The novitiate of Dolores Fombombo was Fortune's shrewdest thrust at Thomas Strawbridge. After that he stayed on at the priests' house because it ceased to make any difference to him where he domiciled. He spent most of his days there with the priests, sitting in the patio or lying on his straw bed in the cubicle. Now and then, when he saw his bags, he would think to himself, "I ought to take some samples and my order-book and canvass this town again." At other times he would think, "I ought to write a report to my house." But his feeling of "oughtness" applied to a perfectly empty motor-impulse for execution. It was precisely as if he were a figure without any will whatsoever.
Strangely, he did not think over-much of Dolores. Occasionally, when his mind made a movement toward her, he had a terrifying feeling as if some chasm were opening before him. Then, almost immediately, it seemed as if his brain closed gently shut, the chasm vanished, and with it all thought of the girl. To say that he grieved for her would be untrue. He had been numbed.
The most trifling things were sufficient to catch the drummer's unanchored attention. His eyes would follow the priests' cat across the patio, or he would watch the slow march of the cathedral's shadow over the flagstones in thecalle.
He became acquainted with the priests who were domiciled in the building. These were his Grace the Bishop, Father Honario, a big, sleek, solemn man with swinging jowls thatwere bluish from a closely shaved beard. Father Roberto was a close-lipped man with a disapproving expression. Then there was Father Pedro, a fat, unaspiring priest, who drank enough wine at his noon meal to make him sleepy all the afternoon. There was still a fifth priest at the house who was not attached to the cathedral at all. This was Father Jaíme, a sort of itinerant guest who had come to the Canalejos cathedral from a Trappist monastery on Lake Titicaca in Peru. The bishop allowed Father Jaíme a few pittances for holding mass at the funerals of his humbler parishioners, and this was the only stipend he received. When Strawbridge knew him he was trying to save sufficient money to purchase the churchman's half-fare passage from Canalejos to Port au Spain in Trinidad, where the Benedictines had a monastery. As far as Strawbridge could gather, Father Jaíme was a sort of ecclesiastical tramp.
The man who rang the cathedral bells, an office which occurred at almost every hour of the day, was called the "Cock." His nickname came, perhaps, from a thin, beak-like nose protruding from under the dirty visor of an old cap. He had a Jewish appearance. He was the only object which aroused to wrath the lethargic children of the cathedral settlement. When the Cock appeared, the children spat at him and called him "bloodsucker" and all manner of insulting epithets. The reason for this contumely was that the Cock lent money in a small way, and the hatred poor people have for a parsimonious money-lender was reflected in their children.
The Cock lived with a very industrious Indian wife, in one of the adobes at the back of the cathedral. He seldom spoke to any one, but moved gloomily on his way to and from his bells. However, once Strawbridge did observe a visitor in the bell-ringer's hut. One day as the salesman was walking slowly along one of the paths on the terrain of theriver, a gay figure stepped out from the blackness of the hut, drew off his sombrero, and bowed to the American with undeniable grace. As he bowed he exhibited a knot of hair at the back of his head.
"How goesel señor, mi General!" he called warmly. "Be assured Lubito knows your unhappiness, señor, and that you have but to lift a finger and the sword of a bull-fighter will leap from its scabbard." He went through the pantomime of drawing his sword, and his bold figure, set against the darkness of the doorway, formed a picture.
The sick man looked at him, thought of his walk with Lubito in the plaza, Esteban's attack on General Fombombo in the palace, Madruja. Such reminiscences were leading him straight to the señora, when some involuntary check in his mind softly closed that stream of thought and left the drummer staring emptily at the torero's posturing. He turned away along the path, vaguely disturbed and unhappy. The bull-fighter looked around and nodded knowingly to some one inside the hut.
"Caramba!" he praised. "What did I tell you? Deep! Why, you can't tell by his face that he even knows me, and yet ... we are as brothers! What a dictator thathombrewill make!"
The cathedral itself was a kind of labyrinth through which Strawbridge sometimes wandered with a sort of dulled attention. He understood little of the ecclesiastical symbolism in the chapels and on the high altar, or the allegorical frescoes in the dome and pendentive. He did peruse the fourteen stations of the passion which spaced the interior walls of the church, and while he could not follow the details of some of the cartoons he understood their general purport. He never entered the chapel of the Last Supper. Something warned him from the place where he had stood with Dolores under Michelena's great masterpiece.
This, unfortunately, was the only worthy canvas which the cathedral of Canalejos contained. The other chapels held staring images of one saint or another, and near the entrance of the pile, on the right side, was a crude picture of souls in purgatory. It was so badly done it was not even hideous.
The altars of the more popular saints were piled with ex-voto offerings. These were all manner of little images, made of tin, silver, or gold, and not much larger than a tobacco-tag. They were images of legs, hearts, arms, feet, a little tin mule, or a tiny house. Each one commemorated a miracle performed by the saint on whose altar it lay. A little silver leg was probably the gift of some rheumatic whom the good saint had cured; a mule would illustrate the gratitude of a peon for finding a strayed burro. The simplicity and childishness of these little gifts touched even Strawbridge; and, moreover, such an accumulation of testimonials lent a certain air of credibility to the power of the images in the chapels.
Besides these offerings of gratitude, on each altar were piles of letters asking the saint for further interventions. Once, as Strawbridge was looking at the missives, he wondered if any real power lay back of these stiff images of saints. Could it be that behind them was ranged some sort of spiritual reality, with a power and a will to soften human unhappiness? The thought stirred the benumbed heart of the American. He stood staring up at the wooden effigy, with a notion of adding a petition of his own to the pile on the altar.
