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By Root 1925 0

whistles with which they have tortured the Seventh Regiment ever since Monte Santo? He is overcome with anxiety, frightened, shivering from the cold. He is soaked to his very bones from the rain. He thinks of his colleague, the elderly journalist who feels the cold so badly; on being left in the rear with the half-naked soldier boys, he said to him: “There’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip, my young friend.” Is he dead? Have he and those youngsters met the same fate as the fair-haired sergeant and the soldiers of his patrol whose corpses they came upon late yesterday afternoon in the foothills of this mountain range? At that very moment the bells down below answer the bugles of the regiment, a dialogue in the dark, rainy shadows that are a prelude to the one that will take place between shotguns and rifles as soon as day breaks.

He might well have shared the fate that befell the fair-haired sergeant and his patrol: he had been about to agree when Moreira César suggested that he accompany them. Was it his fatigue that had saved him? A presentiment? Chance? That was just yesterday, but in his memory it seems a very long time ago, because all during the day just past, Canudos seemed like somewhere they would never reach. The head of the column stops and the nearsighted journalist remembers that his ears were ringing, that his legs were trembling, that his lips were chapped. The colonel is leading his horse by the reins and the officers are indistinguishable from the soldiers and the guides, for they all look the same on foot. He notes the fatigue, the dirt, the deprivation all around him. A dozen soldiers break ranks, step swiftly forward, and stand at attention before the colonel and Major Cunha Matos. The one who is to lead the patrol is the young sergeant who brought the parish priest of Cumbe in as a prisoner.

He hears him click his heels, repeat his orders. “Take up a commanding position at Caracatá close off the ravine with cross fire once the assault has begun.” The sergeant has the same resolute, healthy, optimistic spirit that he has noted in him at all times during the march. “Have no fear, sir, no outlaw is going to escape by way of Caracatá.”

Was the guide who lined up alongside the sergeant the same one who accompanied the patrols that went out to search for water? It was their guide at any rate who led the sergeant and his men into the ambush, and the nearsighted journalist thinks to himself that it is only by a sheer miracle that he is here, his mind in a daze. Colonel Moreira César spies him sitting on the ground, completely worn out, stiff and aching all over, with his portable writing desk on his knees. “Do you want to go with the patrol? You’ll be safer in Caracatá than you will be with us.”

What had made him say no, after a few seconds’ hesitation? He remembers that the young sergeant and he had talked together a number of times: he had asked him questions about the Jornal de Notícias and his work; Colonel Moreira César was the person he admired most in the world—“even more than Marshal Floriano”—and like the colonel, he believed that civilian politicians were a catastrophe for the Republic, a source of corruption and divisiveness, and that only men bearing swords and uniforms were capable of regenerating the Fatherland debased by monarchical rule.

Has it stopped raining? The nearsighted journalist turns over onto his back, without opening his eyes. Yes, it is no longer pouring; that fine penetrating mist is being driven their way by the wind sweeping down the hillside. The cannon fire has also stopped and his mental image of the young sergeant is replaced by that of the elderly journalist who suffers from the cold: his straw-colored hair that had turned almost white, his kindly face that had taken on a sickly cast, his muffler, his fingernails that he so often contemplated as though they were an aid to meditation. Was he, too, hanging dead from a tree? Not long after the patrol has left, a messenger has come to tell the colonel that something is happening among the youngsters. The company of