"If a man could only tell which way it is going to go."
"Who is it fighting us?" called Strawbridge. "Have the federal forces suddenly got up here?"
Delgoa looked around at him, rather surprised.
"No, it's Saturnino."
Strawbridge stared, thunderstruck.
"Saturnino—fighting us!"
"Yes, yes. Been brewing a long time. Very ambitious man. Heretofore the general has handled him somehow, through the influence of the general's wife. Now I understand she has entered a convent, and of course—" the Minister made a hopeless gesture—"of course that unchained hell."
A wide dismay suddenly swept over the drummer. He felt that he and all the people in Canalejos were caught like flies in the web of Coronel Saturnino's endless calculations. He knew that back there, in San Geronimo, the colonel had worked out, night after night, precisely how he would conquer this point and that redoubt; how many men it would require to take that coign of vantage, and so on, step after step, all the way to his goal.
Suddenly the drummer turned to the minister.
"Why didn't Fombombo throw the colonel into prison years ago?"