His body was a monstrous black mass of ants, resembling a lump of coal. The turpentine, killing many of the ants, had aroused the rest, and their formidable pincers were devouring the Indian alive.

When a minute was up—and a minute is horribly long in such circumstances—Longhi heard Alves say:

“A moment of rest, now! Pull him out!”

The Indian was removed and his cries diminished little by little, till they ended in muffled sobs, sobs of impotence and superhuman suffering, as felt by men whose strength is finally broken.

Longhi still kept his eyes closed, and still hadn’t moved a finger. Yet within his heart, like a roaring sea, churned all the indignation and noble rage a manly breast can hold. But his turn had come.

“Now seu Longhi,” Alves told him, turning toward him again, “now I’m going to teach you something you don’t know. You don’t know how to fly, right?”

Longhi didn’t answer.

“Seu Longhi, please, don’t be impolite!” Alves reproached him, with another kick in the head. “I’m talking to you!”

The inspector’s face remained impassive; nothing but his pallor, that terrible pallor already known to Alves, had altered his stoic countenance. When the Brazilian noticed it he smiled with joy.

“All right; that proves you’re hearing me, at least. Now, seu Longhi, it’s a question of flying. Within half an hour your protective self will be on the fly, something that didn’t figure in your magnanimous calculations. It’ll fly so well that maybe it’ll never come back, you hear? So, since it isn’t right for old acquaintances to part like that, without saying good-bye, let’s say good-bye, seu Longhi.”

And abruptly raising his whip, he laid a horrible lash across the inspector’s face.

“That’s my good-bye, canalla!” he bellowed violently, forgetting his politeness, while a streak of blood emerged on Longhi’s face. “Take along this remembrance of me! Hey, you!” he yelled at the laborers. “Put this character on top of the well.”

The peones picked up Longhi and put him on top of the dynamite mine. When they filled the well with stones they had left a hollow so the inspector couldn’t roll away, a kind of coffin they now placed him in. A living tomb, so to speak, where Longhi would count off second by second his last moments of life, before being blown into pieces aloft.

Once everything was ready, Alves approached the well and lit the fuse, which sputtered a moment and then went burning away, slowly, silently and fatally.

“After a quarter of an hour,” said Alves, taking out his watch, “when there are just five minutes left, put the other one on the anthill again. It’s fair that Sr. Longhi should have some music.”

One after the other, slow and relentless, Longhi felt his life’s last pendulum strokes gradually coming to an end.

Suddenly the pure air was rent by that same horrible scream that signaled the torture of the Indian.

“There are still five minutes left,” murmured Longhi.

The screams continued, each more desperate than the last.

Then he heard the noise of steps going away.

“They’re leaving,” he said to himself. “In a minute I won’t be alive anymore.”

And for the first time he felt a knot of anguish in his throat, as he thought about his mother.

“Poor Mama!” he murmured. “She couldn’t have any idea what situation her son is in. If she . . .”

A powerful explosion split the air. A furious vomit of stones erupted from the well, and the body of the inspector, thrown off to one side, fell onto a nearby netting of vines, tearing through them, and dropped heavily to earth.

IV

It was eleven o’clock at night. A fresh breeze was blowing along the trail, and the gloomy woods were getting lively with the wailing of wildcats, the flight of deer, and the grunting of boar. Sounding unexpectedly, the moan of a human being abruptly put an end to the concert. Then a broken voice called out softly:

“Boss Longhi!”

Nobody answered.

“Boss Longhi!” repeated the same voice, broken by suffering, all that was left of the vigorous voice of a man. Slowly, almost invisible in the darkness of the night, a shadow came dragging itself up to the well. It stopped there for half an hour, then moved on to the edge of the woods. There’s no way to convey an idea of the tortures and horrible pain implied by the sight of a human being dragging himself along like that. He suddenly bumped into a hand and shuddered violently. The hand was cold, stiff, icy.

“Boss, boss Longhi!” sobbed the Indian, letting his breast release all his love for the only person who had ever cared for him. He touched the inspector’s face and his noble, rigid body, and, giving in to despair, wept into the desolate night.

The next day, at dawn, a laborer went to tell Alves that neither the Indian nor the inspector had died. Alves went off with him and found them stretched out next to each other. Despite his baseness of spirit, a chill ran through his body as he fixed his eyes on the Indian.