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“It must not hurt you very much when you laugh, Pajeú,” Taramela says.

Pajeú is blowing his cane whistle to let the jagunços know he’s arrived, and thinks to himself that he has the right to smile. Aren’t the dogs taking off down the ravine, battalion after battalion of them, on the road to As Umburanas? Won’t that road take them, inevitably, to A Favela?

He and Taramela are on a wooded promontory overlooking the bare ravines; there is no need to hide themselves, for they are not only standing at a dead angle but are shielded by the sun’s rays, which blind the soldiers if they look in this direction. They can see the column below them turn the gray earth red, blue. They can still hear occasional shots. The jagunços appear, climbing on all fours, emerging from caves, letting themselves down from lookout platforms hidden in the trees. They crowd around Pajeú, to whom someone hands a leather flask full of milk, which he drinks in little sips and which leaves a little white trickle at the corners of his mouth. No one questions him about his wound, and in fact they avert their eyes from it, as though it were something indecent. Pajeú then eats a handful of fruit they give him: quixabas, quarters of umbu, pinhas. At the same time, he listens to the report of two men whom Felício left there when he went off to reinforce Joaquim Macambira and Mané Quadrado in As Umburanas. Constantly breaking in on each other, they tell how the dogs did not react immediately to being fired upon from the promontory, because it seemed risky to climb up the slope and present a target to the jagunço sharpshooters or because they guessed that the latter were such small groups as to be insignificant. Nonetheless, when Felício and his men advanced to the edge of the ravine and the atheists saw that they were beginning to suffer casualties, they sent several companies to hunt them down. That’s how it had gone for some time, with the companies trying to climb the slope and the jagunços withstanding their fire, until finally the soldiers slipped away through one opening or another in the brush and disappeared. Felício had left shortly thereafter.

“Till just a little while ago,” one of the messengers says, “it was swarming with soldiers around here.”

Taramela, who has been counting the men, informs Pajeú that there are thirty-five of them there. Should they wait for the others?

“There isn’t time,” Pajeú answers. “We’re needed.”

He leaves a messenger to tell the others which way they’ve gone, hands out the rifles and knapsacks they’ve brought, and heads straight for the ravines to meet up with Mané Quadrado, Felício, and Macambira. The rest he has had—along with having had something to eat and drink—has done him good. His muscles no longer ache; the wound burns less. He walks fast, not hiding himself, along the broken path that forces them to zigzag back and forth. Below him, the column continues to advance. The head of it is now far in the distance, perhaps climbing A Favela, but even in spots where the view is unobstructed he is unable to catch a glimpse of it. The river of soldiers, horses, cannons, wagons is endless. “It’s a rattlesnake,” Pajeú thinks. Each battalion is a ring, the uniforms the scales, the powder of its cannons the venom with which it poisons its victims. He would like to be able to tell the woman what has happened to him.

At that moment he hears rifle reports. Everything has turned out as Abbot João has planned it. They are up ahead shooting at the serpent from the rocks of As Umburanas, giving it one last push toward A Favela. On rounding a hill, they see a squad of cavalry coming up. Pajeú begins shooting, aiming at their mounts to make them roll down into the ravine. What fine horses, how easily they scale the very steep slope! The burst of fire downs two of them, but a number of them reach the top. Pajeú gives the order to clear out, knowing as he runs that the men must resent his having deprived them of an easy victory.

When they finally reach the ravines where the jagunços are