Free The Cotton-Pickers by B. Traven

field. It was sheer curiosity that made me look inside the house, where I found Gonzalo dead. He had several knife wounds, the most serious of which was a stab in the chest from which he’d evidently bled to death.”
    As I went on describing the wounds, a terrible change came over Antonio. He turned as white as a sheet, stared at me with horrified eyes, moved his lips, and gulped again and again. But no words came. With his left hand he worked at his face and about his throat as though he wanted to tear the flesh away, while with his right hand he groped toward my shoulder and my chest as if he were trying to discover if there really were someone sitting beside him or if it were only a figment of his imagination, a dream from which he would awake.
    I was at a loss to know what to make of it. It just didn’t make sense. Antonio had suddenly taken on the appearance of a guilty man who had just begun to realize the full implications of his dark deed. And only a few moments before he’d been laughing at the thought that I suspected him of Gonzalo’s murder. How was I to figure out his behavior? And yet I must; otherwise I’d get lost in my own confused thoughts. I might even begin to imagine that I’d killed Gonzalo myself! The park lights came on. Night had suddenly closed in around us. Darkness had fallen within the moments since the start of Antonio’s inner battle, for I’d last seen his face, open and guileless, in clear sunset light. Then the coming of night had obscured what I’d glimpsed of the true, the undisguised Antonio. What should have been for me the unforgettable experience of studying the features of a man assailed by the powers of darkness, shaken, moved, his every hair and every pore electrified, was now distorted by the harsh lights. They lied, throwing lines and shadows into Antonio’s face that were in truth not there.
    But his warm breath was truth, his groping, clawing fingers were truth. All the rest was footlights.
    An Indian laborer was sitting on a bench near us, ragged like tens of thousands of others of his class because their wages are barely sufficient to pay for their food. It often happened that such a laborer had nothing left over for a thirty-centavo bunk in one of the many flophouses ― dormitorios, they’re called ― where in the morning fifty or eighty or a hundred bedfellows of every race and every nation, afflicted with every disease in the medical dictionary as well as others that no doctor had heard about as yet, all washed in the same bowl, all dried themselves on the same towel, and combed themselves with the same comb.
    The Indian had fallen asleep on the bench. His limbs sagged and his overworked, exhausted body was crumpled into a heap of rags.
     At this moment a policeman came sneaking up. He circled the bench, his eyes glued on the man sleeping there. Then, when he was again behind the bench, he raised his leather whip and brought it down hard and pitilessly on the shoulder of the sleeping man, at the same time yelling at him: “You bum, you, get up, out of here or I’ll turn you in! The law prohibits sleeping in the park and you know it. Get going before I get seriously rough with you.”
    With a suppressed groan the Indian plunged forward as if a sword had slashed into him. Then his body jerked upward again and, writhing and moaning, he felt for his tortured shoulder. The policeman now stepped in front of him and grinned maliciously. Great tears of pain streamed down the Indian’s face. But he said nothing. He didn’t get up. He remained sitting where he was, for he like any other citizen was entitled to his park seat. No one could deny his right to sit on the bench, however ragged he might be and however many elegant caballeros and señoritas might be strolling about to enjoy the cool of the evening and listen to the bandstand music.
    Yes, the Indian knew that he was a citizen of a free country, where a millionaire had no more right to occupy a park bench than