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charge ordered them to hand over the man known as the Counselor, the mob attacked them, an act of utter foolhardiness in view of the fact that the police had rifles while they were armed only with sticks, sickles, stones, knives, and a couple of shotguns. But everything happened so fast that before they knew it the police found themselves surrounded, dispersed, pursued, beaten up, and injured, as they heard themselves being called “Republicans!” as though the word were an insult. They managed to shoulder their rifles and shoot, but even when men and women in rags fell to the ground, with their chests riddled with bullets or their heads blown off, nothing daunted the mob and soon the police from Bahia found themselves fleeing, dazed and bewildered by this incomprehensible defeat. They were later to say that among their assailants there were not only the fanatics and madmen that they had expected but also hardened criminals such as Pajeú with the slashed face and the bandit whose acts of cruelty had earned him the nickname of Satan João. Three police officers were killed and left unburied, food for the carrion birds of the Serra de Ovó eight rifles disappeared. Another policeman was drowned in the Masseté. The pilgrims did not pursue them. Instead, they concerned themselves with burying their five dead and caring for the wounded, as others, kneeling at the Counselor’s feet, offered their thanks to God. Until far into the night, the sound of weeping and prayers for the dead could be heard amid the graves dug in Severino Vianna’s maize field.
    When a second squad of Bahia Police, numbering sixty officers, better armed than the first, detrained in Serrinha, they discovered that there had been a subtle change in the attitude of the villagers toward men in uniform. For even though the enmity with which police were received in the towns when they came up into the hills to hunt bandits was nothing new to them, they had never been as certain as they were this time that obstacles would be deliberately put in their way. The provisions in the general stores had always just run out, even when they offered to pay a good price for them, and despite the high fee offered, no tracker in Serrinha would guide them. Nor was anyone able this time to give them the slightest lead as to the whereabouts of the band. And as the police staggered from Olhos D’Agua to Pedra Alta, from Tracupá to Tiririca and from there to Tucano and from there to Caraíba and Pontal and finally back again to Serrinha, being met with nothing but indifferent glances, contrite negatives, a shrug of the shoulders on the part of the cowherds, peasants, craftsmen, and women whom they came across on the road, they felt as though they were trying to lay their hands on a mirage. The band had not passed that way, no one had seen the dark-haired, dark-skinned man in the deep-purple habit and nobody remembered now that decrees had been burned in Natuba, nor had they heard about an armed encounter in Masseté. On returning to the capital of the state, safe and sound but thoroughly demoralized, the police officers reported that the horde of fanatics—fleetingly crystallized, like so many others, around a deeply devout woman or a preacher—had surely broken up and at this point, frightened by their own misdeeds, its members had no doubt scattered in all directions, after having perhaps killed their ringleader. Hadn’t that been what had happened so many times in the region?
    But they were mistaken. Even though events apparently repeated old patterns of history, this time everything was to be different. The penitents were now more united than ever, and far from having murdered the saint after the victory of Masseté, which they took to be a sign sent to them from on high, they revered him all the more. The morning after the encounter, the Counselor, who had prayed all night long over the graves of the dead rebels, had awakened them. They found him very downcast. He told