The thought moved him. He walked out at the side entrance of the cathedral, into the priests' house. His legs trembled with his idea. In his cubicle he got out pen and paper and sat down to write, when a strange thing stopped him. All of his stationery bore the letter-head of the Orion Arms Corporation. It struck the drummer as somewhat incongruous to write a note to Saint John in heaven on NewYork letter-heads. And now that he had started to use his own envelops, he could not go out deliberately and purchase the big, square Latin-American envelops such as the peons used in writing a letter to Saint John. In brief, the sight of his matter-of-fact American paper shattered his transitory mysticism and made it impossible. However, the dying of this hope left the drummer grayer than ever.
The wood-carving in the cathedral next offered itself to Strawbridge's faint interest. The circular balustrade which led up and around one of the columns of the nave, to the pulpit, and the canopy over the pulpit were carved out of mahogany with the motif of pineapples and yucca-palm. The wood was black with the centuries. Strawbridge thought this was a defect, but when he recognized the two plants intertwined in the carving, his discovery gave him a childish joy. It led him to look at other work—the choir-stalls, which were not half so well done as the pulpit; the reredos; the altar panels; the pyx. Everywhere his eye fell he saw the labor of generations. Some were the carvings of the Spanish artisans who came to the New World not long after Columbus; others were the work of the Indian and negro apprentices of those original wood-carvers. The whole rise and decline of a folk-art was epitomized in the cathedral at Canalejos.
About a week after Strawbridge came to the priests' house he was walking in the cathedral one afternoon and wandered through an open door into an anteroom full of the images which the priests used in their processionals. It was a strange sight—the Madonnas with dust on their gilt halos; Saint Peter holding up a tarnished key; Saint Thomas reaching a broken finger toward the far-off wounds of Christ. These and perhaps a dozen other dusty figures, all as large as life, were placed helter-skelter in the storeroom, some facing one direction, some another. Over in a corner lay three or fourlitters on which the images were borne. One had a glass frame, another was draped in silks.
The drummer stood looking curiously about him, when he heard a rustling among the images. He moved toward the sound, and after a moment saw an old woman dusting the statues with a brush. A second glance showed him it was Josefa's grandmother. This dusting no doubt was a part of her labor as a charwoman in the cathedral.
Presently the old crone observed Strawbridge. She recognised the American, and put down her duster.
"Cá!It is you, señor. I thought it was Filipe, come in to help me. Have you come to tell me something?"
Strawbridge explained that he was merely idling in the cathedral; then he asked her how she liked her quarters by this time.
"It keeps the rain away. Then you have nothing to tell me of poor Josefa?"
"No, Doña Consolacion—at least not yet," he added, in order to give some crumbs of hope.
The old woman mumbled her wrinkled mouth with nervousness.
"But you will soon?"
"I hope so, Doña Consolacion."
"Very soon?"
"I hope so."
She nodded.
"Sí, sí, I hope so. I pray so every night, señor, at myoraciones." She gave a Virgin a stroke with her brush, then added in a whisper, forming the words very plainly with her thin wrinkled lips, "Who—was—it—the—soldiers—dropped—in—the—river—the—other—night?"
The question brought the drummer a wave of surprise and revived pain.
"I ... I don't know, señora!"
The old woman gave up her dusting and came nearer, so she could talk in a whisper.
"You don't think—you don't believe i-it could h-have b-been—?" She gasped and cut off her sentence.
"You mean...."
She nodded mutely, with a terrified expression in her old eyes.
"Why, no, Doña Consolacion, I am sure it was not ... not your grandson!"
But Doña Consolacion was peering at him, and his face was too full of apprehension to reassure her. On the contrary, with the suspicion of the aged she read tragedy there. She suddenly dropped her duster and her face screwed up into the tearless grimacing which stands for weeping with the aged.
"Oh,Dios mio!my Josefa, my poor little Josefa is gone!" She rocked to and fro with her hands crossed over her dried breast. Suddenly something flared up in her and she pointed at Strawbridge: "And you did it! You killed him! It makes no difference to me if it was all a part of a plan to free this country. I would rather have my little Josefa than free a thousand countries!"
Strawbridge made a gesture.
"But listen, señora; there is no reason to think it was Josefa! He was young and strong. He wouldn't have succumbed so quickly. There must be hundreds of other prisoners in that jail. It is more likely one of them has died than ... than your grandson.... Some old man whose strength had broken down!"
The old woman grew quieter at this reasoning, and stood looking at Strawbridge, with her toothless lips moving in and out with her agitated breathing.
"Holy Mary! I hope you are right! If I only knew he was alive! But he was young and strong, as you say....Cá!but I don't see why you should have chosen him, Señor Strawbridge, to cast into prison, even if it is all a part of your terrible plans."
"But, dear Doña Consolacion," remonstrated the drummer, "it was no part of a plan. There was no plan to it. It was simply an unfortunate move, an accident."
The old charwoman shook her head.
"Cá!señor! there is no use deceiving me! I am not a spy but an old woman cast down by a tyrant. And my family have always been lovers of freedom. My father was a Rosales." Her old voice gathered dignity at this reference to her family, and then, nodding her head to accent her words, she added, "And poor Ricardo, whom you had shot, Señor Strawbridge—he was my grandnephew."
The American stared in amazement.
