"How goes it, Senor Carson?"
"All right so far. But gad, it's tough! It wasn't so bad when they were dying. These days when there are no stricken, and the sick bay is empty, and each man watches the next in fear lest he should succumb—that's maddening!"
They talked jerkily. Quesada wanted to forget the trial of waiting, to ease his mind of the down-bearing strain. To change the subject, he said:
"I have learned something. About the man who was sticking-up persons and saying he was I, Jacinto Quesada. He was a member of the Guardia Civil named Miguel Alvarado. Down by the shrine of Christ of the Pass, his own kind, the Guardia Civil, shot him to death."
The American understood. When Quesada first had returned to the village poisoned with worry at what he had overheard from the policemen then waiting in the gorge, he had told Carson the beginning of the story of the masquerader. Now, at hearing its tragic end, Carson merely nodded. All the while, as he listened, he eyed Don Jaime with fearful anxiety as the physician moved in and out from choza to cabana.
The racking strain—the long torture of work and travail of waiting—showed plainly in the hidalgo doctor,—in the high cheek bones almost bursting through the deep swarth skin, in the thinly chiseled nose and the gray eyes that seemed crystallized to a hard quartz. He was working arduously, Don Jaime—prodigiously, epically, like a true son of Hispanus, that first Spaniard sprung from the loins of Hercules!
Hardly daring to breathe, the barrio entered upon the fifth and occult day. Twenty-four hours more of immunity from disease, and the tension would be over, the iron clutch of the quarantine lifted.
Night shut down, black, breathing, full of the nameless. Groups collected. The suspense was on them like thumbscrews.
Dawn came slowly, a leaden wash, Don Jaime went his final rounds.
No man had stuck his toes toward heaven; in the night, no man had gone under from the plague. The grip of the horror was broken!