Don José de Montoria, finding himself in the barricade of La Cruz del
Coso, got a gunshot in the leg, and had to retire; but leaning against
the wall of a house next to the arch of Cineja, he kept on fighting
for some time, until he brought on a hemorrhage, and at last finding
himself very faint, he called me, and said to me,--
"Señor de Araceli, something is in my eyes. I cannot see anything.
Curse this blood, how fast it runs out when it is most necessary to
keep it. Won't you lend me a hand?"
"Señor," I said, running to him, and holding him up, "it would be
better for you to retire to your lodging."
"No, here is where I want to be. But, Señor de Araceli, if I keep on
bleeding, where the devil is all this blood going? It seems to me as
if my legs are stuffed with cotton. I am falling to the ground like an
empty bag."
He made tremendous efforts of endurance, but almost lost consciousness,
more from the serious nature of his wound, than merely from loss of
blood, after being without food and sleep, and in such trouble during
these past days. Although he begged us to leave him there against the
wall, so that he should not miss a single detail of the battle, we
carried him to his lodging, which was also in the Coso, at the corner
of the Calle del Refugio. The family had been installed in an upper
room. The house was all full of wounded, and the numbers of bodies
deposited there very nearly obstructed the entrance. It was difficult
to get through the narrow doorway and the rooms within, because the men
who had gone there to die, crowded the place, and it was not easy to
distinguish between the living and the dead.
Montoria said, when we entered there, "Don't carry me upstairs, boys,
where my family is. Leave me here below. Here I see a counter which
just suits my purpose."
We put him where he said. This lower story was a shop. Several of the
wounded and victims of the epidemic who had died that day were under
the counter, and many of the sick were lying upon the infected ground
on pieces of cloth.
"Let us see," he said, "if there is any charitable soul who will try a
little to stop the gap where the blood comes out."
A woman came forward to care for the wounded man. It was Mariquilla
Candiola.
"God bless you, child," said Don José, seeing that she was bringing
lint and linen to bandage him. "Enough for now that you patch up this
leg a little. I don't believe there are any bones broken."
While this was going on, some twenty peasants came into the house to
fire from the windows upon the ruins of the hospital.
"Señor de Araceli, are you not going on firing? Wait a moment until I
get up, for I don't seem able to walk alone. I command you to fire from
the window. That's a good shot. Don't let them have time to breathe
over there at the hospital. Look here, lass, make haste! Haven't you a
knife? It would be a good thing to cut off this piece of flesh that's
hanging. How goes it, Señor de Araceli? Are we going to win?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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