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A small house seemed to rise out of the ground before him. He
stumbled into the porch and struck at the door with his fist. There
was not a gleam of light. Gaspar Ruiz might have thought that the
inhabitants had fled from it, as from many others in the neighbourhood,
had it not been for the shouts of abuse that answered his thumping. In
his feverish and enfeebled state the angry screaming seemed to him part
of a hallucination belonging to the weird, dreamlike feeling of his
unexpected condemnation to death, of the thirst suffered, of the volleys
fired at him within fifteen paces, of his head being cut off at a blow.
"Open the door!" he cried. "Open in the name of God!"
An infuriated voice from within jeered at him: "Come in, come in. This
house belongs to you. All this land belongs to you. Come and take it."
"For the love of God," Gaspar Ruiz murmured.
"Does not all the land belong to you patriots?" the voice on the other
side of the door screamed on. "Are you not a patriot?"
Gaspar Ruiz did not know.


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