TERRITORIES: The Pit

The crow of the fighting cock is Porto Rico's national anthem, sung from early dawn to murmurous dusk by spur-legged game-birds tethered in squalid door-yards all over the island. On Sundays the national anthem is stilled. Those sacks you see the natives carrying along the white roads on Sunday morning contain the coxcomb choir. They are going to the cockpits, where a knife, a flask of bitter liquor, volleys of cheers and curses, the chink of coin, the spurt of dust and blood —not always fowl blood—spell life's zest for the brown-skinned...

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