entry line toward the Alameda. When they
returned, a stranger accompanied them, a little distance apart.

"It's true," Driscoll whispered to those who had staid. "The trenches
are filled with townsmen. _He_ took me."

The Americans glanced once the stranger's way, and grunted. He was a
large man, hidden to the eyes in a Spanish cloak. For all the charity of
darkness, he seemed ill at ease, and held himself from them, a marked
figure, alone. A leprosy in himself tainted his every thought. He would
not willingly come near any man. He understood English, unhappily now
for him, and Boone's warning as they mounted seared like vitriol. "Look
out, Harry, don't touch the filthy skut! It'll take the rotting of death
to clean your fingers." After that, even Murguia drew involuntarily away
from the stranger.

They circled the town widely, having only Republican challenges to
quiet, and they dismounted under the trees which shade the valley to the
northeast, between the Sangremal, or mound of La Cruz, and the
besiegers' range of hills. Here, under La Cruz's steep bluff, the
Republican general-in-chief had his quarters, and here he kept a hawk's
jealous watch on the walls above, where slept his country's invader.

Open battle is clear honor, so reckoned; but it takes a brave man to
dive for a pearl in slime. Driscoll was the one to conduct Murguia and
his gloomy companion into the presence of General Escobedo. When he
rejoined the other five outside the tent, he was alone.

"Well, come on," he said as he mounted under the trees. "We needn't stay
for the rest of it, thank God."

For a while they rode in silence back toward their camp. They passed
under the aqueduct and entered the open plain. Then the parson stretched
out his hand to the pommel of Driscoll's saddle.

"Well?" he ventured softly.

"Well, Clem, it's done."

The others crowded their horses nearer.

"I want to tell you all," Driscoll abruptly began again. "I want to tell
you that I've just seen the strangest thing of my whole life, right back
there in that tent. I--well, it's simply flattened me out!"

"You mean Lopez, Din?" one asked tentatively.

"Lopez? No, no, there's nothing strange in him. Any low hound will sell
out to save his hide. No, Dan, I mean the other. I mean the old man.
He's the one who used to run the blockade off Mobile, and a
whiter-livered, more contemptible old grandmother I never hope to see
anywhere, no, never! Yet not a month ago, th