"What, your son Pedrito—?"
"Is dead. I am trying to give my friends a cordial welcome, in order the better to feast the entrance into heaven of my poor boy, who, having never sinned, is an angel by the side of God."
"That's very proper," Belhumeur said, hobnobbing with the rather stoical parent.
The latter emptied his glass of refino at a draught, and withdrew. The strangers, by this time accustomed to the atmosphere in which they found themselves, began to look around them. The room of the pulquería offered them a most singular sight.
In the centre some ten individuals, with faces enough to hang them, covered with rags, and armed to the teeth, were furiously playing at monte. It was a strange fact, but one which did not appear to astonish any of the honourable gamblers that a long dagger was stuck in the table to the right of the banker, and two pistols lay on his left. A few steps further on, men and women, more than half intoxicated, were dancing and singing, with lubricious gestures and mad shouts, to the shrill sounds of two or three vihuelas and jarabes. In a corner of the room thirty people were assembled round a table, on which a child, four years of age at the most, was seated in a wicker chair. This child presided over the meeting. He was dressed in his best clothes, had a crown of flowers on his head, and a profusion of nosegays was piled up on the table all round him.
But alas! The child's brow was pale, his eyes glassy, his complexion leaden and marked with violet spots. His body had the peculiar stiffness of a corpse. He was dead. He was the angelito, whose entrance into heaven the worthy pulquero was celebrating.
Men, women and children were drinking and laughing, as they reminded the poor mother, who made heroic efforts not to burst into tears, of the precocious intelligence, goodness and prettiness of the little creature she had just lost.
"All this is hideous," the first traveller muttered, with signs of disgust.
"Is it not so?" the other assented. "Let us not notice it, but isolate ourselves amid these scoundrels, who have already forgotten our presence, and talk."
"Willingly, but unhappily we have nothing to say to each other."