“Yes, my friends,” he used to say to his guests, “what would you have?  A youth of seventeen summers, without worldly experience, and owing my rank only to the glorious patriotism of my father, may God rest his soul.  I suffered immense humiliation, not so much from the disobedience of that subordinate, who, after all, was responsible for those prisoners; but I suffered because, like the boy I was, I myself dreaded going to the adjutant for the key.  I had felt, before, his rough and cutting tongue.  Being quite a common fellow, with no merit except his savage valour, he made me feel his contempt and dislike from the first day I joined my battalion in garrison at the fort.  It was only a fortnight before!  I would have confronted him sword in hand, but I shrank from the mocking brutality of his sneers.

“I don’t remember having been so miserable in my life before or since.  The torment of my sensibility was so great that I wished the sergeant to fall dead at my feet, and the stupid soldiers who stared at me to turn into corpses; and even those wretches for whom my entreaties had procured a reprieve I wished dead also, because I could not face them without shame.  A mephitic heat like a whiff of air from hell came out of that dark place in which they were confined.  Those at the window who had heard what was going on jeered at me in very desperation:  one of these fellows, gone mad no doubt, kept on urging me volubly to order the soldiers to fire through the window.  His insane loquacity made my heart turn faint.  And my feet were like lead.  There was no higher officer to whom I could appeal.  I had not even the firmness of spirit to simply go away.

“Benumbed by my remorse, I stood with my back to the window.  You must not suppose that all this lasted a long time.  How long could it have been?  A minute?  If you measured by mental suffering it was like a hundred years; a longer time than all my life has been since.  No, certainly, it was not so much as a minute.  The hoarse screaming of those miserable wretches died out in their dry throats, and then suddenly a voice spoke, a deep voice muttering calmly.  It called upon me to turn round.

“That voice, senores, proceeded from the head of Gaspar Ruiz.  Of his body I could see nothing.  Some of his fellow-captives had clambered upon his back.  He was holding them up.  His eyes blinked without looking at me.  That and the moving of his lips was all he seemed able to manage in his overloaded state.  And when I turned round, this head, that seemed more than human size resting on its chin under a multitude of other heads, asked me whether I really desired to quench the thirst of the captives.

“I said, ‘Yes, yes!’ eagerly, and came up quite close to the window.  I was like a child, and did not know what would happen.  I was anxious to be comforted in my helplessness and remorse.

“’Have you the authority, Senor teniente, to release my wrists from their bonds?’ Gaspar Ruiz’s head asked me.