Fombombo

by T. S. Stribling

The moment the drummer entered the palace he stepped into quietude and order. The heavy walls reduced the rifle fire in the streets to a mere popping. Along the passage were stationed several officers, who directed the returning soldiers to march back into the building, toward some objective unknown to the American. One or two of the officers recognized Strawbridge and saluted as he entered.

An odd feeling of home-coming visited the salesman as he stood near the entrance. His painful week at the priests' house seemed to have dropped out of his life. It seemed to him that the señora was still in the music-room, that he might walk back, tap, and have her come to the door.

Bullets were now snapping regularly at the stone façade. They reminded Strawbridge of the first scattering drops of rain at the beginning of a summer shower. Another batch of soldiers came running up the long steps. One of them even laughed, and waved his cap to some one on the roof, when at that moment he fell forward and lay twisting on the sharp comers of the stone steps. Suddenly the drummer saw that it was Pambo, the little brown guard who had nursed him through his illness. His comrades had left him on the steps. An impulse sent the drummer leaping down three steps at a time through the whining air. He seized Pambo in his arms and came back up. The little soldier recognized the American, for he gasped out, "Cá! Señor Americano, tell Juana...." Then he began bending his body backward, thrusting out his chest in an effort for breath. When Strawbridge laid him on the floor, he continued these convulsive movements, bowing up his torso, his mouth open, gasping, and his eyes staring.

The next moment the officer nearest the door looked out and gave a command, and the four soldiers swung shut the heavy metal doors. Instantly the hall was blanketed to silence. The only sounds were the footsteps of the guards walking briskly to the rear of the building and the clinking of balls striking the doors of the palace.

The drummer fell in with the last soldiers who went down the hallway. Along the sides of the passage hung the dark portraits of former dictators, men who had usurped and lost power, and who had been done to death in just such another eruption as now raged outside. With a beating heart the drummer hurried past these ironic pictures.

He meant to fight for General Fombombo. Why? He did not know. Perhaps it was because of the order for rifles. Perhaps because he sensed in the arbitrary general something finer than what he found in the cynical colonel. Or, more likely, it was the result of the salesman's discovery that Saturnino was a lover of Dolores; the general was only her husband. Strawbridge fell in with the soldiers.

The recruits turned in at a side door of the passageway, and this gave upon a flight of stairs that led to the roof. Guards were pouring up and down this staircase; the upward-bound were laden with ammunition boxes; the down-bound were empty-handed. This was the general's ammunition, hoist from some donjon in the palace.

The moment Strawbridge stepped into the stairway a din of firing and shouting broke upon his ears. The salesman ran up the steps beside one burden-bearer. As they emerged on the roof, one of the soldiers reached over and jerked the big American down to a stooping posture. Everybody was stooping. The palace guards crouched and sprawled inside the waist-high wall that surrounded the roof, and fired through the machicolations. Stationed here and there among the riflemen were machine-guns. Each gun was handled by two men. Now and then one of these guns would break into a hard yammering, then abruptly cease. The riflemen were firing in the same careful way. They sighted and fired with murderous concentration. Like all Latin-American revolutionists, they never used volley-firing in the hope of making a hit. Every bullet was aimed at somebody.

A dead man or two and a few wounded men were scattered over the tiled roof. Stone splinters snapped out of the merlons from adverse gun fire. The smell of smokeless powder filled the air with a headache-y quality. The drummer saw a rifle and a bandolier of cartridges beside a motionless figure. He crawled to it and salvaged the gun. He got to the wall and settled himself beside an aperture, in line with the whole wallful of reclining riflemen.

Peering out between his merlons, he found himself looking into the westering sun. Saturnino had flung his forces on top of the houses directly west of the palace. This screened his men in the yellow glow of the declining sun. The whole outline of the opposite buildings was an indistinct purple. The drummer stared fixedly at this purple outline, then he thought he glimpsed a movement. He leveled his gun and fired. At the same moment a machine-gun near him began a sudden chattering. Just where the drummer had seen a movement, the black figure of a man lurched up against the yellow light and disappeared backward.