"Ricardo ... whom I had shot!"
"Sí, señor—Lieutenant Rosales, whom you ordered shot in San Geronimo.Pues, you need not stare so. I understand all. Lubito has explained your deep and mysterious plans that reach all over the world. And also Lubito explained that one cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs. Napoleon first said that, señor; all cruel men say it. But I do not complain. I was born a Rosales, and more than one of us has given himself to die."
The old woman's persistent delusion that he was some sort of arch-plotter, assigning this and that man to his fate, filled the drummer with dismay.
"But señora," he began hopelessly, "how many times have I said that I have nothing, nothing whatever to do with all this butchery! I would not harm a soul in Rio Negro—no, not for the whole government. I would not—"
But the old creature shook her head, with her mouth quirked in withered satire.
"Ola, señor!" She wagged a finger. "I know, I know."She started to stoop for her brush, but the drummer forestalled her. "I know one little thing that tells me all, no matter what you admit or deny."
Strawbridge looked at her.
"What's that?"
"I refer to...." She wagged her head vaguely and looked at the American with narrowed and disapproving eyes.
"What are you talking about, Doña Consolacion?"
"I was down at the riverside on the night when the soldiers flung the body of the dead man into the water."
The salesman stared at her, with his brows drawn in a faint frown.
"Well ... what of that?"
"Oh, what of that! I was at the riverside just below thepalacio, Señor Strawbridge, where the white boat lay. I went down because the Cock told me I could find some driftwood there, and I had no money to buy charcoal...."
The phrase "white boat" moved some memory that was battened down in Strawbridge's heart. It gave him a ghastly sensation, as if an arm were reaching out of a grave. And there was something disconcerting in the rancor in the crone's voice, in the circumstantiality with which she began her account. He stood looking at her, wondering and rather fearing what she was about to say.
"What's the point to this?" he hesitated at last. "What if you were at the river—under thepalacio?"
The charwoman found enough spirit to shrug.
"No matter how grand your final object may be, señor, I think that was going a little too far. There are certain things a Spanishcaballerowill not do, señor—no, not though he gain all Venezuela by it!"
The drummer took a step nearer the old woman, and looked hard at her.
"Look here, Consolacion," he uttered in a strained voice, "what—in—the—hell—are—you—talking—about?"
The ancient shrugged again, and the nostrils of her hatchety old nose dilated momentarily, then she burst out:
"Dios mio!I am talking about the señora, poor Doña Dolores, whom I found down there—poor lamb!—frightened almost to death, and weeping. She started to fly as I came up, but I called to her and she knew I was a woman...."
A horripilation went over Strawbridge. He clutched the old creature's arm.
"The señora!" he whispered, staring with distended eyes. "My God! you can't mean Dolores was down there that night, on the river!"
The hag broke into sardonic, clacking laughter.
"No, you didn't know that! You didn't know you had a poor frightened girl go down to the river bank and wait and pray for your coming until it grew so light she was forced back into thepalacio! No, you didn't know that! Oh, to be sure, I explained to her your plans. I told her that she was just a tiny little part; that you had killed my grandnephew and my grandson, and now for some reason you had flung her down in the river mud, like an old rag—you, and your great plans!"
The old crone's tirade seemed to break loose something hot and seething in Strawbridge's brain. The enormity of his delinquence, the pitifulness of the girl, the rapture which might have been his! His legs shook so that he caught at the effigy of the Blessed Virgin. But all that remained of his mutilated hand were two fingers. These gave way instantly, he staggered against the wooden figure, and the thing swung slowly over and crashed on the tiles.
The ancient shifted from the dowager back to the servant again.
"Look! Look!" she squealed. "Oh, look what you've done! You've broken her head!"
The American neither saw nor heard the fall of the effigy.
"But, señora," he stuttered, with a salty taste in his mouth, "he ... he told me ... Father Benicio told me that she ... she had gone to a convent!"
The hag came out of her servant's concern for the statue and fell to lashing again:
"A priest told you!Diantre!You believed a priest in a case like that! Poor little dove! She did join the sisterhood, Señor Strawbridge, but it was on the afternoon after your cruel desertion of her. What else could she do—poor little dove!"
With legs that shook and hands that clutched at nothing, Strawbridge got out of the image room into the cathedral. He screwed himself to sufficient self-control to be silent as he shivered along the aisles, peering into every chapel and niche for Father Benicio. He raged internally, thinking what he would do to Father Benicio. He syncopated his thoughts with clenching of fists, spreading of nostrils, and muttered blasphemies. When he found the priest, he would throttle him, beat his shaven head on the stone flags. Vibrations of wrath shook through his chest and belly.
He made the entire round of both aisles, and then turned automatically into the priests' house. Opening a door, he stepped quickly into the big room with the latticed side. He glanced about with a beating heart and saw it was empty. He got to the entrance of the bishop's room and looked in. Only the Christ on the cross, and the darkened pictures of former bishops looked down on him. The drummer turned and set out up the narrow passage, to search among the cubicles.
At that moment a loud ringing of the gong at the outer door caught his attention. It came in a succession of three clangorous peals, loud and imperative. It suggested an interruption and sent Strawbridge trotting up the passage, looking hurriedly into each cubicle. All were as obviously empty as a cigar box. Some smelled of burned candles, one of medicine, one or two of stale bedding. The only difference between them was in odor.
The doorbell clanged again, three times. Then it suddenly occurred to Strawbridge that this might be Father Benicio, asking entrance. The thought sent him flying to the door, with titillating nerves. He began whispering through his dry mouth:
"Good God, let it be that devil Benicio!"
