XXXI.
DEFEAT.
After all, the life that I thought was lost, and had but little sorrow for the losing of it, slowly came back to me again. For a good while before I recovered consciousness fully, I understood a little of what was going on around me by sounds which, no doubt, were loud and ringing, yet which seemed to me to come faintly from a long way off. They plainly were the sounds of fighting—of weapons rattling together, of shouts and yells and death-cries—but I did not associate them with our present battling, but thought that we still were in the cañon, and were still fighting those wild Indians by whom poor Dennis was slain. And I knew that I had been hurt badly; for in my head was a throbbing pain so keen that it seemed like to split my skull open, and my stomach was stirred by most distressing qualms, and my weakness was such that I could not ease the sore muscles of my body by moving by so much as a hair's-breadth from the cramped position in which I lay.
It seemed to me a vastly long while that I remained in this dreary condition of half-consciousness, with no certain knowledge of anything save the pain that I suffered; and then I felt some one touch me, and a hand laid upon my heart; and this touch so far roused me that I heaved a long sigh and slowly opened my eyes. For a moment I did not know the face that I saw bending over me; nor was this wonderful, for in place of its usual ruddiness was a death-like pallor, that was the more marked by contrast with the blood that trickled down over it from a great gash across the brow whereby the bone was laid bare. But there was no mistaking the voice that called out: "He's alive, Rayburn!" and added, "I don't see what right he's got t' be alive, either, after a crack like that. I guess studyin' antiquities must everlastin'ly harden an' thicken a man's skull!"
"Studying engineering doesn't harden a man's leg, anyway," I heard Rayburn answer. "That cut pretty near took mine off. But now that we've stopped the bleeding I guess I'm all right. I think I can work over to you on my hands and knees and help you with the Professor. Now that I know he's alive I seem to be a lot more alive myself."
"Just you stay where you are," Young called back, sharply. "If you move you'll start that bandage an' I'll have t' tie you up all over again. I'll attend t' th' Professor." And then Young bent over me, and, with a tenderness that I never would have thought his rough hands capable of, set himself to bandaging my wounded head. But the best thing that he did for me was to give me a draught of water from a gourd that had been slung about the neck of one of the soldiers lying dead there; which draught, with the comfort that the cool wet bandage about my head gave me, brought back to me so much of my strength that I was able presently to sit up and look around.
Truly, a more ghastly sight than that which my eyes then rested upon I never saw. The gate-way of the Citadel was a very shambles. Piles of dead men lay all around me; and the prodigious number of the enemy lying slain there testified with a mute eloquence to the desperate fashion in which our handful of men had fought. Over the rough pavement, down the slope towards the lake, there flowed a stream of bright red blood that in places shone a brilliant vermilion where it was touched by the glintings of the sun. Among the dead I did not see Tizoc's body, and for this I was glad. Half a dozen of the enemy stood by us as a guard; but these suffered us to minister to each other, evidently feeling that no great amount of caution was necessary in dealing with three badly wounded men. Indeed, these guards, in their way, manifested a kindly feeling for us; for when they perceived that our gourd of water was empty one of them picked up another full gourd from amid the dead and handed it to us. From inside the Citadel there still came a tumult of fierce sounds which gave proof that though the battle—if it could be called a battle—was ended the work of killing still was going on; but these sounds sensibly diminished while we lay there waiting to know what fate would come to us, and we concluded, therefore, that there remained no more rebels to be slain.
Rayburn was seated upon the ground at no great distance from me, his back propped against the wall. As he saw that I was looking towards him, and had again my wits about me, he greeted me with a very melancholy smile. "It's been a pretty cold day for us, Professor," he said, "and there's no great comfort in knowing that it's partly our own fault that these fellows have laid us out. I didn't give them credit for such good tactics; and even with the bad watch that we kept I don't see how they managed to get their men round on the other side of our camp. Well, it must please them to know how straight we walked into the trap that they set for us, like the pack of fools that we were."
"You won't ketch me joinin' in any more Indian revolutions, anyway," Young put in. "I did think I could bet on those Tlahuicos, an' they've just gone back on us th' worst kind. Do you feel strong enough, Professor, to tie th' ends o' this rag?" He had been binding up the cut in his forehead, and now he got down on his hands and knees in front of me, and bent his head down within easy reach of my hands; and my strength had so far returned to me that without being very tired after it I was able to make the ends of the bandage fast. The blow on his head had glanced from the skull, luckily; but it had been heavy enough to stun him for some minutes after he received it—and his falling as though dead had been the means, no doubt, of saving his life, even as in the same manner my life had been saved. Rayburn's wound was a worse one than either Young's or mine, for a great gash in his thigh had wellnigh cut his leg off, and until, with Young's help, he had improvised a tourniquet, from a bowstring and a broken fragment of a javelin, he had been in great danger of bleeding to death.