Fidencio swaggered among his compadres in true manly fashion for a few minutes, interspersing his conversation with loud virile oaths. Then, in a lordly manner, he went straight across the room to Carmencita, placed her left hand within the hollow of his right arm, and cried: "Well, now; let's dance!" and the grinning, perspiring musicians nodded and fell to.
There were five of them—two violins, a cornet, a flute and a harp. They swung into "Tres Piedras," and the couples fell in line, marching solemnly round the room. After parading round twice they fell to dancing, hopping awkwardly over the rough, hard, packed-dirt floor with jingling spurs; when they had danced around the room two or three times they walked again, then danced, then walked, then danced, so that each number took about an hour.
It was a long, low room, with whitewashed walls and a beamed ceiling wattled with mud above, and at one end was the inevitable sewing-machine, closed now, and converted into a sort of an altar by a tiny embroidered cloth upon which burned a perpetual rush flame before a tawdry color print of the Virgin which hung on the wall. Don Priciliano and his wife, who was nursing a baby at her breast, beamed from chairs at the other end. Innumerable candles had been heated on one side and stuck against the wall all around, whence they trailed sooty snakes above them on the white. The men made a prodigious stamping and clinking as they danced, shouting boisterously to one another. The women kept their eyes on the floor and did not speak.
I caught sight of the pimply youth glowering with folded arms upon Fidencio from his corner; and as I stood by the door, fragments of the peons' conversation floated in to me:
"Fidencio should not have stayed away so long."
"Carramba! See the way Pablito scowls there. He thought surely Fidencio was dead and that Carmencita was his own!"
And then a hopeful voice:
"Perhaps there will be trouble!"
The dance finally ended and Fidencio led his betrothed correctly back to her seat against the wall. The music stopped. The men poured out into the night where, in the flare of a torch, the owner of the losing rooster sold bottles of strong drink. We toasted each other boisterously in the sharp dark. The mountains around stood dazzling in the moon. And then, for the intervals between dances were very short, we heard the music erupt again, volcanically and exuberantly, into a waltz. The center of twenty curious and enthusiastic youths—for he had traveled—Fidencio strutted back into the room. He went straight to Carmencita, but as he led her out upon the floor Pablito glided up behind, pulling out a large obsolete revolver. A dozen shouts rang:
"Cuidado, Fidencio! Look out!"