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Several men spoke up at once and the baron motioned to them with upraised hands not to ride roughshod over each other. From between his friends’ heads he could see the garden, and though what he was hearing interested him and alarmed him, from the moment that he entered his study he had been wondering whether or not the chameleon was hiding among the trees—an animal that he had grown fond of as others conceive an affection for dogs or cats.

“We now know why Epaminondas organized the Rural Police,” Deputy Eduardo Glicério was saying. “So that it would furnish proof at the right moment. Of contraband rifles for the jagunços, and even of foreign spies.”

“Ah, you haven’t heard the latest news,” Adalberto de Gumúcio said on noting the intrigued expression on the baron’s face. “The height of the grotesque. An English secret agent in the backlands. His body was burned to a cinder when they found it, but he was English. How did they know? Because of his red hair! They exhibited it in the Rio parliament, along with rifles supposedly found alongside his corpse, in Ipupiará. Nobody will listen to us; in Rio, even our best friends are swallowing all this nonsense. The entire country is convinced that the Republic is endangered by Canudos.”

“I presume that I’m the dark genius behind this conspiracy,” the baron muttered.

“You’ve had more mud slung at you than anyone else,” the owner-publisher of the Diário da Bahia said. “You handed Canudos over to the rebels and took a trip to Europe to meet with the émigrés of the Empire and plan the rebellion. It’s even been said that there was a ‘fund for subversion,’ that you put up half the money and England the other half.”

“A fifty-fifty partner of the British Crown,” the baron murmured. “Good heavens, they overestimate me.”

“Do you know who they’re sending to put down the restorationist rebellion?” asked Deputy Lélis Piedades, who was sitting on the arm of the governor’s chair. “Colonel Moreira César and the Seventh Regiment.”

The Baron de Canabrava thrust his head forward slightly and blinked.

“Colonel Moreira César?” He sat lost in thought for some time, moving his lips from time to time as though speaking under his breath. Then he turned to Gumúcio and said: “Perhaps you’re right, Adalberto. This might well be a bold maneuver on the part of the Jacobins. Ever since the death of Marshal Floriano, Colonel Moreira César has been their top card, the hero they’re counting on to regain power.”

Again he heard all of them trying to talk at once, but this time he did not stop them. As his friends offered their opinions and argued, he sat there pretending to be listening but with his mind elsewhere, a habit he readily fell into when a discussion bored him or his own thoughts seemed to him to be more important than what he was hearing. Colonel Moreira César! It did not augur well that he was being sent to Bahia. He was a fanatic and, like all fanatics, dangerous. The baron remembered the cold-blooded way in which he had put down the federalist revolution in Santa Catarina four years before, and how, when the Federal Congress asked him to appear before that body and give an account of the executions by firing squad that he had ordered, he had answered with a telegram that was a model of terseness and arrogance: “No.” He recalled that among those sent to their deaths by the colonel there in the South there had been a marshal, a baron, and an admiral that he knew, and that on the advent of the Republic, Marshal Floriano Peixoto had ordered him to purge the army of all officers known to have had ties with the monarchy. The Seventh Infantry Regiment against Canudos! “Adalberto is right,” he thought. “It’s the height of the grotesque.” He forced himself to listen once more.

“It’s not the Sebastianists in the interior he’s come to liquidate—it’s us,” Adalberto was saying. “He’s coming to liquidate you, Luiz Viana, the Autonomist Party, and hand Bahia over to Epaminondas Gonçalves, who is the Jacobins’ man here.”

“There’s no reason to kill yourselves,