The perspiration rolled from me; my mouth was as a sandpit; the heavy scent of the magnolia blossoms above sickened me with its strength; the sight departed from my eyes. I could see nothing beyond a small circle of the hot dust around, which waved and danced in the sunlight, and the little green lizards which came and looked at me curiously, and forgot that I was human.
And then, of a sudden, my comrade gave a sob, and his chest began to heave of itself without my laborious aid. And after that for a while I knew very little more. The sun-baked dust danced more wildly in the sunshine, the lizards changed to darker colours, the light went out, and when next I came to my senses Methuen was sitting up with one hand clutching at his throat, looking at me wildly.
“What has happened?” he gasped. “I thought I was dead, and Garcia had hanged me. Garcia——No one is here. The puebla seems deserted. Calvert, tell me.”
“They have gone,” I said. “We are alive. We will get away from here as soon as you can walk.”
He rose to his feet, swaying. “I can walk now. But what about you?”
“I am an old man,” I said, “wearily old. In the last two hours I have grown a hundred years. But I think I can walk also. Yes, look, I am strong. Lean on my arm. Do you see that broken window in the chapel? When I fired through that, the bell stopped tolling.”
“Let us go inside the chapel for a minute before we leave the village,” said Methuen. “We have had a very narrow escape, old man. I—I—feel thankful.”
There was a faint smell of incense inside that little white-walled chapel. The odour of it lingers by me still.
THE OTHER TWIN
By EDWIN PUGH