rce her away, she
cried again, "Mercy ... Mercy ... Mercy...." A low murmuring grew on
every side. Maximilian flung open his cab door. But the same instant it
was slammed against him. He sank to his seat, with a stare of dumb pain
in his eyes that the priest beside him never afterward forgot. The woman
back there was Mejia's wife. And Maximilian had had one glimpse of the
husband's face. It was a face stretched to agony, deadened to the color
of lead.

"May I, may I--_pay_ for this!" moaned the one-time Emperor. "O
God, grant Thou that I do pay for this, hereafter!"

Beyond the last hovels of the suburbs, at the foot of the Cerro de las
Campanas, the condemned were told to alight. Here again there was a
throng, hundreds and hundreds of swarthy faces, blank in awed pity. One
gaping fellow pointed wonderingly.

"Look, there they are! There--los muertos!"

Maximilian overheard, and a cold shiver crossed his spine. To be
identified already as "the dead one!"

Then he beheld his coffin, there, the longest of the three being borne
up the hill. They were boxes of cheap wood, unpainted inside, smeared
with black on the outside. A wavy streak of carmine simulated the
drooping cord and golden tassels of richer caskets. It was the pomp and
circumstance that pertains to the humblest peon clay.

Four thousand serried bayonets squared the base of the hill, and made a
compact, bristling hedge to hold back the common people. Through it
marched the doomed Imperialists, each with his confessor and a platoon
of guards, and so toiled on up the slope. The archduke looked about him.
There were many privileged spectators within the cordon, but nowhere did
he see a former friend. All, all, had kept away, and in his heart he
knew that it was better so. He could not ask that much of them. But
stay--yes, a remembered figure caught his attention; a shriveled
decrepit figure. Here, too, mid every color Republican, he beheld in the
man's garb a last surviving uniform of the vanished Empire. It was,
however, scarcely to be distinguished as such. The red coat was
threadbare, and soiled with dust. The ragged green pantaloons, held by a
knotted rope, were grotesquely faded. Yet the prince, who had once
gloried in dashing regimentals and mistook them for power, was deeply
touched. He recognized a lone unit of what had been none other than the
Batallon del Emperador. He paused, to have a word with the miserable
derelict.

"So, you would be near m