Page:Vagabond life in Mexico.djvu/18

16 Perico had been scarcely carried out of the arena when cries of "a priest! a priest!" were raised by a hundred voices. Fray Serapio crouched in a corner of his box, but he could not avoid the duty which the people expected from him. He rose, gravely cloaking his disappointment as much as he could from the eyes of the people, and said to me, in a low tone,

"Follow me; you will pass for a surgeon."

"Are you joking?" said I.

"Not at all; if the fellow is not quite dead, he will have a surgeon and a priest of equal merit."

I followed the monk with a gravity at least equal to his own, and while descending the stairs of the amphitheatre, the laughter and loud hurrahs of the populace proved that the people in the shade, as well as the rabble in the sun, viewed the accident as an every-day occurrence. We were conducted into a little dark room on the ground floor of a house, from which issued several lobbies leading to different apartments. In a corner of this room Perico was laid, having been previously deprived of all his handkerchiefs; then, partly through respect for the Church and the faculty, so worthily represented by both of us, partly lest they should lose the spectacle of the fight, the attendants withdrew and left us alone. The lépero, his head leaning against the wall, and giving no sign of life, was seated rather than reclining; his motionless arms, and his pale, corpse-like face, showed that, if life had not quite fled, there was but a slender spark remaining. We looked at each other, the Franciscan and I, quite at a loss what to do in the circumstances.

"I think," said I to the monk, "that it would perhaps be best to give him absolution."

"Absolvo te" said Fray Serapio, touching roughly