Chapter 5 - Page 2

dawned upon him for the first time.
He remained lying stretched out with rigid limbs under the weight of
two bodies collapsed crosswise upon his back.

By the time the soldiers had fired a third volley into the slightly
stirring heaps of the slain, the sun had gone out of sight, and almost
immediately with the darkening of the ocean dusk fell upon the coasts
of the young Republic. Above the gloom of the lowlands the snowy peaks
of the Cordillera remained luminous and crimson for a long time. The
soldiers before marching back to the fort sat down to smoke.

The sergeant with a naked sword in his hand strolled away by himself
along the heap of the dead. He was a humane man, and watched for any
stir or twitch of limb in the merciful idea of plunging the point of
his blade into any body giving the slightest sign of life. But none of
the bodies afforded him an opportunity for the display of this
charitable intention. Not a muscle twitched amongst them, not even the
powerful muscles of Gaspar Ruiz, who, deluged with the blood of his
neighbours and shamming death, strove to appear more lifeless than the
others.

He was lying face down. The sergeant recognised him by his stature,
and being himself a very small man, looked with envy and contempt at
the prostration of so much strength. He had always disliked that
particular soldier. Moved by an obscure animosity, he inflicted a long
gash across the neck of Gaspar Ruiz, with some vague notion of making
sure of that strong man's death, as if a powerful physique were more
able to resist the bullets. For the sergeant had no doubt that Gaspar
Ruiz had been shot through in many places. Then he passed on, and
shortly afterwards marched off with, his men, leaving the bodies to
the care of crows and vultures.

Gaspar Ruiz had restrained a cry, though it had seemed to him that his
head was cut off at a blow; and when darkness came, shaking off the
dead, whose weight had oppressed him, he crawled away over the plain
on his hands and knees. After drinking deeply, like a wounded beast,
at a shallow stream, he assumed an upright posture, and staggered on
light-headed and aimless, as if lost amongst the stars of the clear
night. A small house seemed to rise out of the ground before him. He
stumbled into the porch and struck at the door with his fist. There
was not a gleam of light. Gaspar Ruiz might have thought that the
inhabitants had fled from it, as from many others in the
neighbourhood, had it not been for the shouts of abuse that answered
his thumping. In his feverish and enfeebled state the angry screaming
seemed to him part of a hallucination belonging to the weird dreamlike
feeling of his unexpected condemnation to death, of the thirst
suffered,