But Batiste, who felt the pain in his shoulder growing more and more insufferable, hushed their lamentations and ordered them with a dark gesture to see at once what had happened to him.
Roseta, who was the bravest, tore open the coarse rough shirt, leaving the shoulder uncovered. How much blood! The girl grew pale, trying not to faint; Batistet and the little ones began to weep, and Teresa continued her howlings as though her husband were in his death agony.
But the wounded man would not tolerate their lamentations and protested rudely. Less weeping: it was nothing: not serious, and the proof of this was that he could move his arm, although he felt, all the time, a greater weight in his shoulder. It was just a scratch, an abrasion, nothing more. He felt too strong for the wound to be deep. Look ... water, cloth, lint, the bottle of arnica which Teresa was guarding as a miraculous remedy in her room ... move about quickly! This was no time to stand gaping with open mouths.
Teresa, returning to her room, searched the depths of her chests, tearing up linen cloths, untying bandages, while the girl washed and washed again the lips of the bleeding wound, which was cut like a sabre-slash across the fleshy shoulder.
The two women checked the hemorrhage as best they could, bandaged the wound, and Batiste breathed with satisfaction, as though he were already cured. Worse blows than this had descended upon him in this life.
And he began to admonish the little ones to be prudent. Of what they had seen, not a word to anybody. There are subjects which it is best to forget. And he repeated the same to his wife, who talked of sending word to the doctor; it would amount to the same thing as attracting the attention of the court. It would cure itself. His constitution was wonderful. What was important was that no one should get mixed up in what occurred down below. Who knows in what condition the other man was by this time?
While his wife was helping him to change his clothes and prepared his bed, Batiste told her all that had occurred. The good woman opened her eyes with a frightened expression, sighed, thinking of the danger encountered by her husband, and cast anxious glances at the closed door of the farm-house, as if the rural police were about to enter through it.
Batistet, meanwhile, with precocious prudence, picked up the gun, and dried it in the candlelight, striving to wipe away from it all signs of recent usage, of that which had occurred.
The night was a bad one for all the family; Batiste was delirious; he had a fever, and tossed about furiously as if he still were running along the bed of the canal, pursuing the man. He terrified the little ones with his cries, so they were not able to sleep, as well as the women who, seated close to his bed, and offering him every moment some sugared water, the only domestic remedy which they could invent, passed a white night.
On the following day, the door of the farm-house was closed all morning. The wounded man seemed to be better: the children, their eyes reddened from lack of sleep, remained motionless in the corral, seated on the manure-heap, following dully the motions of the animals which were being raised there.