He stepped into the entrance and closed the inner shutter behind him. At that moment the gong filled the closed passageway with a great uproar. It was imperative, excited, and held the prolonged clangor of a visitor who is at the end of his patience.
The drummer rushed to the door and laid noiseless hands on the bolts. He had a sensation of immense strength. He wanted not to frighten the priest, but to let him come unwarned into his grip. Not until Strawbridge set about drawing the bolts did he remember that he had but one hand. A thought flickered in his head that he might need his automatic, but it was gone almost instantly.
The bars were hot. He could feel the heat, reflected by the panels, of the sunshine outside. With a painful surge of expectancy he swung open the outer shutters. In the dazzle of sunshine stood a figure who the drummer could see was not Father Benicio. His murderous impulse had been so sure of the priest, that he stood batting his eyes in the glare, when he heard an excited voice gasp:
"Gracias á Dios!it's you, Señor Strawbridge!Diantre!I thought I would never get you! But—caramba!—you know it already! Look, look, Esteban, how white his face is, and how bloodshot his eyes! We were two great fools, Esteban, to imagine we could tellel señoranything!"
A second figure stepped in front of the door-casing and shrugged.
"Naturalmente, Lubito, ifel Señor Generalordered these boats up here, he knew when they were coming."
"But what shall we do,mi General?" demanded the bull-fighter, excitedly. "Are you ready for us peons! Just a word, and we will flame up like a bonfire!" The torero made a swift upward gesture.
Such ejaculations and questions were enough to seize part of the attention of the homicidal drummer.
"What are you talking about!... Boats ... men ... peons!"
"Demonio!" roared Lubito, in admiration. "Is he not as deep as the devil's pit, Esteban! What are we talking about?Pues, mi General, we are talking about your men and your boats, your guns; they are below the rapids. They are gathering in from God knows where. When we saw them coming, Esteban and I came running here as fast as our legs would carry us, to know when you wanted us, here in Canalejos, to strike. Is it now? Is this the day? Shall we set fire to hell now? How is it,mi General? Now?"
The bull-fighter's cries vibrated with a curious edge. He whipped out an imaginary sword and saluted, tossing up his head and knot of hair.
"What part of Canalejos do we sack first! Send me where there are plenty of women!"
Esteban, with his stupid peon face, stood nodding.
"And me ... send me where I can find Madruja,mi General."
By this time Strawbridge had fathomed what had set off the imaginations of his self-appointed henchmen. He made a heavy gesture.
"That isn't my flotilla. It's the dictator's boats, come up from Rio at last." He stood staring at his two followers, with a new and profound depression coming over him. "So this is the end of it! This is the end of everything!" A great sigh burst from him. He struck his palm miserablyagainst his breast. "Oh, Good God! Well, I'm ready to go."
He stumbled out of the priests' house. Each of the bewildered peons took one of his arms, and the three men set out around the buttresses of the cathedral and the adobe lean-tos, toward the terrain of the river. The pain of a complete and final leave-taking of Dolores was upon Strawbridge. The peons had not the least notion of the cause of their master's despair.
"But,mi General," demurred Lubito, uncertainly, "there are too many canoes for the trading party; the river is black with them.Caramba!if they are not your men—"
"Es verdad, Señor mi General," put in Esteban. "There are too many—"
The peon's words were interrupted by a sharp, crashing blow from the direction of the river. It smote the ear-drums of the three men terrifically, and was followed by an abrupt silence. It was a cannon-shot. At the moment the three men trotted around the last obscuring adobe that stuck to the cathedral. On La Fortuna they saw a puff of smoke dissolving into air, and far down below the rapids they saw a crawling of men from a multitude of canoes—so far away that they looked like insects. Among these insect lines forming on the shore, Strawbridge caught the gleam of a banner.
The cannon on La Fortuna crashed again. Soldiers went marching out of the fort, toward the foot of the rapids. They went down the terrain of the river at a double-quick.
A feeling of movement and stir spread over the city. Almost before Strawbridge knew it, the whole terrain on which he stood was covered with denizens of the adobes. The Cock came out, peered through the sunshine, then darted back into his inky hut and reappeared with an extraordinary single-barreled, muzzle-loading pistol and a dagger. Men andwomen came running out of the plaza, to the riverside, for a view.
Lubito clutched the drummer's arm.
"You see,mi General, it is your men attacking. What shall I do? Gather up my men and advance?"
Some obscure cerebration caused Strawbridge to answer, "No, ... no, not now. Wait till we see how this goes!"
The bull-fighter snapped his fingers in admiration.
"Caramba, Esteban!" he cried above the noise of the gathering crowd. "What calmness! This is the strategy of a Napoleon!"
By this time the gun on La Fortuna was firing regularly, and far down the river, among the insects, little plumes of smoke showed where the shells were bursting.
Strawbridge left the river bank and made his way through the crowd, toward the plaza. He was filled with a rising anxiety for the señora. He wondered where she was, to what convent she had retired. He supposed that she would be safe, but she would surely be frightened. The drummer went hurrying eastward through a smallcalle, glancing to right and to left, half expecting to see the señora's face at some barred window.
Along the thoroughfares natives were darting about, salvaging their household goods as if from a fire. Women and children, with burdens on their backs, turned out into the streets and went hurrying along, urged by the groaning of cannon and an occasional dry rattle of musketry.
