“It is Pallura with the candles!  It is Pallura coming!  Here’s Pallura!”

The wagon came screeching over the gravel, drawn at a walk by a heavy gray mare, over whose shoulders hung a great shining brass horn, like a half-moon.  When Giacobbe and the others made towards her, the pacific animal stopped and breathed hard.  Giacobbe, who reached the wagon first, saw stretched out on its floor the bloody body of Pallura, and screamed, waving his arms towards the crowd, “He is dead!  He is dead!”

III.

The sad news spread like lightning.  People crowded around the wagon, and craned their necks to see, thinking no longer of the threats in the sky, because struck by the unexpected happening and filled with that natural ferocious curiosity which the sight of blood awakens.

“He is dead?  What killed him?”

Pallura lay on his back upon the boards, with a broad wound in the middle of his forehead, with one ear torn, with gashes on his arms, his sides, and one thigh.  A warm stream flowed down to his chin and neck, staining his shirt and forming dark, shining clots on his breast, his leathern belt, and even his breeches.  Giacobbe hung over the body; all the rest waited around him; an auroral flush lighted up their perplexed faces; and at that moment of silence, from the river-bank arose the song of the frogs, and bats skimmed back and forth above the heads of the crowd.

Suddenly Giacobbe, straightening up, with one cheek bloody, cried: 

“He is not dead.  He still breathes.”

A hollow murmur ran through the crowd, and the nearest strained forward to look.  The anxiety of those at a distance commenced to break into clamor.  Two women brought a jug of water, another some strips of linen.  A youth held out a gourd full of wine.

The wounded man’s face was washed; the flow of blood from his forehead was checked; his head was raised.  Then voices inquired loudly the cause of this deed.  The hundred pounds of wax were missing; only a few fragments of candles remained in the cracks of the wagon-bed.

In the commotion their minds grew more and more inflamed, exasperated, and contentious.  And as an old hereditary hatred burned in them against the town of Mascalico, on the opposite bank of the river, Giacobbe said venomously, in a hoarse voice: 

“What if the candles have been offered to San Gonselvo?”

It was like the first flash of a conflagration!  The spirit of church-rivalry awoke all at once in these people brutalized by many years of blind, savage worship of their own one idol.  The fanatic’s words flew from mouth to mouth.  And beneath the tragic dull-red sky, the raging multitude resembled a tribe of mutinous gypsies.