“BUT Gaspar Ruiz breathed yet. I had him carried in his poncho¹ under the shelter of some bushes on the very ridge² from which he had been gazing so fixedly³ at the fort while unseen death was hovering⁴ already over his head.  
“Our troops had bivouacked round the fort. Towards daybreak I was not surprised to hear that I was designated to command the escort of a prisoner who was to be sent down at once to Santiago. Of course the prisoner was Gaspar Ruiz’ wife.
 
“‘I have named you out of regard for your feelings,’ General Robles remarked. ‘Though the woman really ought to be shot for all the harm she has done to the Republic.’
 
“And as I made a movement of shocked protest, he continued:
 
“‘Now he is as well as dead, she is of no importance. Nobody will know what to do with her. However, the Government wants her.’ He shrugged⁵ his shoulders. ‘I suppose he must have buried large quantities of his loot in places that she alone knows of.’
 
“At dawn I saw her coming up the ridge, guarded by two soldiers, and carrying her child on her arm.
 
“I walked to meet her.
 
“‘Is he living yet?’ she asked, confronting me with that white, impassive face he used to look at in an adoring way.
 
“I bent⁶ my head, and led her round a clump⁷ of bushes without a word. His eyes were open. He breathed with difficulty, and uttered her name with a great effort.
 
“‘Erminia!’
 
“She knelt at his head. The little girl, unconscious of him, and with her big eyes, looking about, began to chatter⁸ suddenly, in a joyous⁹, thin voice. She pointed¹⁰ a tiny finger at the rosy¹¹ glow of sunrise behind the black shapes of the peaks. And while that child-talk, incomprehensible and sweet to the ear, lasted, those two, the dying man and the kneeling woman, remained silent, looking into each other’s eyes, listening to the frail¹² sound. Then the prattle¹³ stopped. The child laid its head against its mother’s breast and was still.
 
“‘It was for you,’ he began. ‘Forgive.’ His voice failed him. Presently I heard a mutter, and caught the pitiful words: ‘Not strong enough.’
 
“She looked at him with an extraordinary intensity¹⁴. He tried to smile, and in a humble¹⁵ tone, ‘Forgive me,’ he repeated. ‘Leaving you...’
 
“She bent down, dry-eyed, and in a steady voice: ‘On all the earth I have loved nothing but you, Gaspar,’ she said.
 
“His head made a movement. His eyes revived. ‘At last! ‘he sighed out. Then, anxiously, ‘But is this true... is this true?’
 
“‘As true as that there is no mercy and justice in this world,’ she answered him passionately¹⁶. She stooped over his face. He tried to raise his head, but it fell back, and when she kissed his lips he was already dead. His glazed¹⁷ eyes stared at the sky, on which pink clouds floated very high. But I noticed the eyelids¹⁸ of the child, pressed to its mother’s breast, droop¹⁹ and close slowly. She had gone to sleep.
 
“The widow of Gaspar Ruiz, the strong man, allowed me to lead her away without shedding a tear.
 
“For travelling we had arranged for her a side-saddle very much like a chair, with a board swung beneath to rest her feet on. And the first day she rode without uttering a word, and hardly for one moment turning her eyes away from the little girl, whom she held on her knees. At our first camp I saw her during the night walking about, rocking the child in her arms and gazing down at it by the light of the moon. After we had started on our second day’s march she asked me how soon we should come to the first village of the inhabited country.
 
“I said we should be there about noon.
 
“‘And will there be women there?’ she inquired.
 
“I told her that it was a large village. ‘There will be men and women there, senora,’ I said, ‘whose hearts shall be made glad by the news that all the unrest and war is over now.’
 
“‘Yes, it is all over now,’ she repeated. Then, after a time: ‘senor officer, what will your Government do with me?’
 
“‘I do not know, senora,’ I said. ‘They will treat you well, no doubt. We republicans are not savages²⁰, and take no vengeance²¹ on women.’
 
“She gave me a look at the word ‘republicans’ which I imagined full of undying hate. But an hour or so afterwards, as we drew up to let the baggage mules²² go first along a n............