When morning dawned through wisps of rain, the long night of taxing and intolerable work showed plainly in the doctor. His narrow face looked thin and long as a ferule; the cheek bones were high, the aquiline nose never more imperious. What with all the coffee he had drunk like a good Moor, to accelerate the action of his brain and steady the movement of his hand, his skin seemed tinged to a deeper swarth.