to the place.  Matanzas appeared poor and squalid, depressingly wretched; its streets were foul and the Plaza de la Libertad—­grim mockery of a name—­was crowded with a throng such as it had never held in O’Reilly’s time, a throng of people who were, without exception, gaunt, listless, ragged.  There was no afternoon parade of finery, no laughter, no noise; the benches were full, but their occupants were silent, too sick or too weak to move.  Nor were there any romping children.  There were, to be sure, vast numbers of undersized figures in the square, but one needed to look twice to realize that they were not pygmies or wizened little old folks.  It was not strange that Jacket had compared them to gourds with legs, for all were naked, and most of them had bodies swollen into the likeness of pods or calabashes.  They looked peculiarly grotesque with their spidery legs and thin faces.

O’Reilly passed a damp hand across his eyes.  “God!” he breathed.  “She—­she’s one of these!”

He had not penetrated even thus far into the city without receiving a hint of what conditions must be, for in the outlying streets he had seen sights and smelled odors that had sickened him; but now that he was face to face with the worst, now that he breathed the very breath of misery, he could scarcely credit what he saw.  A stench, indescribably nauseating, assailed him and Jacket as they mingled with the crowd, for as yet their nostrils were unused to poverty and filth.  It was the rancid odor that arises from unwashed, unhealthy bodies, and it testified eloquently to the living-conditions of the prisoners.  Hollow eyes and hopeless faces followed the two new-comers as they picked their way slowly along.

The reconcentrados overran Matanzas in an unclean swarm; streets and plazas were congested with them, for no attempt was made to confine them to their quarters.  Morning brought them streaming down from the suburban slopes where they lived, evening sent them winding back; their days were spent in an aimless search for food.  They snatched at crumbs and combed the gutters for crusts.  How they managed to exist, whence came the food that kept life in their miserable bodies, was a mystery, even to the citizens of the city; no organized effort had been made to care for them and there was insufficient surplus food for half their number.  Yet somehow they lived and lingered on.

Of course the city was not entirely peopled by the starving—­as a matter of fact they formed scarcely one-fifth of the normal civil population—­and the life of the city was going on a good deal as usual.  Stores were open, at least there was a daily train from Habana, and the barracks were full of Spanish troops.  It was from off the wastage of this normal population that these fifteen thousand prisoners were forced to live.  Even this wastage was woefully inadequate, merely serving to prolong suffering by making starvation slower.