To Hell with General Fombombo.
The crowd danced about the bonfire to this absurd chant—men and women, embracing, kissing, singing, whirling in and out like brown vortices of sand blown up by the winds on the llanos.
The drummer stood near the façade of the palace, watching the growing saturnalia. He thought of the señora, and he thanked God she was safe in some convent, out of all this fury and madness. Greater and greater crowds gathered in the plaza; they streamed in from everywhere. An old woman passed Strawbridge, with her arms about a filthy skeleton-like creature. In the gathering gloom of evening, Strawbridge recognized the old charwoman of the cathedral, Doña Consolacion, and her grandson Josefa. These two had been reunited. The drummer watched them pass. The strange thought came to him that he had brought them down to their poor plight.
The bonfire was leaping high by this time, and with the delicacy of an etching the ornamental trees stood out against the flames. Below circled the dark figures of the peons, singing of liberty, justice, and Saturnino. Amid the rhythmic intervals of this uproar, the American heard a solitary sobbing. The sound was so consonant to his own mood that he looked about for the mourner. He found the weeper in the gloom beside the long stairway that led up into the palace. He walked slowly around the curve of the marble balustrade, and in the shadows he saw a misshapen woman bending over some object on the pavement and weeping vehemently. Strawbridge drew closer until he could see her face, distorted with grief. It was Madruja. The peon girl was heavy with an unborn child, and in her arms she held the body of the fallen dictator. The dead tyrant looked curiously small as he lay on the pavement, where he had been thrown from the roof of the palace. Occasionally the girl would pause in her sobbing, to stroke the dead man's face with her puffed fingers; then she would break out afresh.
As Strawbridge stood blinking his eyes a street vender came running along, lifting his hands in an attitude of prayer and shouting a priest-like singsong at the skies. Strawbridge listened to him. He was chanting in a frenzy of satire:
"O Saint Peter! O good Saint John! Guard well your eleven thousand holy virgins; General Fombombo is on his way to Paradise!"
CHAPTER XXVII
The dead man's fate oppressed Strawbridge, and the irony of all the rejoicing at the rise of Saturnino filled him with bitterness. He turned away. He meant to go back to the priests' house. He would leave this anarchic land as quickly as he could. As he turned, a girl came running down the steps of the palace. She stopped half-way down and peered at the man on the pavement. Next moment she called his name, under her breath: