“'Ow about the other?” Mother Jenks demanded. Don Juan Cafetéro had, unfortunately, been so much of a nuisance to her in life that she was not minded to be troubled greatly over him in death, although the Spartanlike manner of his exit had thrilled the British bulldog blood in her.
“The big fellow isn't quite dead yet, but I'm afraid he's a goner. The surgeons have him in this room now. Friend of yours, Miss?” he inquired in tones freighted with neighbourly sympathy.
Dolores nodded.
“Sorry I can't let you in, Miss,” he continued, “but the General ordered me to keep everybody out until the doctors have finished looking him over. If I was you, I'd wait in that room across the hall; then you can get the first news when the doctors come out.”
Mother Jenks accepted his advice and steered her charge into the room indicated. And as they waited, Ricardo Ruey stood anxiously beside the table on which John Stuart Webster's big, limp body reposed, while Doctor Pacheco, assisted by a Sobrantean confrère, went deftly over him with surgical scissors and cut the blood-soaked clothing from his body.
“He breathes very gently,” the rebel leader said, presently. “Is there any hope?”
The little doctor shrugged. “I fear not. That bayonet-thrust in the left side missed his heart but not his lung.”
“But apparently he hasn't bled much from that wound.”
“The hemorrhage is probably internal. Even if that congestion of blood in the lungs does not prove fatal very shortly, he cannot, in his weakened state, survive the traumatic fever from all these wounds. It is bound—hello, how our poor friend still lives with the bayonet broken off in his body—for here is steel—hah! Not a bayonet, but a pistol.”
He unbuttoned the wounded man's coat and found a strap running diagonally up across his breast and over the right shoulder, connecting with a holster under the left arm. The doctor unbuckled this strap and removed the holster, which contained Webster's spare gun; Ricardo, glancing disinterestedly at the sheathed weapon, noted a small, new, triangular hole in the leather holster. He picked it up, withdrew the pistol, and found a deep scratch, recently made, along the blued steel close to the vulcanite butt.