This continued from street to street, and by the time the drummer reached the plaza, the square was already crowded with fugitives, all of whom were flowing westward, past the palace and the state buildings, toward the outskirts of town and the llanos. The mass moved slowly and in great disorder. Mules and donkeys went past, laden with household goods; carts containing food,mosquiteros, calabashes, invalidedpersons. Pedestrians struggled along under huge bundles done up in ponchos; old women carried their belongings twisted up in their skirts, with their bare legs and feet exposed. It was an astonishing, frantic procession, with every one struggling, pushing, cursing unfortunates who could not move quickly. Perched on top of many a bundle rode pet game-cocks. The shrill crowing of these fowls added a curious stridor to the turmoil of the refugees.
Almost every shop around the plaza was shut now. One or two doors had been forced by looters, and the riffraff of the street eddied into these magazines as if by some law of nature, and streamed out again with their arms filled with spoil.
In the midst of this pillaging and flight, a murmur, which swiftly rose to cries, oaths, and shouts of anguish, came from the direction of the palace. It grew louder and louder, and presently the drummer was aware that the crowd about him was solidifying and surging backward. He tried to find out what was the matter, but in the uproar he could ask nothing. Within the space of a minute he was caught in a dense jam and had to struggle merely to keep his feet. He held his sore hand up, to prevent its being hurt, and tried to push his way in some direction, but men and women were crushing into him on every side. Then, owing to his height, he saw the danger. Down the square the palace guards were coming at a double-quick in the direction of the fighting. The front ranks had leveled their bayonets to force a swift passage through the mob. Before the steel the crowd flung itself back, shrieking in terror and pain. The masses crushed blindly toward the sides of the square, lost their bundles, upset carts, bastinadoed their burros, and flung themselves, in compact masses, away from the line of march.
As the guards plowed down the plaza, Strawbridge felt himself crushed one way, then another; and then suddenlya line of division opened and left him with half a dozen others directly in the middle of the way. He was in a narrow alley through which the bayonets were double-quicking. He had that terrible sensation of being unable to move in either direction. He stood dodging in a mad contra-dance, then he seemed lost; he dashed to one side and tried to press his body into a solid wall of flesh. He might as well have tried to sink into a bank of rubber. He stood out; he was still exposed. The bristle of bayonets was right on him. He made a last convulsive effort to merge himself, when an arm thrust out of the mass, hooked about his waist, and from some leverage, pried the American into a niche at the very moment the bayonets skimmed smoothly past.
The crush stood perfectly immobile as the rifles went by. A sweat broke out on Strawbridge. He twisted his head to look at the palace guards. Only a few days before, they had been little better than servants who fetched and carried for him; now, at a cannon-shot, at a volley of firearms, they had formed a machine which, accidentally, almost casually, had transfixed him.
The moment the soldiers were past, the crowd filled thecalleagain, struggling with greater violence than ever. A voice shouted in Strawbridge's ear:
"Where are you trying to go?"
Strawbridge looked about and saw a bearded and somewhat familiar face. It belonged to the man who had wedged him into the crowd. Then the drummer recognized him as Dr. Delgoa, the minister of war, whom he had seen once or twice at the palace. The doctor's face had a strained look, and now in the press he still held Strawbridge's arm, perhaps with an idea of directing the drummer's steps.
"I wasn't going anywhere, specially," shouted the American. "Trying to find out what's the trouble."
The doctor shook his head.
"Diantre!This is terrible! Come with me; I am going to thepalacio. Here! Let's get into this side street. This crush!" These exclamations were jogged out of him as he edged his body into this and that aperture. He made way for the drummer, who followed him body to body, and at last succeeded in pushing himself into the mouth of a stinking little sidecalle.
In this place the crowd dwindled to small groups and single pedestrians who hurried back and forth with ant-like aimlessness. Dr. Delgoa rested a moment. He wore a high hat; now he took it off, drew out a silk handkerchief, and mopped his face and hair. Somehow he had managed to preserve his silk hat; his black frock-coat and his pearl-gray trousers were unrumpled despite his struggle.
"We'll have to get away from here!" he said in a breath. "Thiscallewill be untenable in thirty minutes.... The machine-guns...." He started walking along thecalle, with the stragglers. "Caramba!I wish I knew which way the cat'll jump," he puffed, drying his hatband as he went. "One never knows what to do. I left my wife at home. Of course the telephones have been seized, and I can't talk to her. Where are you going, Señor Strawbridge?" He had evidently forgotten the drummer's answer to this same question a minute or two before.
"I'm trying to find out what caused this." The American looked back and listened to the inarticulate roar of the mob thundering in the tympanum of the narrow street.
Dr. Delgoa started to explain, but at that moment out of a back door of a shop bundled an old woman with a great pile of fiber hammocks. The men collided with her. The old creature spat invectives. She twisted about, saw who had struck her, and became more furious.
"It's that thief Delgoa! That bloodsucker Delgoa! May a ray of God blast your entrails! You stole every centavomy shop could earn, you and your cursed police! May you be bayoneted through the liver!"
Her anathemas were finally lost in the uproar. They struck coldly on the drummer's nerves in so perilous a situation, but Delgoa paid no attention to her. He began shaking his head, with his distressed look.
"If a man could only tell which way it is going to go."
"Who is it fighting us?" called Strawbridge. "Have the federal forces suddenly got up here?"
Delgoa looked around at him, rather surprised.
"No, it's Saturnino."
Strawbridge stared, thunderstruck.
