hes about not deserting intends now to sacrifice these poor
helpless devils? Prove it!"

Murguia had touched neither lover nor soldier. But what man was here, in
boots and woolen shirt, puffing angrily at a corncob, yet sitting in
judgment supreme on the proud Hapsburg himself? Blindly stumbling,
Murguia had touched the inexplicable man who was of stone, and the
baffled fiend that was in him leaped up with a cry of glee.

"To prove it?" he cried, "Ai, then Lopez shall walk with you in our
outer trenches. For in them you shall see the doomed townsmen
themselves, a thousand townsmen, sleeping there until the dawn.
Afterward, when Maximilian is safe, they who are still alive will be
free to surrender."

"And then----" But Driscoll knew the temper of the siege. What with the
chief prize lost, there would be scant mercy for surrendered townsmen.

"God in heaven," he muttered fervently, "if there's any to suffer, it
might as well be the guilty one, and a thousand times better one than
one thousand! A man's a man, or alleged to be!--Murgie, you wait here,
I'm going to call the others."

The others came, and heard. It was the court en banc, five Missourians
and a Kansan. And the culprit was a Caesar. But they hewed forth their
Justice as rugged and huge, and as true, as would the outlaw, Michel
Angelo. Like him, they were their own law. Nor were they nice gentlemen,
these Homeric men who spat tobacco. Finding their goddess pandered to by
those who were nice gentlemen, and finding the gift of these a pretty
scarf over her eye, they roughly tore it away. For them she was not that
kind of a woman.

"W'y, this prince is no Christian," Crittenden announced in querulous
discovery.

"One thousand loyally dying for their sovereign," Daniel mused, his
romantic soul wavering. "Sho!" he cried the instant after, "that thing's
out-dated!"

"And the prince there----" began the Kansan angrily.

"May just go--to--the--devil!"

All swung round on one of their number. It was the parson himself who
had pronounced sentence.

Then they set out under the stars to attend to it.

CHAPTER XVII

UNDER A SPANISH CLOAK

"What misadventure is so early up,
That calls our person from our morning's rest?"
--_Romeo and Juliet_.

Just within their own bivouac four Missourians waited with eight horses.
Driscoll and Boone, and the small limping shadow of Murguia between
them, went on outside the s