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But what he sees is something crawling swiftly out of a house and wriggling along the ground like a worm, and by the time he thinks to himself: “A ‘youngster’!” there is not just one lad but three, the other two having come wriggling along the ground, too. The three of them paw and tug at the dead soldiers. They are not stripping them, as the Lion of Natuba thinks at first; they are removing their bullet pouches and their canteens. And one of the “youngsters” lingers long enough to plunge a knife as long as his arm into the soldier closest to the Lion—one he had thought was dead, though evidently there was still a little bit of life in him—struggling with all his might to lift the heavy weapon.

“Lion, Lion!” It is another “youngster,” signaling to him to follow him. The Lion of Natuba sees him disappear through a door standing ajar in one of the dwellings, as the other two make off in opposite directions, trailing their booty along after them. Only then does his little body, frozen in panic, finally obey him, and he is able to drag himself over to the door. Energetic hands just inside the doorway reach out for him. He feels himself lifted off his feet, passed to other hands, set down again, and hears a woman’s voice say: “Pass him the canteen.” They place it in his bleeding hands, and he raises it to his lips. He takes a long swallow, closing his eyes, deeply grateful, moved by the miracle of this liquid that he can feel extinguishing what seem like red-hot coals inside him.

As he answers questions from the six or seven armed persons who are in the open pit that has been dug inside the house—faces covered with soot, sweaty, some of them bandaged, unrecognizable—and tells them, panting for breath, what he has been able to see on the church square and on his way up here, he realizes that the pit opens downward onto a tunnel. A “youngster” suddenly pops up between his legs, saying: “More dogs setting fires, Salustiano.” Those who were listening to him go into action immediately, pushing the Lion aside, and at that moment he realizes that two of them are women. They, too, have rifles; they, too, aim them, with one eye closed, toward the street. Through the cracks between the stakes of the wall, like a recurrent image, the Lion of Natuba sees once again the silhouettes of soldiers in profile coming past with lighted torches that they are hurling inside the houses. “Shoot!” a jagunço shouts, and the room fills with gunsmoke. The Lion hears the deafening report and hears other shots from close by. When the smoke clears away a little, two “youngsters” leap out of the pit and crawl out into the street to gather up ammunition pouches and canteens.

“We let them get good and close before we shoot. That way they don’t get away,” one of the jagunços says as he swabs out his rifle.

“They’ve set fire to your house, Salustiano,” a woman says.

“And Abbot João’s,” the same man adds.

These are the houses opposite; they have caught fire together, and beneath the crackling of the flames the sound of people running back and forth, voices, shouts reach them, along with thick clouds of smoke that make them scarcely able to breathe.

“They’re trying to fry us to death, Lion,” another of the jagunços in the pit says. “All the Freemasons come into the city with torches.”

The smoke is so thick that the Lion of Natuba begins to cough, as at the same time that active, creative, efficient mind of his remembers something that the Counselor once said, which he wrote down and which, like everything else in the Sanctuary notebooks, is doubtless being reduced to ashes at this moment: “There will be three fires. I shall extinguish the first three and the fourth I shall offer to the Blessed Jesus.” He says in a loud voice, gasping for breath: “Is this the fourth fire, is this the last fire?” Someone asks timidly: “What about the Counselor, Lion?” He has been waiting for that; ever since he entered this house he has known that someone would dare to ask him this question. He sees, amid the tongues