“Bah! They’d do nothing,” muttered Jesús.
“Why not?”
“Because they wouldn’t. If you were to deprive the rich man of the satisfaction of knowing that while he sleeps another is freezing, and that while he eats another is dying of hunger, you would deprive him of half his pleasure and good fortune.”
“Do you really believe that?” asked Don Alonso, staring in astonishment at Jesús.
“I certainly do. What’s more,—why should we bother with what they may think? They don’t give themselves any concern over us. At this hour they must be sleeping in their clean, soft beds, so peacefully, while we....”
The Snake-Man made a gesture of displeasure; he was vexed that any one should speak ill of the rich.
The sun came out: a disk of red over the black earth. Then carts began to arrive at the Gas Work’s dumping grounds and to dump rubbish and refuse. Here and there in the doorways of the hovels that filled the hollow appeared a woman with a cigar in her mouth.
One night the watchman of Las Injurias discovered the three men in the abandoned shanty and ejected them.
The following days, Manuel and Jesús—the showman had disappeared—decided to go to the Asilo de las Delicias for the night. Neither was at all bent upon finding work. It was already almost a month since they had taken to this tramp’s existence, and between one day at a barracks and the next in a monastery or a shelter, they managed to keep going.
The first time that Jesús and Manuel slept in the Asilo de las Delicias was a March day.