“When the lips of the officer moved to give the order: Fire! I fell upon my face as if dead. As I lay, I was pierced by a bayonet through the shoulder, but I made no sign of life. After the execution, the camp followers came to rob the dead. A kind-hearted Mexican woman helped me to reach the river. I found a horse tied there, and I took it. I have been on the point of giving up life several times, but I met a man coming here with the news to Houston, and he helped me to hold out.”
The doctor was trembling with grief and anger, and he felt Antonia’s hand on his shoulder.
“My friend,” he whispered, “did you know JOHN WORTH?”
“Who did not know him in Fannin’s camp? Any of us would have been glad to save poor Jack; and he had a friend who refused to live without him.”
“That was the man, young lady. Grant was a doctor, and the Mexicans wanted doctors. They offered him his life for his services, but he would not have it unless his friend’s life also was spared. They were shot holding each other’s hands, and fell together. I was watching their faces at the moment. There wasn’t a bit of fear in them.”
The Senora rose, and came as swiftly as a spirit to them. She looked like a woman walking in her sleep. She touched the stranger. “I heard you. You saw Dare Grant die. But my boy! My boy! Where is my Juan?”
“Don’t speak, Roberto. Where is my Juan? Juan Worth?”
“Madam. I am sorry enough, God knows. Juan Worth--was shot.”
Then the wretched mother threw up her hands, and with an awful cry fell to the ground. It was hours ere she recovered consciousness, and consciousness only restored her to misery.
The distress of the father, the brother and sisters of the dead youth was submerged in the speechless despair of the mother. She could not swallow food; she turned away from the the{ sic} sympathy of all who loved her. Even Isabel’s caresses were received with an apathy which was terrifying. With the severed curl of her boy’s hair in her fingers, she sat in tearless, voiceless anguish.
Poor Antonia, weighed down with the double loss that had come to her, felt, for the first time, as if their condition was utterly hopeless. The mental picture of her brother and her lover meeting their tragic death hand in hand, their youth and beauty, their courage and fidelity, was constantly before her. With all the purity and strength of her true heart, she loved Dare; but she did not for a moment wish that he had taken a different course. “It is just what I should have expected from him,” she said to Isabel. “If he had let poor Jack die alone, I could never have loved him in the same way again. But oh, Isabel, how miserable I am?”