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By Root 2113 0

unlike others, he has never lost in all these months, not even when so many of the men were dying and they were all so hungry. Not knowing what he is going to do, he runs across the open stretch of ground in the direction of this bloody fiesta that the jagunços are having themselves, just as they said they would, and fires his four remaining bullets in the air, telling himself that the red-hot barrel of his rifle will be proof that he hasn’t been sleeping, that he’s been fighting. He trips and falls headlong. “Leopoldinho?” he says. “Leopoldinho?” He feels the ground in front of him, behind him, alongside him.

Yes, it’s Leopoldinho. He touches him, shakes him. The fiends. He spits out the taste of vomit in his mouth, keeps himself from throwing up. They have sunk a knife in his neck, they have slit his throat the way they would a lamb’s, his head dangles like a doll’s when he lifts him up by the armpits. “The fiends, the fiends,” he says, and without the thought distracting him from his grief and wrath at the death of his buddy, it occurs to him that going back to the camp with the dead body will convince Captain Oliveira that he wasn’t asleep at his post when the bandits came, that he put up a fight. He advances slowly, stumbling along with Leopoldinho’s body slung over his back, and hears, amid the shots and the fracas in the camp, the high-pitched, piercing screech of a strange bird, followed by others. The whistles. What are they up to? Why are the fanatical traitors entering the camp, setting off dynamite, and then beginning to blow whistles like mad? He staggers beneath the weight of Leopoldinho’s body and wonders if it wouldn’t be better to stop and rest.

As he approaches the huts he is struck by the chaos that reigns inside the camp: the soldiers, brutally awakened by the explosions, are shooting helter-skelter in all directions, disregarding the shouts and roars of the officers trying to impose order. At that moment, Leopoldinho shudders. Queluz is so stunned at this that he lets go of him and falls to the ground alongside him. No, he is not alive. What a stupid idiot he is! It was the impact of a bullet that shook the body like that. “That’s the second time tonight that you’ve saved my life, Leopoldinho,” he thinks. That knife thrust might have been meant for him, that bullet might have had his name on it. “Thanks, Leopoldinho!” He lies there flat on the ground, thinking that it would be the last straw if he got shot by the soldiers of his own regiment, in a fury again, his mind going round and round again, not knowing whether to stay there where he is till the shooting dies down or whether to try at all costs to reach the huts.

He is still lying there, agonizing as to what he should do, when in the shadows on the mountainside that are beginning to dissolve into a shimmer of blue he spies two silhouettes running toward him. He is about to shout: “Help! Come give me a hand!” when a sudden suspicion freezes the cry in his throat. He strains to see, till his eyes burn, whether or not they are wearing uniforms, but there is not enough light. He has unslung his rifle from his shoulder, grabbed a cartridge pouch from his knapsack, and is loading and cocking his gun by the time the men are almost upon him: none of them is a soldier. He fires point-blank at the one who offers the best target, and along with the report of his rifle, he hears the man’s animal snort and the thud of his body as it hits the ground. And then his rifle jams again: his finger squeezes a trigger that refuses to budge even a fraction of an inch.

He curses and leaps aside as at the same time he raises his rifle in his two hands and lashes out at the other jagunço, who, after a second’s hesitation, has flung himself on top of him. Queluz is good at fighting hand to hand, he has always shown up well in the tests of strength organized by Captain Oliveira. He feels the man’s hot panting breath in his face and his head butting him as he concentrates on the most important thing, searching out his adversary’s arms, his hands, knowing that the danger