On this basis he began to reason with a crazy directness.  And to act.  He went and pried open the door into the entry.  From a shelf he took down his razor.  A big, heavy-heeled strop.  His hands began to hurry.  And the mug, half full of soap.  And water.  It would have to be cold water.  But after all, he thought (light-headedly), at this time of night——­

Outside, they were at the shop again.  The crowd’s habit is to forget a thing quickly, once it is out of sight and hearing.  But there had been something about that solitary cry which continued to bother them, even in memory.  Where had it been?  Where had it come from?  And those who had stood nearest the cobbler-shop were heard again.  They were certain now, dead certain.  They could swear!

In the end they broke down the door.

If Boaz heard them he gave no sign.  An absorption as complete as it was monstrous wrapped him.  Kneeling in the glare of the lantern they had brought, as impervious as his own shadow sprawling behind him, he continued to shave the dead man on the floor.

No one touched him.  Their minds and imaginations were arrested by the gigantic proportions of the act.  The unfathomable presumption of the act.  As throwing murder in their faces to the tune of a jig in a barber-shop.  It is a fact that none of them so much as thought of touching him.  No less than all of them, together with all other men, shorn of their imaginations—­that is to say, the expressionless and imperturbable creature of the Law—­would be sufficient to touch that ghastly man.

On the other hand, they could not leave him alone.  They could not go away.  They watched.  They saw the damp, lather-soaked beard of that victimized stranger falling away, stroke by stroke of the flashing, heavy razor.  The dead denuded by the blind!

It was seen that Boaz was about to speak.  It was something important he was about to utter; something, one would say, fatal.  The words would not come all at once.  They swelled his cheeks out.  His razor was arrested.  Lifting his face, he encircled the watchers with a gaze at once of imploration and of command.  As if he could see them.  As if he could read his answer in the expressions of their faces.

“Tell me one thing now.  Is it that cachorra?”

For the first time those men in the room made sounds.  They shuffled their feet.  It was as if an uncontrollable impulse to ejaculation, laughter, derision, forbidden by the presence of death, had gone down into their boot-soles.

“Manuel?” one of them said.  “You mean Manuel?”

Boaz laid the razor down on the floor beside its work.  He got up from his knees slowly, as if his joints hurt.  He sat down in his chair, rested his hands on the arms, and once more encircled the company with his sightless gaze.

“Not Manuel.  Manuel was a good boy.  But tell me now, is it that cachorra?”