Thieves! How well they had known how to do it! They had set fire to the farm-house from all four sides, it had burst into flames from top to bottom; even the corral with its stable and its sheds was crowned with flames.
From it there came forth desperate neighings, cacklings of terror, fierce gruntings; but the farm-house, insensible to the wails of those who were roasting in its depths, went on sending up curved tongues of fire through the door and the windows; and from its burning roof there rose an enormous spiral of white smoke, which reflecting the fire took on a rosy transparency.
The weather had changed: the night was calm, the wind did not blow and the blue of the sky was dimmed only by the columns of smoke, between whose white wisps the curious stars appeared.
Teresa was struggling with her husband, who, recovered from his painful surprise, and spurred on by his interests, which incited him to commit follies, wished to enter the fiery inferno. Just one moment, nothing more: only the time necessary to take from the bedroom the little sack of money, the profit of the harvest.
Ah! Good Teresa! Even now it was no longer necessary to restrain the husband, who endured her violent grasp. A farm-house soon burns; straw and canes love fire. The roof came down with a crash,—that erect roof which the neighbours looked upon as an insult—and out of the enormous bed of live-coals arose a frightful column of sparks, in whose uncertain and vacillating light the huerta seemed to move with fantastic grimaces.
The sides of the corral stirred heavily as if within them a legion of demons were rushing about and striking them. Engarlanded with flame the fowls leaped forth, trying to fly, though burning alive.
A piece of wall of mud and stakes fell, and through the black breach there came forth like a lightning flash, a terrible monster, ejecting smoke through its nostrils, shaking its mane of sparks, desperately beating its tail like a broom of flame, which scattered a stench of burning hair.
It was the horse. With a prodigious bound, he leaped over the family, and ran madly through the fields, instinctively seeking the canal, into which he fell with the sizzling hiss of red-hot iron when it strikes water.
Behind him, dragging itself along like a drunken demon emitting frightful grunts, came another spectre of fire, the pig, which fell to the ground in the middle of the field, burning like a torch of grease.
There remained now only the walls and the grape-vines with their twisted runners distorted by fire, and the posts, which stood up like bars of ink over the red background.