“My friend is a doctor,” he said, turning to the host, “take him to the sick man; for myself, I will put up the mules and then assist the old mother, for mountain air sharpens appetite.”
In a rude, tumble-down hut close to the main building Lawrence found his patient. He lay stretched in a corner on a heap of straw in a state of great exhaustion—apparently dying—and with several bandages about his cut and bruised head and face.
The first glance told Lawrence that it was Antonio, the robber whom he had tried to rescue, but he carefully concealed his knowledge, and, bending over the man, addressed him as if he were a stranger. The start and look of surprise mingled with alarm on the robber’s face told that he had recognised Lawrence, but he also laid restraint on himself, and drew one of the bandages lower down on his eyes.
Feeling his pulse, Lawrence asked him about his food.
He got little, he said, and that little was not good; the people of the farm seemed to grudge it.
“My poor man,” said Lawrence in his bad Spanish, “they are starving you to death. But I’ll see to that.”
He rose and went out quickly. Returning with a basin of soup, he presented it to the invalid, who ate it with relish. Then the man began to relate how he had been attacked a few days before by a party of robbers in one of the mountain passes, who had cut the throats of all his party in cold blood, and had almost killed himself, when he was rescued by the opportune arrival of some travellers.
Lawrence was much disgusted at first by the man’s falsehood. Observing the poor fellow’s extreme weakness, however, and his evident anxiety lest he should be recognised, the feeling changed to pity. Laying his hand gently on the man’s shoulder, he said, with a look of solemnity which perchance made, up to some extent for the baldness of the phraseology—
“Antonio, tell not lies; you are dying!”
The startled man looked at his visitor earnestly. “Am I dying?” he asked, in a low tone.