"Saturnino—fighting us!"
"Yes, yes. Been brewing a long time. Very ambitious man. Heretofore the general has handled him somehow, through the influence of the general's wife. Now I understand she has entered a convent, and of course—" the Minister made a hopeless gesture—"of course that unchained hell."
A wide dismay suddenly swept over the drummer. He felt that he and all the people in Canalejos were caught like flies in the web of Coronel Saturnino's endless calculations. He knew that back there, in San Geronimo, the colonel had worked out, night after night, precisely how he would conquer this point and that redoubt; how many men it would require to take that coign of vantage, and so on, step after step, all the way to his goal.
Suddenly the drummer turned to the minister.
"Why didn't Fombombo throw the colonel into prison years ago?"
Dr. Delgoa looked at him, his mind evidently coming back from some painful abstraction.
"Oh, yes.... He couldn't. Saturnino has always beena favorite with the army. Besides, the general needed a tactician.Diablo!I wish the general had kept his wife in thepalacio!"
By this time the two men had come to the mouth of the little side street, where it emptied into the main thoroughfare opposite the palace. Delgoa held out an arm to warn the drummer, then advanced carefully to the limit of the protecting walls and peered down the plaza. The place was a litter of scattered goods and broken carts. Here and there a human figure darted across the wreckage, making for some place of safety. The crowd had struggled past and were gone.
Just across the street the doors of the palace stood open. Four soldiers were posted by each shutter, whose duty, evidently, was to close the building at a moment's notice. On top of the palace roof were lined a number of guards, and in the machicolations above the architrave shone the muzzles of some rapid-fire guns.
Dr. Delgoa stood in thecalle, peering at the scene before him and listening with all his ears. He said to Strawbridge in an apprehensive voice:
"The cannonading at La Fortuna has stopped."
The drummer listened. It was true, but he had not observed the fact, under the ceaseless tearing sound of the small arms, which was growing louder and louder. It sounded somewhat like an approaching storm. Delgoa waved a hopeless hand.
"Dios mio!which way will this battle go!Canastre!this deciding for your life, your property and your family!" With a tortured face he turned to Strawbridge. "Just think, if I fail to guess the victor just once, I go into La Fortuna, my property confiscated, and my wife...." He snapped his fingers and flung out his hands.
Such frank opportunism amazed the American.
"Why—damn it, man!—stick to the side you think is right!"
"Right!Right!" Delgoa laughed in a very access of irony. "My dearamigo, I am a politician. I have nothing to do with—" He interrupted himself to listen to the increased ripping and tearing of the gun fire; then, with his head cocked sidewise, he looked steadily at Strawbridge and whispered, "I believe Saturnino is winning...."
The drummer was outraged.
"Well—by God!—between the two I stand by the general!"
"But look yonder!" The minister pointed down the plaza. "Yonder are the guards falling back!"
At that moment a flurry of men that looked like leaves before a wind, whirled out of a street into the plaza and instantly settled into every niche and crevice they could find. Almost immediately came another whirl of men, falling back behind every makeshift ambuscade. The minister gripped the American's arm.
"Your general is losing; we are going to change dictators!"
The American burst out in profanity:
"I don't give a damn! I've always been against Saturnino! He's nothing but a rascal, a damn clever rascal! Hasn't got a principle in him!" The drummer shook off the doctor's arm, and next moment darted out of his covert, toward the long flight of steps at the entrance of the palace.
The big American's flight might have been the signal for the whole regiment of palace guards to retreat headlong toward thepresidencia. Immediately a company of insurgents deployed into the square, and knelt to fire. Even in the drummer's short sprint across thecalle, the attackers discharged a volley. The crash, pent up between the houses, roared down thecalle, and a shower of leaves and twigs fell from the ornamental greenery in the plaza. Stone flakesleaped from the façade of the palace; spots of dust floated up into the air along thecalle; the air was filled with a whining. Here and there a flying guard stumbled in the plaza; two or three of the less severely wounded went crawling on their hands and knees toward the side streets, to escape the steel storm. Strawbridge dashed up the long flight of steps and was hardly inside the recessed doors when the van of the retreating guard began to pour up the steps into the building.
The moment the drummer entered the palace he stepped into quietude and order. The heavy walls reduced the rifle fire in the streets to a mere popping. Along the passage were stationed several officers, who directed the returning soldiers to march back into the building, toward some objective unknown to the American. One or two of the officers recognized Strawbridge and saluted as he entered.
An odd feeling of home-coming visited the salesman as he stood near the entrance. His painful week at the priests' house seemed to have dropped out of his life. It seemed to him that the señora was still in the music-room, that he might walk back, tap, and have her come to the door.
Bullets were now snapping regularly at the stone façade. They reminded Strawbridge of the first scattering drops of rain at the beginning of a summer shower. Another batch of soldiers came running up the long steps. One of them even laughed, and waved his cap to some one on the roof, when at that moment he fell forward and lay twisting on the sharp comers of the stone steps. Suddenly the drummer saw that it was Pambo, the little brown guard who had nursed him through his illness. His comrades had left him on the steps. An impulse sent the drummer leaping down three steps at a time through the whining air. He seized Pambo in his arms and came back up. The little soldier recognized the American, for he gasped out, "Cá!Señor Americano, tellJuana...." Then he began bending his body backward, thrusting out his chest in an effort for breath. When Strawbridge laid him on the floor, he continued these convulsive movements, bowing up his torso, his mouth open, gasping, and his eyes staring.
