The most active of the candidates was Dr. Ortigosa.
Ortigosa was a narrow-minded, tenacious man. His chief hatred was for Catholicism and he directed all his attacks at the religion of his forefathers, as he ironically termed it.
He had founded a Masonic lodge, named the “Microbe,” and whose principal characteristic was anti-Catholicism.
Ortigosa carried his propaganda everywhere. He stopped at every corner to speechify, to talk of his plans.
Cæsar used his motor-car to go about among the villages in the district. They would go to four or five and talk from balconies, or very often from the car, like itinerant patent-medicine venders.
In the little villages these reunions produced a great effect. What was said served as a topic of conversation for a month.
Cæsar had developed a clear, insinuating eloquence. He knew how to explain things admirably. Padilla’s followers were not asleep; but, as was natural, they took up the work in another way. They went from shop to shop, making the shopkeepers see the harmfulness of the Moncadist politics, promising them advantages. They threatened workmen with dismissal. There was no great enthusiasm; their campaign was less noisy, but, in part more certain.
All the Liberal element of Castro was wrought up, from the temperate Liberals, who remembered Espartero, to the Anarchists. “Whiskers” and “Furibis” were the only ones who got together in a tavern to talk about bombs and dynamite, and one could be sure that neither of them was capable of anything. Those two had nothing more to do with Ortigosa, considering him a deserter.
“You are imbeciles,” the doctor told them, with his habitual fury. “This fight is waking the people up. They are beginning to show their instincts, and that makes a man strong. The longer and more violent this fight is, the better; progress will be so much quicker.”
“Agitation, agitation is what we need,” cried the doctor; and he himself was as agitated as a man condemned.