O'Reilly felt a sudden excitement when Matanzas came into view. From this distance the city looked quite as it did when he had left it, except that the blue harbor was almost empty of shipping, while the familiar range of hills that hid the Yumuri--that valley of delight so closely linked in his thoughts with Rosa Varona--seemed to smile at him like an old friend. For the thousandth time he asked himself if he had come in time to find her, or if fate's maddening delays had proved his own and the girl's undoing. O'Reilly knew that although Matanzas was a prison and a pesthole, a girl like Rosa would suffer therein perils infinitely worse than imprisonment or disease. It was a thought he could not bear to dwell upon. Signs of life began to appear now, the travelers passed small garden-patches and occasional cultivated fields; they encountered loaded carts bound into the city, and once they hid themselves while a column of mounted troops went by. O'Reilly stopped to pass the time of day with a wrinkled cartman whose dejected oxen were resting. "Going into the city, are you?" the fellow inquired. "Starved out, I suppose. Well, it's as pleasant to starve in one place as another." Jacket helped himself to a stalk of cane from the load and began to strip it with his teeth. "Will the soldiers allow us to enter?" Johnnie inquired. "Of course. Why not?" The old man laughed mirthlessly; then his voice changed. "Go back," he said, "go back and die in the fields. Matanzas stinks of rotting corpses. Go back where the air is clean." He swung his long lash over the oxen, they leaned against the load, and the cart creaked dismally on its way. It is never difficult to enter a trap, and Matanzas was precisely that. There were soldiers everywhere, but beyond an indifferent challenge at the outer blockhouse, a perfunctory question or two, Narciso and Juan Villar experienced no trouble whatever in passing the lines. Discipline, never strict at best, was extremely lax at the brick fortinas along the roads, and, since these two refugees were too poor to warrant search, they were waved onward by the sentries. They obeyed silently; in aimless bewilderment they shuffled along toward the heart of the city. Almost before they realized it they had run the gauntlet and had joined that army of misery, fifteen thousand strong. The hand of Spain had closed over them. XXIV ROSA "Look!" Jacket clutched at O'Reilly and pointed a shaking finger. "More beggars! Cristo! And those little children!" The boy tried to laugh, but his voice cracked nervously. "Are they children, or gourds with legs under them?"