Page:Tales of Today.djvu/222

206 The Carlist officers were bustling anxiously about Zucarraga. Some of them were down on their knees examining the wound. One of them was calling for a surgeon.

The surgeon! The surgeon, valgame Dios! Where is Urrabieta, then? Where is he?'

"Urrabieta was the surgeon of the Carlist detachment. Men were looking for him in every direction. The officers were beginning to become impatient. Zucarraga, smiling, made a motion with his hand and said, very gently: 'Wait. Perhaps Urrabieta has fallen asleep. He must have had so much to do, last night!'

"All at once a sergeant came running up toward the officers, very pale and with tears in his eyes. Urrabieta, the surgeon, had just been found among the dead, where he had fallen, laid low by a bullet, upon the corpse of a Naverrese whose wound he had been looking to. It had happened in the darkness, like all the rest of it. A stray bullet. Those bits of lead, they bring death just as surely to those who cure as to those who kill!

"Then there was consternation among the Carlists. Zucarraga's wound might be serious; nay, it was serious. And no surgeon to attend to it! Waiting to summon those of the adjacent army-corps, that would be a proceeding fraught with danger. He was losing blood freely. Then one of his officers walked straight up to the group of prisoners and asked in a loud voice:

Is there a surgeon among you?'

"Garrido's men looked one another in the face. No, there was no surgeon. They were all soldiers.

No one who can dress a wound?'