The next moment the officer nearest the door looked out and gave a command, and the four soldiers swung shut the heavy metal doors. Instantly the hall was blanketed to silence. The only sounds were the footsteps of the guards walking briskly to the rear of the building and the clinking of balls striking the doors of the palace.
The drummer fell in with the last soldiers who went down the hallway. Along the sides of the passage hung the dark portraits of former dictators, men who had usurped and lost power, and who had been done to death in just such another eruption as now raged outside. With a beating heart the drummer hurried past these ironic pictures.
He meant to fight for General Fombombo. Why? He did not know. Perhaps it was because of the order for rifles. Perhaps because he sensed in the arbitrary general something finer than what he found in the cynical colonel. Or, more likely, it was the result of the salesman's discovery that Saturnino was a lover of Dolores; the general was only her husband. Strawbridge fell in with the soldiers.
The recruits turned in at a side door of the passageway, and this gave upon a flight of stairs that led to the roof. Guards were pouring up and down this staircase; the upward-bound were laden with ammunition boxes; the down-bound were empty-handed. This was the general's ammunition, hoist from some donjon in the palace.
The moment Strawbridge stepped into the stairway a din of firing and shouting broke upon his ears. The salesman ran up the steps beside one burden-bearer. As they emerged on the roof, one of the soldiers reached over and jerked thebig American down to a stooping posture. Everybody was stooping. The palace guards crouched and sprawled inside the waist-high wall that surrounded the roof, and fired through the machicolations. Stationed here and there among the riflemen were machine-guns. Each gun was handled by two men. Now and then one of these guns would break into a hard yammering, then abruptly cease. The riflemen were firing in the same careful way. They sighted and fired with murderous concentration. Like all Latin-American revolutionists, they never used volley-firing in the hope of making a hit. Every bullet was aimed at somebody.
A dead man or two and a few wounded men were scattered over the tiled roof. Stone splinters snapped out of the merlons from adverse gun fire. The smell of smokeless powder filled the air with a headache-y quality. The drummer saw a rifle and a bandolier of cartridges beside a motionless figure. He crawled to it and salvaged the gun. He got to the wall and settled himself beside an aperture, in line with the whole wallful of reclining riflemen.
Peering out between his merlons, he found himself looking into the westering sun. Saturnino had flung his forces on top of the houses directly west of the palace. This screened his men in the yellow glow of the declining sun. The whole outline of the opposite buildings was an indistinct purple. The drummer stared fixedly at this purple outline, then he thought he glimpsed a movement. He leveled his gun and fired. At the same moment a machine-gun near him began a sudden chattering. Just where the drummer had seen a movement, the black figure of a man lurched up against the yellow light and disappeared backward.
A thrill of triumph shot through Strawbridge. He thought he had hit his man. He lifted himself for a good look and another shot, when a bullet flicked a bit of stone out of his merlon and cut his forehead just over his eye. The salesmandodged down, put up his fingers to the sting, and saw that he was bleeding a little. It made him angry, and he fired his rifle viciously several times at the blank purple rim of the opposite wall.
At that moment a hand was laid on his shoulder. Strawbridge looked around and saw that it was General Fombombo. The dictator was patting his shoulder warmly and encouraging him as a father might encourage the first efforts of a son.
"That's the idea—two or three quick shots, then get down."
The general himself did not keep down so carefully. He seemed sure that he would not be touched, and was careful only of his men. A contagious power surrounded the commander. His hand on Strawbridge's shoulder filled the American with warmth and confidence. He felt a passion to do some striking thing in the general's service. Standing up quite as high as the dictator himself, he suddenly cried out:
"Look! Yonder are some fellows down on the street level! Watch me get—"
The general pressed him down.
"Guard yourself," he ordered; "you are too valuable to be in this firing-line. You must go to New York for me. Report to the magazine and help send up ammunition. Descend quickly, señor!"
The drummer was about to crawl off toward the manhole, when abruptly the whole rank of rapid-fire guns began a steady shrieking. At the same moment half the riflemen reared up to shoot at something on the street level. As they did so came a cracking from the opposite building. The guards fell backward from their barricade, some wounded, some finished. Perhaps half remained standing, firing solid volleys down into the street.
Fombombo bellowed for the riflemen to remain down andlet the machine-guns clean the streets. The big man's roars seemed to fling the soldiers back into their niches. The machine-gunners, with their steel shields protecting them, depressed their guns and began a vibratory screaming at something below.
Strawbridge, with a nervous spasm in his throat, peered through a machicolation. Out from behind the nearest building came a swarm of ghastly scarlet figures armed with heavy timbers. The machine-guns whipped thecalleabout them. Groups of the ragged red specters were struck to the ground about the timbers, but others of the rabble leaped to their places. They were the "reds." Saturnino had collected these wretches from the canal camps all over the survey, and now flung them at the dictator. There was something sickening in the charge of the "reds" across thecalle. The machine-guns could not beat them back. They sowed the street with filthy red canvas bags; but still they came on and rushed their timbers under the overhang of the building, where the machine-guns could not reach them.
The drummer turned and scuttled toward the manhole. As he straightened and went flying down the steps, he heard a great booming echoing through the palace.
It was the "reds" thundering with their wooden rams against the doors of the building. When Strawbridge got below, the whole palace shook with the blows. All the inner doors along the central hallway stood open, and soldiers darted in and out of the rooms to fire through the windows. Rifle-shots roared through the place, and the stinking haze of smokeless powder floated out into the corridor through the tops of the doors and settled against the roof.
