He was the only physician who would journey up the mountains to Minas de la Sierra. It mattered not to him that there were long climbing miles of perilous goat-paths along howling gorges; it mattered not to him that the mountaineers never had money to pay him his just due. He was indeed a "hard man," haughty as Satanas, and grim and dour. But 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.
The old men of Minas were sitting under the cork-oak in the center of the village when the hidalgo doctor came out of the hut of the sick woman.
"Is it not the great illness, Don Jaime?" asked one of the old men, old Castro. He was thinking of the dread cholera.
"No. She is merely sick with despair."
"Ah, that is the great illness of Spain! All Spain is sick with despair!"
"Carajo! but you are right, my father!" answered the Senor Doctor in his bitter way. "Spain despairs. And why not? Spain famishes. There is no food for honest men to eat. And men turn dishonest, thinking by crime to appease their gnawing bellies. They became contrabandistas, salteadores de camino, abigeos, ladrones. And the men of the Guardia Civil take them out on the mountainside and murder them.
"Our forefathers," he philosophized, "were refugees from the fall of Troy. Black was their national color; black for their lost cause. They should put a black stripe with the red and yellow stripes of our modern Spanish flag. A black stripe for despair."
"Bueno, Don Jaime!" said the old men. One added:
"We have not studied at Salamanca like you, but we know what we know. Every night the hungry children cry themselves to sleep. Our own porridge bowls are never full. We have seen our sons grow desperate. We have seen them one by one go away. There was Benito, my youngest. He became a contrabandista, and the Civil Guard murdered him. There was Adolpho, the son of my sister Teresa. He also went the same way. There was Santiago Reyes and Mateo Pacheco and Ignacio Parral. And now follows Juan Quesada."
"What would you?" asked the Senor Doctor, with sudden brutality. "The Guardia Civil must keep the peace of Spain. And Spaniards must steal to live. It is dog eat dog. It will always be dog eat dog while men are Spaniards and Spaniards starve."