d and with a broken sword.' On what happened to the general
afterwards Olivier is as silent as Captain Keith."

"Well," grunted Flambeau, "get on to the next bit of evidence."

"The next evidence," said Father Brown, "took some time to find, but it
will not take long to tell. I found at last in an almshouse down in the
Lincolnshire Fens an old soldier who not only was wounded at the Black
River, but had actually knelt beside the colonel of the regiment when
he died. This latter was a certain Colonel Clancy, a big bull of an
Irishman; and it would seem that he died almost as much of rage as of
bullets. He, at any rate, was not responsible for that ridiculous raid;
it must have been imposed on him by the general. His last edifying
words, according to my informant, were these: 'And there goes the damned
old donkey with the end of his sword knocked off. I wish it was his
head.' You will remark that everyone seems to have noticed this detail
about the broken sword blade, though most people regard it somewhat
more reverently than did the late Colonel Clancy. And now for the third
fragment."

Their path through the woodland began to go upward, and the speaker
paused a little for breath before he went on. Then he continued in the
same business-like tone:

"Only a month or two ago a certain Brazilian official died in England,
having quarrelled with Olivier and left his country. He was a well-known
figure both here and on the Continent, a Spaniard named Espado; I knew
him myself, a yellow-faced old dandy, with a hooked nose. For various
private reasons I had permission to see the documents he had left; he
was a Catholic, of course, and I had been with him towards the end.
There was nothing of his that lit up any corner of the black St. Clare
business, except five or six common exercise books filled with the diary
of some English soldier. I can only suppose that it was found by the
Brazilians on one of those that fell. Anyhow, it stopped abruptly the
night before the battle.

"But the account of that last day in the poor fellow's life was
certainly worth reading. I have it on me; but it's too dark to read it
here, and I will give you a resume. The first part of that entry is full
of jokes, evidently flung about among the men, about somebody called the
Vulture. It does not seem as if this person, whoever he was, was one of
themselves, nor even an Englishman; neither is he exactly spoken of as
one of the enemy. It sounds rather