Some impulse sent Strawbridge running to the señora's room. As he dodged inside, he saw two groups of soldiers crouched in the corners and raking the windows with their fire. Some of their bullets bit pieces out of the iron windowbars. At regular intervals the end of a heavy beam crashed against the bars and slowly bent the heavy grille inward. One by one the anchorages in the stone casing broke loose.
The two squads of peon soldiers were barricaded behind delicate dressing-tables and exquisitely wrought chairs; half a dozen guards knelt behind a canopied four-poster. Their rifles were leveled across an embroidered silk coverlet. Everything in the room still looked incongruously feminine, even with men firing across it and a dead soldier sprawled on a couch. Now and then a bullet drilled a neat hole in an old-fashioned thin glass mirror in a dressing-stand. And notwithstanding the sharp stench of powder-gas, still a faint feminine sweetness lingered in the señora's apartment, a gentle wraith that would not be exorcised.
Abruptly the whole of the bending bars broke loose and clanged down inside. Instantly the window was filled with crashing rifles. The concussion tore the drummer's ear-drums as he crouched behind the massive bed. Guards crumpled up out of both firing-squads. Bottles, brushes, and silver containers on the señora's dressing-table leaped to splinters. The next moment the window was full of the heads and shoulders of men, struggling to climb inside. They were the most ghastly human beings the drummer had ever imagined.
The few guards left in the room fired point-blank into these terrible creatures. Strawbridge caught up a gun and was on the point of firing. He was aiming down the barrel at a skull-like head when he recognized the tortured features and the burning monkey eyes of Josefa.
Such a revulsion swept over the American at the semblance of the little clerk that he dropped his rifle and crouched behind the silken bed. The prisoners in La Fortuna had been released. The mere horror of their faces must have shocked the remnant of the guard into flight. Those who wereunwounded leaped from hiding and bolted for the door, shouting above the din, "Los presos!The prisoners are upon us! La Fortuna has fallen!" They rushed pell-mell into the hallway, still shouting their warning until their voices were lost in the din.
Strawbridge stared at these animated cadavers. Whether they recognized and spared him as an American, or whether they overlooked him among the wounded and dead, he never knew. The disinterred wretches streamed past, with unshaven faces, with yellow skins sticking to the very bones of their skulls, with eyes lost in bony pits, with lips stretched across teeth in wrinkles. Their clothes were torn filth and sores. Into the boudoir with them gushed the smell of rotting flesh and latrines. This was the very dung of Venezuelan society; it was the cesspool of the prison regurgitating into the palace; it was human sewage flowing backward. It was inexpressibly obscene.
Nausea overcome Strawbridge; yet as they passed into the hallway he struggled up and followed them. The corridor was a haze filled with flashing rifles. Out of half a dozen rooms poured other assailants, who had succeeded in breaking through the windows—other prisoners, other "reds," other insurgent soldiers, all mixed in the maddest confusion. They collected themselves under some leader; they formed themselves into a regiment and then went pouring through the doorway onto the staircase leading to the roof.
The drummer stood watching the scarecrow fighters as if hypnotized. He watched them swirl into the passage that led above. Suddenly, above the tumult, he heard the hard, shuddering reports of the machine-guns. A storm of steel burst down on the ghastly assailants, bearing them backward: the skeleton regiment recoiled, bent low, and started climbing again, struggling up over their fallen comrades straight into the muzzles of the guns. Ghastly croaking shouts; thin,rattling huzzas; the clatter of the guns; the reek of ordure and sores; the inferno roared on. The rattle of the machine-guns was dwindling. Strawbridge heard hoarse coughing cries: "Down with Fombombo! There he is! Strike him! Stab! Shoot! Here he is, over with him!" The drummer wondered what thoughts burned through the dictator's mind as he faced his horrible enemies. The cesspool of the prison had belched back, clear up to the roof of the palace, and General Fombombo was inundated.
Strawbridge was deathly sick. He tottered back to the boudoir and clambered out at the broken window, unopposed. Assailants no longer encircled the palace; they had drained inside. The tumult on the roof was rapidly subsiding. Here and there cries of "VivaSaturnino!" began to sound. Presently a few soldiers came running out of the palace, waving their rifles and shouting, "VivaSaturnino!"
VivaSaturnino! The battle was over.
News of the victory spread through the plaza and the adjoining streets with extraordinary swiftness. Strawbridge could hear cries for Saturnino as they were repeated in every direction—near, far, now from all parts at once—"VivaSaturnino!"
By common concert men and women appeared, coming in from every direction. Crowds might have formed out of the air. They came shouting and huzzaing for victory. They took up the cry, "Liberty! Justice and Saturnino!"
A group of peons began dancing in the evening shadows which fell across the plaza. Some tatterdemalions ran with ropes, lassoed the head of General Fombombo's statue, and began pulling it from its pedestal. The marble seemed to resist. It held out its scroll bearing "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," but at last it swung slowly outward and smashed down on the pavement.
At its fall a ferocious joy-making boiled up in the crowd. Some one lighted a fire in the center of the square, and immediately every one flung the litter from the refugees upon the pyre—broken carts, smashed furniture, rags, all manner of waste. The fire boiled up in a great white smoke, and presently flames began licking through it. The revelers began to sing; half a dozen voices, a score, others and others, until a great sounding chorus roared up from the plaza. Some rimester had improvised the words: