“A curse on the Church! Amigos! Muchachos!” he bawled, turning to the mob, “we will batter down the doors!”
The crowd surged forward again. But the props held firm. Again and again the mob hurled itself upon the thick doors. They bent, they sagged, but they held. Don Mario became apoplectic. A torrent of anathemas streamed from his thick lips.
“The side door!” some one shouted, recovering a portion of his scant wit.
“Aye––and the door of the sacristía!”
“Try the windows!”
Round the building streamed the crazed mob, without head, without reason, lusting only for the lives of the frightened little band huddled together in the gloom within. Josè kept an arm about Carmen. Ana bent sobbing over her tiny babe. Don Jorge and Rosendo remained mute and grim. Josè knew that those two would cast a long reckoning before they died. Juan and Lázaro went from door to window, steadying the props and making sure that they were holding. The tough, hard, tropical wood, though pierced in places by comjejen ants, was resisting.
The sun was already high, and the plaza had become a furnace. The patience of the mob quickly evaporated in the ardent heat. Don Mario’s wits had gone completely. Revenge, mingled with insensate zeal to manifest the authority which he believed his intercourse with Wenceslas had greatly augmented, had driven all rationality from his motives. Flaming anger had unseated his reason. Descending from the platform on which stood the church, he blindly drew up his armed followers and bade them fire upon the church doors.
If Wenceslas, acting-Bishop by the grace of political machination, could have witnessed the stirring drama then in progress in ancient Simití, he would have laughed aloud at the complete fulfillment of his carefully wrought plans. The cunning of the shrewd, experienced politician had never been more clearly manifested than in the carrying out of the little program which he had set for the unwise Alcalde of this almost unknown little town, whereby the hand of Congress should be forced and the inevitable revolt inaugurated. Don Mario had seized the government arms, the deposition of which in Simití in his care had constituted him more than ever the representative of federal authority. But, in his wild zeal, he had fallen into the trap which Wenceslas had carefully arranged for him, and now was engaged in a mad attack upon the Church itself, upon ecclesiastical authority as vested in the priest Josè. How could Wenceslas interpret this but as an anticlerical uprising? There remained but the final scene. And while the soft-headed dupes and maniacal supporters of Don Mario were 311 hurling bullets into the thick doors of the old church in Simití, Wenceslas sat musing in his comfortable study in the cathedral of Cartagena, waiting with what patience he could command for further reports from Don Mario, whose last letter had informed him that the arrest of the priest Josè and his unfortunate victim, Carmen, was only a few hours off.
When the first shots rang out, and the bullets ploughed into the hard wood of the heavy doors, Josè’s heart sank, and he gave himself up as lost. Lázaro and Juan cowered upon the floor. Carmen crept close to Josè, as he sat limply upon a bench, and put her arms about him.