. He reported only what had been registered on the
sensitive tympanums of his ears, to the last whisper of footfalls
stealing past the dark wall of the shop. Of all the formless tangle
of thoughts, suspicions, interpretations, and the special and
personal knowledge given to the blind which moved in his brain, he
said nothing.

He shut his lips there. He felt himself on the defensive. Just as he
distrusted the higher ramifications of finance (his house had gone
down uninsured), so before the rites and processes of that
inscrutable creature, the Law, he felt himself menaced by the
invisible and the unknown, helpless, oppressed; in an abject sense,
skeptical.

"Keep clear of the Law!" they had told him in his youth. The monster
his imagination had summoned up then still stood beside him in his
age.

Having exhausted his monosyllabic and superficial evidence, they
could move him no farther. He became deaf and dumb. He sat before
them, an image cast in some immensely heavy stuff, inanimate. His
lack of visible emotion impressed them. Remembering his exuberance,
it was only the stranger to see him unmoving and unmoved. Only once
did they catch sight of something beyond. As they were preparing to
leave he opened his mouth. What he said was like a swan-song to the
years of his exuberant happiness. Even now there was no colour of
expression in his words, which sounded mechanical.

"Now I have lost everything. My house. My last son. Even my honour.
You would not think I would like to live. But I go to live. I go to
work. That _cachorra_, one day he shall come back again, in the dark
night, to have a look. I shall go to show you all. That _cachorra_!"

(And from that time on, it was noted, he never referred to the
fugitive by any other name than _cachorra_, which is a kind of dog.
"That _cachorra_!" As if he had forfeited the relationship not only
of the family, but of the very genus, the very race! "That _cachorra_!")

He pronounced this resolution without passion. When they assured him
that the culprit would come back again indeed, much sooner than he
expected, "with a rope around his neck," he shook his head slowly.

"No, you shall not catch that _cachorra_ now. But one day--"

There was something about its very colourlessness which made it
sound oracular. It was at least prophetic. They searched, laid their
traps, proceeded with all their placards, descriptions, rewards,
clues, trails. But on Manuel Negro they never