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columns of a warehouse and the towers and cupola of the
church.
"How beautiful the revolution! Even in its most barbarous
aspect it is beautiful," Solis said with deep feeling.
Then a vague melancholy seized him, and speaking
low:
"A pity what remains to do won't be as beautiful! We
must wait a while, until there are no men left to fight
on either side, until no sound of shot rings through the
air save from the mob as carrion-like it falls upon the
booty; we must wait until the psychology of our race, condensed
into two words, shines clear and luminous as a
drop of water: Robbery! Murder! What a colossal failure
we would make of it, friend, if we, who offer our enthusiasm
and lives to crush a wretched tyrant, became the
builders of a monstrous edifice holding one hundred or
two hundred thousand monsters of exactly the same sort.
People without ideals! A tyrant folk! Vain bloodshed!"
Large groups of Federals pushed up the hill, fleeing
from the "high hats." A bullet whistled past them, singing
as it sped. After his speech, Alberto Solis stood lost in
thought, his arms crossed. Suddenly, he took fright.
"I'll be damned if I like these plaguey mosquitoes!" he
said. "Let's get away from here!"
So scornfully Luis Cervantes smiled that Solis sat
down on a rock quite calm, bewildered. He smiled. His
gaze roved as he watched the spirals of smoke from the
rifles, the dust of roofs crumbling from houses as they
fell before the artillery. He believed he discerned the symbol
of the revolution in these clouds of dust and smoke
that climbed upward together, met at the crest of the hill
and, a moment after, were lost. . . .
"By heaven, now I see what it all means!"
He sketched a vast gesture, pointing to the station.
Locomotives belched huge clouds of black dense smoke
rising in columns; the trains were overloaded with fugitives
who had barely managed to escape from the captured
town.