VIII
On the morrow, Luis Cervantes was barely able to get up. His injured leg trailing behind him, he shuffled from hut to hut in search of a little alcohol, a kettle of boiled water and some rags. With unfailing kindness, Camilla provided him with all that he wanted.
As he began washing his foot, she sat beside him, and, with typical mountaineer’s curiosity, inquired:
“Tell me, who learned you how to cure people? Why did you boil that water? Why did you boil the rags? Look, look, how careful you are about everything! And what did you put on your hands? Really.... And why did you pour on alcohol? I just knew alcohol was good to rub on when you had a bellyache, but... Oh, I see! So you was going to be a doctor, huh? Ha, ha, that’s a good one! Why don’t you mix it with cold water? Well, there’s a funny sort of a trick. Oh, stop fooling me... the idea: little animals alive in the water unless you boil it! Ugh! Well, I can’t see nothing in it myself.”
Camilla continued to cross-question him with such familiarity that she suddenly found herself addressing him intimately, in the singular tu. Absorbed in his own thoughts, Luis Cervantes had ceased listening to her. He thought:
Where are those men on Pancho Villa’s payroll, so admirably equipped and mounted, who only get paid in those pure silver pieces Villa coins at the Chihuahua mint? Bah! Barely two dozen half-naked mangy men, some of them riding decrepit mares with the coat nibbled off from neck to withers. Can the accounts given by the Government newspapers and by myself be really true and are these so-called revolutionists simply bandits grouped together, using the revolution as a wonderful pretext to glut their thirst for gold and blood? Is it all a lie, then? Were their sympathizers talking a lot of exalted nonsense?
If on one hand the Government newspapers vied with each other in noisy proclamation of Federal victory after victory, why then had a paymaster on his way from Guadalajara started the rumor that President Huerta’s friends and relatives were abandoning the capital and scuttling away to the nearest port? Was Huerta’s, “I shall have peace, at no matter what cost,” a meaningless growl? Well, it looked as though the revolutionists or bandits, call them what you will, were going to depose the Government. Tomorrow would therefore belong wholly to them. A man must consequently be on their side, only on their side.
“No,” he said to himself almost aloud, “I don’t think I’ve made a mistake this time.”
“What did you say?” Camilla asked. “I thought you’d lost your tongue.... I thought the mice had eaten it up!”
Luis Cervantes frowned and cast a hostile glance at this little plump monkey with her bronzed complexion, her ivory teeth, and her thick square toes.
“Look here, Tenderfoot, you know how to tell fairy stories, don’t you?”
For all answer, Luis made an impatient gesture and moved off, the girl’s ecstatic glance following his retreating figure until it was lost on the river path. So profound was her absorption that she shuddered in nervous surprise as she heard the voice of her neighbor, one-eyed Maria Antonia, who had been spying from her hut, shouting:
“Hey, you there: give him some love powder. Then he might fall for you.”
“That’s what you’d do, all right!”
“Oh, you think so, do you? Well, you’re quite wrong! Faugh! I despise a tenderfoot, and don’t forget it!