And Pimentó smiled with a sort of admiration. The sudden ferocity of this little old man, who was considered a good-natured fool by all the huerta, astounded him. Return him the shot-gun! At once! He well divined by the straight wrinkles which stood out between his eyebrows, his firm intention of blowing the author of his ruin to atoms.
Barret grew more and more vexed with the young fellow. He went so far as to call him a thief: he had refused to give him his weapon. He had no friends; he could see that well enough; all of them were only ingrates, equal to don Salvador in avarice; he did not wish to sleep here; he was suffocating. And searching in the bag of implements, he selected a sickle, shoved it through his sash, and left the farm-house. Nor did Pimentó attempt to bar his way.
At such an hour, he could do no harm; let him sleep in the open if it suited his pleasure. And the bully, closing the door, went to bed.
Old Barret started directly toward the fields, and like an abandoned dog, began to make a détour around his farm-house.
Closed! Closed forever! These walls had been raised by his grandfather and renovated by himself through all these years. Even in the darkness, the pallor of the neat whitewash, with which his little girls had coated them three months before, stood out plainly.
The corral, the stable, the pigsties were all the work of his father; and this straw-roof, so slender and high, with the two little crosses at the ends, he had built himself as a substitution for the old, which had leaked everywhere.
And the curbstone at the well, the post of the vineyard, the cane-fences over which the pinks and the morning-glories were showing their tufts of bloom;—these too were the work of his hands. And all this was going to become the property of another, because—yes, because men had arranged it so.
He searched in his sash for the pasteboard strip of matches in order to set fire to the straw-roof. Let the devil fly away with it all; it was his own, anyway, as God knew, and he could destroy his own property and would do so before he would see it fall into the hands of thieves.
But just as he was going to set fire to his old house, he felt a sensation of horror, as if he saw the ghosts of all his ancestors rising up before him; and he hurled the strip of matches to the ground.
But the longing for destruction continued roaring through his head, and sickle in hand, he set forth over the fields which had been his ruin.