"
"Not La Manola, but others of a different sort--The Love of Isabella, The
Flight of Bobadil, Saragosse, My Little Banderillero, and so on, and all
so sweet that the women used to cry. Always, always she was singing till
the time when my father became a rebel. Then she used to cry too; and she
would sing no more; and when my father was put against a wall to be shot,
and fell in the dust when the rifles rang out, she came at the moment,
and seeing him lying there, she threw up her hands, and fell down beside
him dead--"
"The poor little senora, dead too--"
"Not dead too--that was the pity of it. You see my father was not dead.
The officer"--she did not say sergeant--"who commanded the firing squad,
he was what is called a compadre of my father--"
"Yes, I understand--a made-brother, sealed with an oath, which binds
closer than a blood-brother. It is that, is it not?"
"So--like that. Well, the compadre had put blank cartridges in their
rifles, and my father pretended to fall dead; and the soldiers were
marched away; and my father, with my mother, was carried to his home,
still pretending to be dead. It had been all arranged except the awful
thing, my mother's death. Who could foresee that? She ought to have been
told; but who could guess that she would hear of it all, and come at the
moment like that? So, that was the way she went, and I was left alone
with my father.
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