s limbs grew
tense, and a hideous joy overspread his face.

"'But at sunrise of the nineteenth you will execute the sentence already
approved.'"

The prisoners were not to be deceived by false hopes. There would be no
further appeal. The last, the final decision, had been made.

"I have signed it, I believe, Colonel Driscoll?"

"Yes."

"Then seal it again, and hurry! Good-bye, sir, good-bye."

When Driscoll was gone, the Benemerito of America turned to the grinning
hyena-like old man who was his visitor. His own dark features were
passionless, impenetrable.

"You observe, senor," he said, "that Justice does not require
corrupting, nor even a memory. So let El Chaparrito add this to his
philosophy, that he need not boast again of an infallible spur to civic
loyalty, for he will never find it, nor I. And yet--there is
patriotism."

CHAPTER XIX

IN ARTICULO MORTIS

"The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and majesty
of the soul.... Man cannot be happy and strong until he lives
in the present."--_Emerson._

For Maximilian it was the eve of execution. The soul feels that there is
much to decide at such a time, but under the nettling merciless load the
soul will either flounder pitifully and decide nothing, else lie numb
and in a half death vaingloriously believe that it has decided
everything. So may the condemned be open-eyed or blind. Or, according to
the police reporter, be either coward or stoic. But it really depends in
large measure on whether realization be dulled, or no.

Maximilian had too late come to understand that his anointed flesh was
violable at all. He learned it only when the death watch was actually
set on his each remaining breath. And now he was _en capilla_, in
the chapel of the doomed; he, Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, Archduke of
Austria, Prince of Hungary and Bohemia, Count of Hapsburg, Prince of
Lorraine, Emperor of Mexico, even He!

They had given him the tower room of Queretaro's old Capuchin church,
and against the wall was an improvised altar. But the sacrament waited.
The tapers on the snow-white cloth were as yet unlighted. Instead the
Most Serene Archduke--Emperor no longer--read from a battered volume of
Universal History, which, with a book's queer vagaries, had strayed into
his cell. He read how Charles of England had died, then he paused,
blinking at the two candles on the rough table. They were vague shapes,
they were horrors, which he now bega