The crowd was not to know why they were stopped. After they had annoyed some hundreds of people with it, the police suddenly removed the barrier and told the people that they might get along out of it. The crowd slowly surged forward among growls of “Keeping us waiting all this time and in the end they didn’t want us. Now we shall be fined a peseta for being late.”
They passed through the city gates, to the open space where the market folk had cheered the Piranhas the day before.
“There is the pier, Hi,” Rosa said. “I can get home through that waste piece, the old graveyard. You go up that gully to the right, to Medinas.”
“All right. Good luck. I’ll fetch Manuel.”
“God bless you, Hi.”
“You, too. My love to your mother. And good luck. And cheer up.”
She nodded, not having more words; she turned out of the stream of workers into the old graveyard of the town and did not look back.
As Hi set off for Medinas, he looked back several times after her, till she had disappeared.
“She’s got some pluck,” he thought. “I don’t think she’ll be stopped now, going that way.”
His own way led through a road which having once been the city ditch, was still a city dump and refuse pit under the walls. On the left hand of the refuse were shacks and sties of wood, for pigs, cows, horses and fowls; though men lived in them, too. The road was an unpaven track in a kind of gulley between the dump and the sheds. It was in a mucky state at that time from the recent rains and the habits of the market people. It stank, it was littered with tins and stalks, rats were rummaging among the garbage, and pariah dogs with the mange were scraping against the sides of the sties. However, no men were abroad in it nor any sign of a patrol. In about twelve minutes he was in Medinas.