e day of that Cimatario
scrimmage, I found him on the battlefield, and he had been wounded. But
he didn't seem to know it. He didn't even seem to know that the shells
were still banging all around him."

"An _old_ coward, too!" someone muttered.

"But wait. He used to be one thing worse, one thing more, than a coward.
He was a miser, and such a miser that he _made_ himself face
danger. You should have seen him running a blockade, with the Yankees
chasing behind. He trembled--I tell you, he trembled like a withered
cottonwood leaf on a broken stem. Yet he whined against stoking with
turpentine, because it cost a little more. I'd 'a' thought, I did then,
that the miser was in his bones until the last trumpet. But to-night,
back in that tent just now----"

"Well?"

"Well, he _refused_ money! He refused _gold_! He didn't seem
to know what it was, any more than he did bullets a month ago. Escobedo
asked him his price, and shoved a glittering heap across the table at
him. You saw how he acted when we offered him something to eat? Well, he
looked the same way at the gold. He acted impatient. He didn't want to
see anything except Lopez. But you'd have called it a miser's eagerness,
the way he watched that Lopez. Only a miser don't exult when it's
someone else who pockets the money."

"Maybe they'll divide?"

"Not much, because Murgie could have had his share over and above. No,
it wasn't that. It wasn't the gold. He was greedy--for a soul! He wanted
to see Lopez _bought_, and no hitch. And when it was done, he wet
those catfish lips of his with his tongue. I believe the devil in hell
must look just that way when he gets some poor sinner. But to think of
that old skinflint, to think of that old feeble cowardly shark not
_knowing_ danger, not _knowing_ money----"

"Come, Din," the parson's blessed, cheery voice interrupted, "let's
hurry back and wash our hands. Then we'll _all_ feel better."

While the six Americans rode gloomily away from what they had done, and
from their own thoughts as they best could, a stealthy company was
forming under the trees among the tents of the Republican general. After
a time the seeming spectres began to move in unison, an undulating wave
that spread as the grayish shadow of a low hanging cloud. The dim
figures slowly swept the little space of valley, on toward the steep
slope of La Cruz, and soon they were climbing, silently creeping, nearer
and nearer the dark walls above.

Two seeme