“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