to rise with their knives in
their hands and put an end once for all to the Blancos, to these Gothic
remnants, to these sinister mummies, these impotent paraliticos, who
plotted with foreigners for the surrender of the lands and the slavery
of the people.

The clamour of this Negro Liberalism frightened Senor Avellanos. A
newspaper was the only remedy. And now that the right man had been found
in Decoud, great black letters appeared painted between the windows
above the arcaded ground floor of a house on the Plaza. It was next to
Anzani's great emporium of boots, silks, ironware, muslins, wooden toys,
tiny silver arms, legs, heads, hearts (for ex-voto offerings), rosaries,
champagne, women's hats, patent medicines, even a few dusty books in
paper covers and mostly in the French language. The big black letters
formed the words, "Offices of the Porvenir." From these offices a single
folded sheet of Martin's journalism issued three times a week; and
the sleek yellow Anzani prowling in a suit of ample black and carpet
slippers, before the many doors of his establishment, greeted by a deep,
side-long inclination of his body the Journalist of Sulaco going to and
fro on the business of his august calling.

CHAPTER FOUR

Perhaps it was in the exercise of his calling that he had come to see
the troops depart. The Porvenir of the day after next would no doubt
relate the event, but its editor, leaning his side against the landau,
seemed to look at nothing. The front rank of the company of infantry
drawn up three deep across the shore end of the jetty when pressed too
close would bring their bayonets to the charge ferociously, with an
awful rattle; and then the crowd of spectators swayed back bodily,
even under the noses of the big white mules. Notwithstanding the great
multitude there was only a low, muttering noise; the dust hung in a
brown haze, in which the horsemen, wedged in the throng here and there,
towered from the hips upwards, gazing all one way over the heads. Almost
every one of them had mounted a friend, who steadied himself with both
hands grasping his shoulders from behind; and the rims of their hats
touching, made like one disc sustaining the cones of two pointed crowns
with a double face underneath. A hoarse mozo would bawl out something to
an acquaintance in the ranks, or a woman would shriek suddenly the word
Adios! followed by the Christian name of a man.

General Barrios, in a shabby blue tunic and wh