your husband . . . or whatever he is? If he’s hidin’ in some hole tell ’im to come out. As far as I care . . . pop! Let me assure you I’m not afraid of no rats.”

A white silhouette suddenly filled the dark opening of the doorway.

“Demetrio Macías!” the sergeant exclaimed, aghast, taking several steps back.

The lieutenant got up, speechless, and stood cold and motionless as a statue.

“Kill ’em!” the woman exclaimed, her throat dry.

“Oh, forgive me, my friend! I didn’t know. But I respect brave men like you, truly.”

Demetrio stood looking at them, an insolent and scornful smile warping his features.

“And not only do I respect ’em, I also love ’em. Here, take the hand of a friend. That’s okay, Demetrio Macías, I know why you rebuke me. It’s because you don’t know me, it’s because you see me doin’ this damned dog of a job. But what d’ya want, my friend! We’re poor, we have large families to keep. Sergeant, let’s go. I always respect the house of a brave man, of a real man.”

After they disappeared, the woman hugged Demetrio tightly.

“Blessed Virgin of Jalpa!5What a scare! I thought they had shot you!”

“Go on now to my father’s house,” Demetrio said.

She tried to stop him. She begged, she cried. But he pushed her aside sweetly and answered in a somber voice:

“I can feel that they’ll be back with the whole group.”

“Why didn’t ya kill ’em?”

“Just wasn’t their time yet!”

They went out together, she with the child in her arms.

Once at the door, they walked off in opposite directions.

The moon filled the mountainside with dim, hazy shadows.

At every cliff and at each scrub oak, Demetrio could still see the sorrowful silhouette of a woman with her child in her arms.

After many hours of climbing, he turned around to look back. At the bottom of the canyon, near the river, he saw tall flames rising: his house was ablaze.

II

Everything was still in shadows as Demetrio Macías climbed down toward the bottom of the ravine. He was following a path along the narrow incline of a rough slope, between rocky terrain streaked with enormous cracks on one side and a drop of hundreds of meters, cut as if by a single cleft, on the other.

As he descended with agility and speed, he thought:

“Surely now the Federales will find our trail, and they’ll jump on us like dogs. Luckily for us, though, they don’t know any of the paths going in or out of the ravine. Unless someone from Moyahua1is with them as a guide, because the people from Limón, Santa Rosa, and the other ranchitos from the Sierra are reliable and would never turn us in. The cacique who has me running through these hills is from Moyahua, and he’d be more than pleased to see me strung up from a telegraph pole with my tongue hanging down to here . . .”

He reached the bottom of the ravine as dawn was beginning to break. He lay down between the boulders and fell asleep.

The river rushed along, singing in tiny cascades. The birds were chirping, hidden among the pitahaya cacti,2while the monotonous cicadas filled the solitude of the mountain with a sense of mystery.

Demetrio woke up, startled. Then he waded across the river and started up the trail on the other side of the canyon. Like a large red ant he climbed toward the crest, his hands clutching like claws at the crags and cut-off branches, the soles of his feet clutching at the trail’s round, smooth stones.

By the time he reached the summit, the sun was bathing the high plains of the Sierra in a lake of gold. Looking down toward the ravine, he could see enormous tapered stones, bristling protuberances like fantastic African heads, pitahaya cacti like the ossified fingers of a colossus, and trees stretching out toward the bottom of the abyss. And among the dry boulders and the parched bushes, the bright San Juan roses dawned like a white offering to the star beginning to spread its golden tendrils from stone to stone.

Demetrio stopped at the summit.