A Charmed Life | Page 8

he may carry
despatches. If we take them to the commandante at Mayaguez he will
reward us."
"And the gold pieces?" demanded the one called Paul.
"We will divide them in three parts," said the landlord.
In the front of the inn, surrounded by a ghostlike group that spoke its
suspicions, Chesterton was lifting his saddle from El Capitan and
rubbing the lame foreleg. It was not a serious sprain. A week would set
it right, but for that night the pony was useless. Impatiently, Chesterton
called across the plaza, begging the landlord to make haste. He was
eager to be gone, alarmed and fearful lest even this slight delay should

cause him to miss the transport. The thought was intolerable. But he
was also acutely conscious that he was very hungry, and he was too old
a campaigner to scoff at hunger. With the hope that he could find
something to carry with him and eat as he rode forward, he entered the
inn.
The main room of the house was now in darkness, but a smaller room
adjoining it was lit by candles, and by a tiny taper floating before a
crucifix. In the light of the candles Chesterton made out a bed, a priest
bending over it, a woman kneeling beside it, and upon the bed the little
figure of a boy who tossed and moaned. As Chesterton halted and
waited hesitating, the priest strode past him, and in a voice dull and flat
with grief and weariness, ordered those at the door to bring the landlord
quickly. As one of the group leaped toward the corral, the priest said to
the others: "There is another attack. I have lost hope."
Chesterton advanced and asked if he could be of service. The priest
shook his head. The child, he said, was the only son of the landlord,
and much beloved by him, and by all the village. He was now in the
third week of typhoid fever and the period of hemorrhages. Unless they
could be checked, the boy would die, and the priest, who for many
miles of mountain and forest was also the only doctor, had exhausted
his store of simple medicines.
"Nothing can stop the hemorrhage," he protested wearily, "but the
strongest of drugs. And I have nothing!"
Chesterton bethought him of the medicine case Miss Armitage had
forced upon him. "I have given opium to the men for dysentery," he
said. "Would opium help you?"
The priest sprang at him and pushed him out of the door and toward the
saddle-bags.
"My children," he cried, to the silent group in the plaza, "God has sent
a miracle!"
After an hour at the bedside the priest said, "He will live," and knelt,
and the mother of the boy and the villagers knelt with him. When
Chesterton raised his eyes, he found that the landlord, who had been
silently watching while the two men struggled with death for the life of
his son, had disappeared. But he heard, leaving the village along the
trail to Mayaguez, the sudden clatter of a pony's hoofs. It moved like a
thing driven with fear.

The priest strode out into the moonlight. In the recovery of the child he
saw only a demonstration of the efficacy of prayer, and he could not
too quickly bring home the lesson to his parishioners. Amid their
murmurs of wonder and gratitude Chesterton rode away. To the kindly
care of the priest he bequeathed El Capitan. With him, also, he left the
gold pieces which were to pay for the fresh pony.
A quarter of a mile outside the village three white figures confronted
him. Two who stood apart in the shadow shrank from observation, but
the landlord, seated bareback upon a pony that from some late exertion
was breathing heavily, called to him to halt.
"In the fashion of my country," he began grandiloquently, "we have
come this far to wish you God speed upon your journey." In the fashion
of the American he seized Chesterton by the hand. "I thank you, senor,"
he murmured.
"Not me," returned Chesterton. "But the one who made me 'pack' that
medicine chest. Thank her, for to-night I think it saved a life."
The Spaniard regarded him curiously, fixing him with his eyes as
though deep in consideration. At last he smiled gravely.
"You are right," he said. "Let us both remember her in our prayers."
As Chesterton rode away the words remained gratefully in his memory
and filled him with pleasant thoughts. "The world," he mused, "is full
of just such kind and gentle souls."
After an interminable delay he reached Newport, and they escaped
from the others, and Miss Armitage and he ran down the lawn to the
rocks, and stood with the waves whispering at