is terrible abilities in a hand-to-hand engagement. It was
this very notoriety that had attracted the insurgents' attention to him,
and led to his downfall.

[Illustration: "CABLE THE PRESIDENT! WHAT A JOKE!"]

The little brown men stood in awe of this black demon, and wanted him on
their side. His military training and reputation as a fighter would be
of inestimable value. With their usual craft the insurgent officials
went about to wean the soldier from his allegiance, and by the aid of
the _mestiza_ beauty, Mercedes Martinez, succeeded in their purpose.
Between retreat and reveille of one July night, Private Wilson, led by
visions of love and a brigadier-general's star, took to the hills. He
longed to emulate the black renegade, Fagan, but having none of Fagan's
"foxiness" or ability, he was soon laid by the heels. Men of his own
squadron took him. He demanded at first to be treated as befitted his
rank; but none of his self-importance went with his black captors.
"We'll brigidiale-gene'al yer, yer black scound'al," they remarked
cheerfully, as they stripped off his tinsel stars. "Yer oughter be
lynched."

They "Gen'al Wilsoned" him until he was sick of it and begged them to
stop. Then, when they got back to the station, they popped him into the
"jigger" along with privates charged with sassing the cook and other
heinous offenses--a most humiliating experience for a brigadier general.
Now he must die; and it came to him that it was as hard for a general
officer to die as ever it was for a private.

[Illustration: "THE CIRCLE CLOSED IN AS THE SEA SURGES UP UPON THE
LAND"]

When his son had disappeared, old Sergeant Wilson had borne himself
proudly, even in the face of rumors and insinuations. His boy would not
desert. That he might have gone outside the lines to see some "lady
friend" and been captured, yes; but no desertion. Even when tales of his
lurid doings out in the province began to come in, old Jeremiah had not
faltered in his faith. They were lies, all of them, or it was some other
man. Nor when Buff was taken, with his patent-leather boots and tin
stars, was the old man shaken; for the explanation that the private gave
as to how he had been conjured was easier for Wilson to believe than
that his "baby" had been false to his salt. But now the case was
different. The disgrace of being parent to a "bobtailed" and condemned
criminal was as the bitterness of death.

Up to now, for all his hard sixty years