“I'm here to see a girl,” I said. “I'm not an enemy of the people.”

     Another young man came around the corner of the hut. He was carrying a rifle. I saw the curved clip, the wood stock. It was an AK.

     The first one grabbed me by the wrist and yanked me down the steps. They exchanged a couple of sharp bursts of words. Something shone around the neck of the second one: a silver crucifix that hung from a leather thong. There was more to the shine: a tiny glass vial, liquid-filled, with a cap of silver filigree. At his hip a knife handle grew out of a long, broad, wooden scabbard.

     He turned me around. The muzzle of the rifle bumped me hard in the back, and bumped me a second time. He wanted me to walk. I walked. The one with the pistol jumped up into Rosita's hut, and in a few seconds jumped down and went into the hut next door.

     From the shoves and bumps in my back, I guessed that the one with the rifle wanted me to go toward the courtyard. I did, and he stopped pushing. Up and down the irregular rows of huts I could see more vigilantes going in and out of doorways, sometimes coming out alone, other times dragging out men and herding them toward the front of the barrio. About half a dozen other riflemen were waiting in the courtyard. They lined up the ones they had taken from the huts. They held their guns on the line, and they made me join it.

     The line expanded for a few minutes until it contained fifty or sixty men, all about the same age, early thirties. The bustle in the barrio simmered down. More vigilantes came out to the courtyard as they finished searching the huts; they must have gone through every one.

     One vigilante walked out to face us in the line. He was a short, round figure, who strode with a stumpy swagger. If vigilantes had officers, he was one. A name wriggled out of my memory. From the Star: a certain Baldomero Capas.