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It was in the Cathedral at Manchester, a particularly black and grim old structure, into which I had stepped to examine some ancient and curious wood-carvings within the choir. I sat down accordingly, and soon the parson and his clerk appeared at the altar, and a considerable crowd of people made their entrance at a side-door, and ranged themselves in a long, huddled line across the chancel.
Then the British leaped from the carts, and twenty of them scattered through the works, cutting down those who offered resistance and disarming the rest. These were huddled into the guardroom, and five men with cocked revolvers placed at the door, with orders to shoot them down at the first sign of movement.
In a few moments he had reached the line fence that marked the limits of the ranch. Here were the railroad tracks, and just beyond a huddled mass of roofs, with here and there an adobe house on its outskirts the little town of Guadalajara.
But here, again, fortune helped us. To the right, at the extreme inner corner of the mole, I espied half a dozen boats, not unlike our own, huddled close under a stone stairway; and I had no sooner thrust down the helm than a man, catching sight of us, came running along the mole to barter. Marc'antonio's conduct of the ensuing bargain was nothing short of masterly.
Everyone was silent enough now; most hiding their faces, that they might not see what happened next. Half way between the river and the smoking church, in the farther part of the opposite meadow, was a fine spreading oak, under which, as might just be seen, a flock of sheep were huddled together for shelter. Another fiery dart shot down from the dark canopy, upon the crown of this oak.
I would have given a great deal to have understood what was going on; but as I could not, I occasionally disturbed them by laughing, when they huddled back to the closet; and when I grew stronger, I sometimes dashed a pillow in among them, which made the poor senators breathless with agitation, and scuffle under the furniture, till they thought they might gain the closet in safety.
There came a footstep outside; it hesitated, then the street door was pushed open and the step came in, up to the room door, and a small face, pinched with cold, its eyes all burning, looked at him. "Come in, Jimmie," he whispered. And so the two sat, huddled one against the other, and the man felt again and again a shudder, though not of cold, shake the little body at his side.
Sometimes the bands that entered the settlements were several hundred strong; but their chief object was plunder, and they rarely attacked the strong places of the white frontiersmen, though they forced them to keep huddled in the stockaded stations; nor did they often fight a pitched battle with the larger bodies of militia.
The bodies of two who had died just before our arrival were lying in the corner over there behind Quashy. They were more like skeletons covered with skin than corpses. The four who still lived were in the corner here beside me, huddled together for warmth, and so worn out by hunger and despair that they did not seem to care at first that we had come to save them.
There was watching enough, now, but it was the watching of strangers who made a greedy trade of it, and who, in the intervals in their attendance upon the sick man huddled together with a ghastly good-fellowship, and ate and drank and made merry; for disease and death were their ordinary household gods.
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