It was some time before O’Reilly spoke; then he said, quietly:  “I am not going back.  I am going to stay here and look for Rosa.”

“So!” exclaimed the colonel.  “Well, why not?  So long as we do not know precisely what has happened to her, we can at least hope.  But, if I were you, I would rather think of her as dead than as a prisoner in some concentration camp.  You don’t know what those camps are like, my friend, but I do.  Now I shall leave you.  One needs to be alone at such an hour—­eh?” With a pressure of his hand, Colonel Lopez walked away into the darkness.

Judson and his adventurous countryman did not see O’Reilly that night, nor, in fact, did any one.  But the next morning he appeared before General Gomez.  He was haggard, sick, listless.  The old Porto-Rican had heard from Lopez in the mean time; he was sympathetic.

“I am sorry you came all the way to hear such bad news,” he said.  “War is a sad, hopeless business.”

“But I haven’t given up hope,” O’Reilly said.  “I want to stay here and—­and fight.”

“I inferred as much from what Lopez told me.”  The general nodded his white head.  “Well, you’ll make a good soldier, and we shall be glad to have you.”  He extended his hand, and O’Reilly took it gratefully.

The city of Matanzas was “pacified.”  So ran the boastful bando of the captain-general.  And this was no exaggeration, as any one could see from the number of beggars there.  Of all his military operations, this “pacification” of the western towns and provinces was the most conspicuously successful and the one which gave Valeriano Weyler the keenest satisfaction; for nowhere did rebellion lift its head—­except, perhaps, among the ranks of those disaffected men who hid in the hills, with nothing above them but the open sky.  As for the population at large, it was cured of treason; it no longer resisted, even weakly, the law of Spain.  The reason was that it lay dying.  Weyler’s cure was simple, efficacious—­it consisted of extermination, swift and pitiless.

Poverty had been common in Matanzas, even before the war, but now there were so many beggars in the city that nobody undertook to count them.  When the refugees began to pour in by the thousands, and when it became apparent that the Government intended to let them starve, the better citizens undertook an effort at relief; but times were hard, food was scarce, and prices high.  Moreover, it soon transpired that the military frowned upon everything like organized charity, and in consequence the new-comers were, perforce, abandoned to their own devices.  These country people were dumb and terrified at the misfortunes which had overtaken them; they wandered the streets in aimless bewilderment, fearful of what blow might next befall.  They were not used to begging, and therefore they did not often implore alms; but all day long they asked for work, for bread, that their little ones might live.  Work, however, was even scarcer than food, and the time soon came when they crouched upon curbs and door-steps, hopeless, beaten, silently reproachful of those more fortunate than they.  Their eyes grew big and hollow; their outstretched hands grew gaunt and skinny.  The sound of weeping women and fretting babies became a common thing to hear.