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To the Buzzards. With smoke still pluming into a clear sky, bandits not busy looting or loading lined up in the plaza to drink aguardiente from the local cantina. They hauled the little harmonium out of the church, tried to play it, failed, and smashed it with rifle butts. Then they found a phonograph. It provided music for a wild dance in the plaza's basketball court. Edelmira did not dance, and under her eye the bandits dared not seek village women for partners. So the men danced together, one cavorting wildly in a cassock he found in the priest's house.
By midafternoon the bandits were ready to leave. At the cemetery they buried their single casualty with full military honors. Then they marched away in good order, leaving smoldering ruins and 24 bodies. The surviving people of San Pedro stayed long enough to bury their own dead, to disinter the bandit's body and throw it to the buzzards. Then, the civil war's newest refugees,they straggled westward to seek shelter in neighboring towns.