We have already given the reader a sufficient idea of Lorenzo Bezan, for him to understand that he was a person possessed of more than ordinary manliness and personal beauty.  A distinguished and chivalric bearing was one of his main characteristics, and you could hardly have passed him in a crowd, without noting his fine manly physical appearance, and strikingly intelligent features.  Fired with the new ambition which we have referred to in the closing of the last chapter, Lorenzo Bezan arrived in the capital of his native land, ready and eager to engage in any enterprise that called for bravery and daring, and which in return promised honor and preferment.

Tacon, governor-general of Cuba, had marked his qualities well, and therefore wrote by the same conveyance that took the young soldier to Spain, to the head of the war department, and told them of what stuff he was composed, and hinted at the possibility of at once placing him in the line of his rank, and of giving him, if possible, active service to perform.  Tacon’s opinion and wishes were highly respected at Madrid, and Lorenzo Bezan found himself at once placed in the very position he would have desired-the command of as fine a company, of the regular service as the army could boast, and his rank and position thoroughly restored.

There was just at that period a revolt of the southern and western provinces of Spain, which, owing to inactivity on the part of government, had actually ripened into a regularly organized rebellion against the throne.  News at last reached the queen that regular bodies of troops had been raised and enlisted, under well known leaders, and that unless instant efforts were made to suppress the rising, the whole country would be shortly involved in civil war.  In this emergency the troops, such its could be spared, were at once detached from the capital and sent to various points in the disaffected region to quell the outbreak.  Among the rest was the company of Lorenzo Bezan and two others of the same regiment, and being the senior officer, young as he was, he was placed in command of the battalion, and the post to which he was to march at once, into the very heart of the disaffected district.

Having arrived in the neighborhood of the spot to which his orders had directed him, he threw his whole force, some less than three hundred men, into one of the old Moorish fortifications, still extant, and with the provisions and ammunition he had brought with him, entrenched himself, and prepared to scour and examine the surrounding country.  His spies soon brought him intelligence of the defeat of two similar commands to his own, sent out at the same time to meet the insurgents; and, also, that their partial success had very naturally elated them in the highest degree.  That they were regularly organized into regiments, with their stands of colors, and proper officers, and that one regiment had been sent to take the fort where he was, and would shortly be in the neighborhood.