“‘I thank you, Captain,’ said Kearny quietly.  ’I will try to make it the best handicap I ever ran.’

“By noon the next day the submerged Gatling was rescued, as Kearny had promised.  Then Carlos and Manuel Ortiz and Kearny (my lieutenants) distributed Winchesters among the troops and put them through an incessant rifle drill.  We fired no shots, blank or solid, for of all coasts Esperando is the stillest; and we had no desire to sound any warnings in the ear of that corrupt government until they should carry with them the message of Liberty and the downfall of Oppression.

“In the afternoon came a mule-rider bearing a written message to me from Don Rafael Valdevia in the capital, Aguas Frias.

“Whenever that man’s name comes to my lips, words of tribute to his greatness, his noble simplicity, and his conspicuous genius follow irrepressibly.  He was a traveller, a student of peoples and governments, a master of sciences, a poet, an orator, a leader, a soldier, a critic of the world’s campaigns and the idol of the people in Esperando.  I had been honoured by his friendship for years.  It was I who first turned his mind to the thought that he should leave for his monument a new Esperando—­a country freed from the rule of unscrupulous tyrants, and a people made happy and prosperous by wise and impartial legislation.  When he had consented he threw himself into the cause with the undivided zeal with which he endowed all of his acts.  The coffers of his great fortune were opened to those of us to whom were entrusted the secret moves of the game.  His popularity was already so great that he had practically forced President Cruz to offer him the portfolio of Minister of War.

“The time, Don Rafael said in his letter, was ripe.  Success, he prophesied, was certain.  The people were beginning to clamour publicly against Cruz’s misrule.  Bands of citizens in the capital were even going about of nights hurling stones at public buildings and expressing their dissatisfaction.  A bronze statue of President Cruz in the Botanical Gardens had been lassoed about the neck and overthrown.  It only remained for me to arrive with my force and my thousand rifles, and for himself to come forward and proclaim himself the people’s saviour, to overthrow Cruz in a single day.  There would be but a half-hearted resistance from the six hundred government troops stationed in the capital.  The country was ours.  He presumed that by this time my steamer had arrived at Quintana’s camp.  He proposed the eighteenth of July for the attack.  That would give us six days in which to strike camp and march to Aguas Frias.  In the meantime Don Rafael remained my good friend and compadre en la causa de la libertad.

“On the morning of the 14th we began our march toward the sea-following range of mountains, over the sixty-mile trail to the capital.  Our small arms and provisions were laden on pack mules.  Twenty men harnessed to each Gatling gun rolled them smoothly along the flat, alluvial lowlands.  Our troops, well-shod and well-fed, moved with alacrity and heartiness.  I and my three lieutenants were mounted on the tough mountain ponies of the country.