t drop his idea of introducing, not only justice,
industry, peace, to the benighted continents, but also that pet dream
of his of a purer form of Christianity. Later on, the principal European
really in Sulaco, the engineer-in-chief of the railway, came riding up
the Calle, from the harbour, and was admitted to our conclave. Meantime,
the Junta of the Notables in the great sala was still deliberating;
only, one of them had run out in the corredor to ask the servant
whether something to eat couldn't be sent in. The first words the
engineer-in-chief said as he came into the boudoir were, 'What is
your house, dear Mrs. Gould? A war hospital below, and apparently a
restaurant above. I saw them carrying trays full of good things into the
sala.'

"'And here, in this boudoir,' I said, 'you behold the inner cabinet of
the Occidental Republic that is to be.'

"He was so preoccupied that he didn't smile at that, he didn't even look
surprised.

"He told us that he was attending to the general dispositions for the
defence of the railway property at the railway yards when he was
sent for to go into the railway telegraph office. The engineer of the
railhead, at the foot of the mountains, wanted to talk to him from his
end of the wire. There was nobody in the office but himself and the
operator of the railway telegraph, who read off the clicks aloud as the
tape coiled its length upon the floor. And the purport of that talk,
clicked nervously from a wooden shed in the depths of the forests,
had informed the chief that President Ribiera had been, or was being,
pursued. This was news, indeed, to all of us in Sulaco. Ribiera himself,
when rescued, revived, and soothed by us, had been inclined to think
that he had not been pursued.

"Ribiera had yielded to the urgent solicitations of his friends, and had
left the headquarters of his discomfited army alone, under the
guidance of Bonifacio, the muleteer, who had been willing to take the
responsibility with the risk. He had departed at daybreak of the third
day. His remaining forces had melted away during the night. Bonifacio
and he rode hard on horses towards the Cordillera; then they obtained
mules, entered the passes, and crossed the Paramo of Ivie just before a
freezing blast swept over that stony plateau, burying in a drift of
snow the little shelter-hut of stones in which they had spent the night.
Afterwards poor Ribiera had many adventures, got separated from his
guide, lost his m