"No shovel, Padre," he announced. "But I crept up back of my house and got this bar which I had left standing there when I came back from the mountains. I can scrape up the loose earth with my hands. Come now." Josè wearily rose. He was but a tool in the hands of a man to whom physical danger was but a matter of temperament. He absently helped Rosendo wrap the black, distorted corpse in the frayed blanket; and then together they passed out into the night with their grewsome burden. "Why not to the cemetery, Rosendo?" asked Josè, as the old man took an opposite course. "_Hombre_, no!" cried Rosendo. "The cemetery is on shale, and I could not dig through it in time. We must get the body under ground at once. _Caramba!_ If we put it in one of the _bóvedas_ in the cemetery the buzzards will eat it and scatter the plague all over the town. The _bóvedas_ are broken, and have no longer any doors, you remember." So beyond the shales they went, stumbling through the darkness, their minds freighted with a burden of apprehension more terrible than the thing they bore in their arms. The shales crossed, Rosendo left the trail, cutting a way through the bush with his _machete_ a distance of several hundred feet. Then, by the weird yellow light of a single candle, he opened the moist earth and laid the hideous, twisted thing within. Josè watched the procedure in dull apathy. "And now, Padre," said Rosendo, at length breaking the awful silence, "where will you sleep to-night? I cannot let you go back to your house. It is too near the señora and Carmen. No man in town will let you stay in his house, since you have handled the plague. Will you sleep in the shed where the lad died? Or out on the shales with me? I called to the señora when I went after the bar, and she will lay two blankets out in the _plaza_ for us. And in the morning she will put food where we can get it. What say you?" Josè stood dazed. His mind had congealed with the horror of the situation. Rosendo took him by the arm. "Come, Padre," he said gently. "The hill up back of the second church is high, and no one lives near. I will get the blankets and we will pass the night out there." "But, Rosendo!" Josè found his voice. "What is it? Is it--_la cólera_?" "_Quien sabe?_ Padre," returned Rosendo. "There has been plague here--these people, some of them, still remember it--but it was long ago. There have been cases along the river--and brought, I doubt not, by Turks, like this one." "And do you think that it is now all along the river? That Bodega Central is being ravaged by the scourge? That it will sweep through the country?" "_Quien sabe?_ Padre. All I do know is that the people of Simití are terribly frightened, and the pestilence may wipe away the town before it leaves." "But--good God! what can we do, Rosendo?" "Nothing, Padre--but stay and meet it," the man replied quietly.