They were. It would have been impossible for any man with red corpuscles in his blood to harken to the shooting and shouts only three city blocks distant without yearning to see the fight itself.
“I'll return in fifteen minutes, at the latest,” he promised her, and with Don Juan Cafetéro, who had helped himself to a rifle and bayonet from one of the wounded, he turned the corner into the next street and started back toward the Calie San Rosario, which they followed west through a block plentifully sprinkled with the dead of both factions.
Don Juan led the way through an alley in the rear of the Catedral de la Santa Cruz to the door of the sacristy; as he placed his hand on the latch three rifle bullets struck around them, showering them with fragments of falling adobe.
“There's a house party in the neighbourhood,” yelled Don Juan and darted into the church, with Webster at his heels, just in time to escape another fusillade. They walked through the sacristy and passed through a door into the great cathedral, with its high, carved, Gothic-arched ceiling. Through the thick closed doors of the main entrance, lost in the dimness of space out in front, the sounds of the battle half a block away seemed very distant, indeed.
They passed the altar and Don Juan genuflected and crossed himself reverently. “I'll be afther makin' me confession,” he whispered to Webster. “Wait for me, sor.”
He leaned his rifle against the altar railing, crossed the church and touched lightly on the shoulder a monk kneeling in prayer before the altar of the Virgin; the latter bent his head while Don Juan whispered; then he rose and both went into the confessional, while Webster found a bench along the wall and waited.
Presently Don Juan came forth, knelt on the red-tiled floor and prayed—something, Webster suspected, he had not done for quite a while. And when he had finished his supplication and procured his rifle, Webster joined him, the monk unbolted the door and from the quiet of the house of God they passed out into the street and the tumult of hell.
“I've been dost to death this day,” Don Juan explained, “an' the day is not done. Be the same token, 'tis long since I'd made me last confession; sure, until you picked me out av the mire, sor, 'tis little thought I had for the hereafter.”
They were standing on the steps of the cathedral as Don Juan spoke, and from their place they could see a dozen or more of Ricardo's hired fighters crouched under the shelter of the palace walls across the street. “I think we'll be safer there,” Webster cried, as a couple of bullets struck the stone steps at their feet and ricocheted against the cathedral door. “That rifle of yours is making you a marked man, Don Juan.”
They ran across the street and joined the men under the palace wall.