The alférez gave the order to start.
“Coward!” cried a woman, as the cart moved off. “While the others fought, you were in hiding! Coward!”
“Curses on you!” cried an old man, running after. “Cursed be the gold heaped up by your family to take away our peace. Accurst! accurst!”
“May you be hung, heretic!” cried a woman, picking up a stone and throwing it after him. Her example was promptly followed, and a shower of dust and pebbles beat against the unhappy man. Crisóstomo bore this injustice without a sign. It was the farewell of his beloved country. He bent his head and sat motionless. Perhaps he was thinking of a man beaten in the pueblo streets; perhaps of the body of a girl, washed up by the waves.
The alférez felt obliged to drive away the crowd, but stones did not cease to fall, nor insult to sound. One mother only did not curse Ibarra; the Capitana Maria watched her sons go, with compressed lips and eyes full of silent tears.
Of all the people in the open windows as he passed, none but the indifferent and curious showed Ibarra the least compassion. All his friends had deserted him, even Captain Basilio, who had forbidden Sinang to weep. When Crisóstomo passed the smoking ruins of his home, that home where he was born, and spent his happy childhood and youth, the tears, long repressed, gushed from his eyes, and bound as he was, he had to experience the bitterness of showing a grief that could not rouse the slightest sympathy.
From a hill, an old man, pale and thin, wrapped in a mantle, and leaning on a stick, watched the sad procession. At the news of what had happened, old Tasio had left his bed, and tried to go to the pueblo, but his strength had failed him. He followed the cart with his eyes, until it disappeared in the distance. Then, after resting a while in thought, he got up painfully, and started toward his home, halting for breath at almost every step. The next day some shepherds found him dead under the shadow of his solitary house.