He was lying face down. The sergeant recognized him by his stature, and
being himself a very small man, looked with envy and contempt at the
prostration of so much strength. He had always disliked that particular
soldier. Moved by an obscure animosity, he inflicted a long gash across
the neck of Gaspar Ruiz, with some vague notion of making sure of that
strong man's death, as if a powerful physique were more able to resist
the bullets. For the sergeant had no doubt that Gaspar Ruiz had been
shot through in many places. Then he passed on, and shortly afterwards
marched off with his men, leaving the bodies to the care of crows and
vultures.

Gaspar Ruiz had restrained a cry, though it had seemed to him that his
head was cut off at a blow; and when darkness came, shaking off the
dead, whose weight had oppressed him, he crawled away over the plain on
his hands and knees. After drinking deeply, like a wounded beast, at
a shallow stream, he assumed an upright posture, and staggered on
light-headed and aimless, as if lost amongst the stars of the clear
night. 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."