He had left for Queretero, to
join Miramon there.

Bazaine, the last to quit the shore, climbed aboard his ship, and taking
one final look for a chance horseman with word to wait yet longer, and
seeing none, gave the order to weigh anchor.

CHAPTER XI

FATALITY AND THE MISSOURIAN

"Si debbe ai colpi della sua fortuna
Voltar il viso di lagrime asciutto."
--_Machiavelli._

The mountain villages were arming. Bronzed men, savagely joyful, poured
from under roofs of thatch, strapping on great black lead-weighted
belts. In the corrals others lassoed horses. It looked like a sudden
changing from peaceful highland domesticity, as the clans of Scotland or
the cantons of Helvetia might gather. But these men were not rising to
defend their homes. The hamlets clustered among the crags were their
barracks, nothing more. The wildest canyons of the Sierra Madre del Sur,
far away in the rocky southwestern corner of the continent, were only
their camping grounds, their refuge. To be armed was their natural
state. They were fighters by occupation. They were an army. Unceasing
hardship and constant peril had seasoned them, and their discipline was
perfect, unconscious, because it came from the herding instinct of
wolves. During years they had waged war against a ruthless foe, and
they, too, were relentless. The penalty of defeat was massacre.

The foe of this army was a greater army, and between the two it was a
duel of chieftains, of General Regules in the Sierra, of General Mendez
on the plain. Deadlier antagonists might not be imagined. Mendez, he who
had shot two Republican generals under the Black Decree, was above all
men the likeliest to hold stubborn Michoacan for the Empire. But even he
failed, because the man against him was not less a man than he, because
also the spark of resistance to sceptre and crosier never dies out in
Michoacan.

The man as good as he was Regules. A Spaniard, Regules had fought with
the Catholic Don Carlos. And now, he was suffering for Mexican Liberals
the most that any general can suffer, defeat after defeat, and sometimes
annihilation. But he was a Marion, a Fabius. He knew the mountain
recesses as no one else, even better than Mendez, who was born among
them, and here he would gather fugitives, draft every straggler, until
in time he sallied forth again to badger his arch enemy. He hoped only
to exist till that day when the French should leave Empire