“Deuce take it all!” exclaimed Don Alonso as he stretched himself out. “A fellow has always got to be on the lookout for a place. If I could only be a snail!”
“Why a snail?” queried Jesús.
“If only to get out of paying bills for lodgings.”
“Better times are coming,” promised Manuel, ironically.
“That’s the only hope,” replied the Snake-Man. “By tomorrow our luck may have shifted. You don’t know life. Fate is to man what the wind is to the weathervane.”
“The trouble is,” grumbled Jesús, “that our weathervane, when it isn’t pointing to hunger, is pointing to cold and always to poverty and wretchedness.”
“Things may change tomorrow.”
The trio fell asleep in the lap of these flattering illusions. Manuel awoke at daybreak; the light of the dawn filtered in through the spaces of the wattle that served as roof, and with this pale glow the interior of the Black House assumed a sinister aspect.
They slept in a bunch, rolled up in a ball of rags and newspaper sheets. Some of the men sought out the women in the semi-gloom, and their grunts of pleasure could be heard.
Near Manuel a woman whose features betrayed idiocy as well as physical degeneration, begrimed and garbed in patches, was cradling a child in her arms. She was a beggar, still young,—one of those poor wandering creatures who roam over the road without direction or goal, at the mercy of fate.