Page:The Valley of Adventure (1926).pdf/285

 Geronimo groaned, lying face downward on his bed of boughs.

Juan was concerned gravely over his own condition. His heavy undergarment had protected his arms and chest, but his neck and face's eemed cooked, puffed in places with dropsical distensions, skinless and raw in others, a most miserable and tortuous plight. His hands were in no better case; his legs were scorched and blistered in spots where his pantaloons had burned through. These things he could have borne with no more than a passing concern, as indeed they were secondary to the injury his eyes had suffered. But the thought that he might lose his vision was a terrifying one which made his courage falter in a sweat of dreadful apprehension.

Don Geronimo did not know, Dominguez had not understood, that Juan had seen but dimly when he broke the leafy tips of branches from oak and sycamore for the mayordomo's bed; or that this obscuration grew with alarming rapidity, as an eclipse seems to rush to its climax. The inflammation was mounting in pulsating pangs that pierced his brain like exploring instruments in a cruel surgeon's hands. When they left the shadow of the oaks around the spring and entered the glaring sun on the white road, the canvas cover of Dominguez' cart seemed a poor shelter against the piercing rays.

Juan sat with hands pressed to his burning eyeballs, not even a tear left in the seared founts to mitigate the deep-striking agony. He had no spare