THE FEU AO 
coarsest specimens of humanity; but the subject — I use 
the singular, mark you, for alas! there was only one, 
discussed in all its phases perhaps, but only one single 
subject — assassination. The accounts of different mur¬ 
ders, in some of which the men boasted they had taken 
part, were nightly repeated in their minutest details to 
the assembled crowd, myself excluded, sitting around the 
fire, while the feijao (beans) so loved by them were being 
stewed for hours and hours in a cauldron. 
There was one story of a murder of which one of the 
men was particularly proud, in which he reproduced the 
facial expression as well as the smothered shrieks of the 
horrified victim. He gave a vivid description of how 
the blood squirted out like a fountain from the jugular 
vein of the throat as it was being severed. That story, 
most graphically narrated, I admit, had taken the fancy 
of that cruel crowd. Almost every evening, during the 
entire time those men were with me, many long months, 
I heard that story repeated amid roars of laughter from 
the company. Murder, when applied to others, was 
evidently for them a great joke! 
Inconsiderate to a degree, they would get up and 
sing at the top of their voices in the middle of the night, 
and keep everybody awake while the feijao was stewing. 
It took hours and hours before those awful black beans 
had boiled sufficiently to be edible, and the man who 
acted as cook had to sit up the whole night to stir them 
up and watch them. Yes, the position of cook for the 
camp was not an enviable one, for it meant marching 
all day and sitting up all night to prepare the feijao for 
the following day. Yet the love they had for their feijao 
— I never ate the beastly stuff myself -— was so great 
that those lazy devils, who could not be induced on any 
account to do other work, did not mind at all spending 
sleepless nights in watching over the steaming cauldron. 
With the feijao were placed in the pot large pieces of 
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