The church was of a Renaissance model, with rounded windows high up in the walls, and a ceiling painted with simpering ladies in clothes like rolls of blue smoke. All the sacred symbols had been wrenched or cut away from the decorations. A big coloured print of Don Lopez stood in a gilt frame over the altar. It represented him in evening dress with a red sash across his shirt. It had a dreadful likeness to a pig whose throat had been cut. Under him in gilt letters was the legend:
Liberty from Superstition.
There were about a hundred men, women and children of the suspected imprisoned there: most of them were stunned, some were terrified: one or two, like the young girl, hysterical. What shocked Hi was the atmosphere of suspicion: all there were afraid that the next person was a spy. They looked at each other, but hardly spoke, hardly even whispered. They watched the shot man die and the fevered man shake, without interest and without help: I was I, he was he; self was become terribly important, and sympathy a dangerous thing.
“They’ve been through the mill, these people,” the American said.
“How do you know the Whites will be here this afternoon?” Hi asked him.
“Cut it right out, son,” the American said. “I’ve been through one of these picnics once before here. This place is plum full of spies. You’d best not talk.”
“But do you know if the Reds have killed anyone here?”
“Killed? I dunno. I guess they won’t kill till they see which way the weasel pops. If they whip, they’ll rip around. But you stay quiet.”
The advice was good, for even as they talked a man edged a little nearer to them, with the look of the eavesdropper. When he found that the two fell silent, he sidled up to Hi, indicated the portrait over the altar, and said: “Look at that. I call that a dam’ outrage: don’t you?” Something in the look of the man reminded Hi of the brothel-touts who had beset him at the landing stairs before ’Zeke drove them away: it flashed into his mind that this man might be a spy: so he answered, “No, I call it ‘Liberty from Superstition.’ ” The man was puzzled by the answer, but seemed to consider Hi’s youth, and then moved away.
Soon after this, an armed guard appeared at the door, under an officer, who explained that the married couples as well as all women and children there in prison were to be moved “in the interests of morality” to another church, where they would be alone. As some of them expected to be murdered outside the doors, this caused a piteous scene, of screaming and begging for mercy, but by persuasion and force the removal was made. Among those removed, to Hi’s great relief, was the Englishman with the Spanish wife, the pride of the Pinamentes, and their three children.