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Antônio nodded and a moment later ran back, followed by Honório, the aides, and ten other men, to the intersection of Mártires and Campo Grande. He seemed to be coming to at last, to be coming out of his stupor. “You know how to organize things,” he said to himself. “And that’s what’s needed now, precisely that.” He ordered the men to take the dead bodies and the rubble on the square back to the barricade and helped them till, amid all the hurrying back and forth, he heard shouts inside one of the buildings. He was the first one in, kicking a hole in the wall and shooting at the soldier squatting on his heels. To his stupefaction, he realized that the soldier he had killed had been eating: in his hand was a piece of jerked beef that he had doubtless just grabbed off the stove. The owner of the house, an old man, lay dying alongside him, a bayonet thrust into his belly, and three little children were screaming in terror. “How hungry he must have been,” he thought, “to have forgotten everything and gotten himself killed for a mouthful of jerked beef.” He and five men searched all the houses between the end of the street and the square. All of them looked like a battlefield: disorder, roofs with gaping holes, walls ripped apart, objects smashed to bits. Women, oldsters, children armed with shovels and pitchforks greeted them with looks of relief on their faces, or began to chatter frantically. In one house he found two buckets of water, and after he and the men had had a drink, he toted them back to the barricade. He could see how joyfully Honório and the others drank the water down.

Climbing up onto the barricade, he peeked out between various objects and dead bodies. The only straight street in all of Canudos, Campo Grande, was deserted. To his right there was heavy gunfire amid the burning buildings. “Things are rough in O Mocambo, compadre,” Honório said. His face was crimson and dripping with sweat. Antônio smiled at him. “The dogs aren’t going to be able to get us out of here, right?” he said. “Of course they’re not, compadre,” Honório replied. Antônio sat down on a cart and as he was reloading his revolver—there were almost no bullets left in the cartridge belts wound around his middle—he noticed that most of the jagunços were now armed with rifles taken from soldiers. They were winning the war.

He suddenly remembered the Sardelinha sisters, down below, on the lower slope of Santa Ana. “Stay here, and tell João that I’ve gone to the Health House to see how things are going there,” he said to his brother.

He climbed to the top of the barricade, stepping on corpses swarming with flies, and leapt down on the other side. Four jagunços followed him. “Who ordered you to come with me?” he shouted at them. “Abbot João,” one of them answered. He didn’t have time to argue, for at São Pedro they found themselves caught in a fusillade: there was fighting in the doorways, on the rooftops, and inside the houses along the street. They turned back to Campo Grande and were able to make their way down to Santa Ana from that direction, without encountering soldiers. But there was shooting in Santa Ana. They crouched down behind a house going up in smoke and the storekeeper took a look around. Up by the Health House there was another cloud of smoke; the shooting was coming from there. “I’m going to go closer. Wait here,” he said, but as he crawled off, he saw that the four jagunços were crawling along at his side. A few yards farther on he finally spied half a dozen soldiers, directing their fire not at them but at the houses. He stood up and ran toward them as fast as his legs could carry him, his finger on the trigger of his revolver, but he did not shoot until one of the soldiers turned. He fired all six bullets at him and threw his knife at another one who came at him. He fell to the ground and grabbed his attacker’s legs, or those of another soldier, and somehow found himself strangling him, with all his strength. “You’ve killed two dogs, Antônio,” one of the jagunços