An old man squatting against the wall asked me where I came from. I said New York.
"Well," he said, "I don't know anything about New York, but I'll bet you don't see such fine cattle going through the streets as you see in the streets of Jiminez."
"You don't see any cattle in the streets of New York," I said.
He looked at me incredulously. "What, no cattle? You mean to tell me that they don't drive cattle through the streets up there? Or sheep?"
I said they didn't. He looked at me as if he thought I was a great liar; then he cast his eyes on the ground and thought deeply.
"Well," he pronounced finally, "then I don't want to go there!..."
Two skylarking boys started a game of tag; in a minute twenty full-grown men were chasing each other around in great glee. The card players had one short deck of torn cards, and at least eight people were trying to play some game and arguing about the rules at the top of their voices, or perhaps there weren't enough cards to go around. Four or five had crawled into the shade of the house, singing satirical love songs. All this time the steady infernal din up ahead never relented, and the bullets spattered in the dust like rain drops. Occasionally one of the men would slouch over, poke his rifle around the corner and fire....
We stayed there about half an hour. Then two gray cannons came rocketing out of the brush behind and wheeled into position in a dry ditch seventy-five yards away on the left.
"I guess we're going in a minute," said the boy.
At that moment three men galloped up from the rear, evidently officers. They were entirely exposed to rifle fire over the roofs of the huts, but jerked up their horses with the shots yelling all around, contemptuous of them. The first to speak was Fierro, the superb great animal of a man who had murdered Benton.