were some sort of
cruel deity. It was incarnated in himself, and his adversaries, the
Federalists, were the supreme sinners, objects of hate, abhorrence, and
fear, as heretics would be to a convinced Inquisitor. For years he had
carried about at the tail of the Army of Pacification, all over the
country, a captive band of such atrocious criminals, who considered
themselves most unfortunate at not having been summarily executed. It
was a diminishing company of nearly naked skeletons, loaded with irons,
covered with dirt, with vermin, with raw wounds, all men of position,
of education, of wealth, who had learned to fight amongst themselves for
scraps of rotten beef thrown to them by soldiers, or to beg a negro
cook for a drink of muddy water in pitiful accents. Don Jose Avellanos,
clanking his chains amongst the others, seemed only to exist in order to
prove how much hunger, pain, degradation, and cruel torture a human
body can stand without parting with the last spark of life. Sometimes
interrogatories, backed by some primitive method of torture, were
administered to them by a commission of officers hastily assembled in a
hut of sticks and branches, and made pitiless by the fear for their own
lives. A lucky one or two of that spectral company of prisoners would
perhaps be led tottering behind a bush to be shot by a file of soldiers.
Always an army chaplain--some unshaven, dirty man, girt with a sword and
with a tiny cross embroidered in white cotton on the left breast of
a lieutenant's uniform--would follow, cigarette in the corner of the
mouth, wooden stool in hand, to hear the confession and give absolution;
for the Citizen Saviour of the Country (Guzman Bento was called thus
officially in petitions) was not averse from the exercise of rational
clemency. The irregular report of the firing squad would be heard,
followed sometimes by a single finishing shot; a little bluish cloud
of smoke would float up above the green bushes, and the Army of
Pacification would move on over the savannas, through the forests,
crossing rivers, invading rural pueblos, devastating the haciendas of
the horrid aristocrats, occupying the inland towns in the fulfilment of
its patriotic mission, and leaving behind a united land wherein the evil
taint of Federalism could no longer be detected in the smoke of burning
houses and the smell of spilt blood. Don Jose Avellanos had survived
that time. Perhaps, when contemptuously signifying to him his rele