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Show of Spain, for we could have held this ship against an army. And the lean Indians filled out like dogs at a feast, and eyes brightened, and shoulders squared, and patriotism (lamed again, and strength came back to us strength of body and mind and spirit and the will to win was ours, and a desire to pit against the enemy this renewed vigor that belonged to us. We put away one more gargantuan meal a breakfast and took, each, two pistols and a musket and sufficient suffi-cient ammunition to carry us through a score of skirmishes, and then we set the torch to the good ship Santa Lucrecia in a dozen different places. We turned our faces southward toward the barrier range, where an enemy awaited us, and with songs of victory on our lips, we drove onward on-ward up the timbered slopes while flames spurted skyward from the doomed ship and, spreading into the jungle, fashioned a raging hell behind be-hind us. We emerged from the cover of the forest and fell upon the thin line that held the heights. They must have considered us shrieking demons from the fiery pit that we had left, for they broke, crying out in the fulness of their terrors, and cast their weapons away as useless against the imps who had just escaped from the blazing tumult that devoured the jungle. On we went, ever southward, down the forested incline that led toward the vast basin of Lake Valencia. East of Valencia we swept across the fields way. A simple thing Indeed," he jeered, "for La Torre and Morales, with all the available forces of Spain, await us on the plains of Carabobo." "Then we meet them there, Francisco?" Fran-cisco?" "Aye." He thought a moment. "I think La Torre made a mistake when he did not dispute our passage at Buena Vista ; he lost an advantage there. I I cannot help believing. Garde, that at Carabobo tomorrow, we stand or fall. The general stakes all on this last battle; we win an empire or we are for ever slaves." CHAPTER X The Battle of Carabobo I think Bolivar as a toastmaster was the peer of any man I have ever seen. It was his wont to bring his officers together once a week in what he termed a dinner, but which usually developed de-veloped into a well-ordered carouse, for wine and rum and other spirituous liquors were cheap and plentiful in Venezuela. Bolivar, demanding only obedience of his men, took no note of their morals; wherein, I think, lay one of the secrets of his amazing hold upon his soldiers. In the spacious hall of the adobe house that was his headquarters we were gathered on the night before the battle of Carabobo. Besides Bolivar there was the wise and suave Marino, chief of staff ; TJrdaneta, whom the general called Rafael, a faithful follower fol-lower of Bolivar, who, for many years after the death of the Liberator, served his country with brilliance and distinction; Paez, chief of the llaneros, Plaza, Cedeno, Colonel Pint, all smiles because of his questionably won decoration dec-oration ; Colonel Mackintosh, Colonel Ferrier, who, on the morrow, was destined des-tined to find the fatal bullet ; Captain Minchin, another Briton who fell upon the field of Carabobo ; Moore and Lindsay, Lind-say, English medicos; Captain Scott, Monahan, the swarthy Manuel, Francisco Fran-cisco and others names to conjure with in Venezuela. Santinl, the soldier, sol-dier, had not survived the storm that wrecked the Santa Lucrecia. Under the surface of laughter and badinage lay the tension of overwrought over-wrought nerves, for we felt the portent por-tent of the morrow's battle. Men were called upon for speeches or toasts. Colonel Pint, whose bloodshot blood-shot eyes showed the effect of the vast amount of wine that he had consumed, con-sumed, found unsteady feet and, swaying beyond the bounds of safe equilibrium, related the fragment of an amour, the questionable wit of which might have lifted laughter only out of wine-bemused minds. Manuel gave an account of my unsuccessful attempt in New Orleans to imitate San Isidro, and my equally unsuccessful unsuccess-ful effort to vanquish four men, which drew the attention of the gathered officers in my direction. I had never made a speech, nor offered a toast, but when Bolivar, encouraging en-couraging eyes upon me, said, "Should we not get the voice of the United States, a great- nation after which we hope to pattern our own?" I came slowly to my feet, my mind a blank, and tremors shaking me. Leaning against the table for support, I stared vacantly at the half-filled wine glass in my right hand, and Pini, noting my embarrassment, laughed harshly. "A speech," he cried gaily, "or if the Americano's mind refuses to function, func-tion, a toast. ... A toast to the Senorita to the lovely Lamartina !" A silence fell upon us a grim foreboding fore-boding silence for many of these men knew of my mad worship of the Senorita. Seno-rita. The look that I bent upon Pinl had nothing of friendship in it; it was more like a challenge. That he was drunk I knew, and that her name upon his lips gained nothing for a lady was a thing of equal certainty to me. Looking across the narrow table into the leering eyes of my tormentor, I felt the surge of an overwhelming fury, and before I had taken time to consider my act, or the consequences of it, I had cast the contents of my wine glass into his face. Then, while Pini spluttered in anger, I turned to Bolivar. "That, my general, is the voice of the United States, where men are i wont to look with reverence upon a woman. The amours of Colonel Pini" Pini came to his feet, his face flaming, flam-ing, eyes gleaming. "I will have his life for that, I'll run him through, I'll drive a sword !" I bowed, while Bolivar the furrows in his high forehead deepening and his heavy eyebrows drawing together j in a portentous frown considered us. 1 "I think," said Francisco coldly, I "that Colonel Pini forgets the wounded 1 arm of Major Garde; it has not yet I healed, and the major, therefore, would j be at a serious disadvantage." (TO BE CONTINUED.) pi5:j:Tav:rT:;-,TnaiT.aij,r.7ir:a!:T'fii- j THE VALE OFARAGON fred Mclaughlin Author of "The Blade of Picardy" Copyright by Bobbs-Merrlll Co. ' (WNU Service.) CHAPTER IX -14 ! The Spirit of the Dead j Of the six hundred and fifty men I who had gone so blithely to the investment in-vestment of the town of Maracay, scarce four hundred remained ; starvelings starve-lings trapped in a strip of jungle that lies hptween the Valencia range and the sea ; blocked on the north by the sea itself, on the south by an army j patrolling the road that followed the I crest of the range, and menaced in , the rear by an ever approaching body j of weli-accoutered and well-fed Span- Ish troops. Adolfo de Fuentes himself him-self led them, and it must have af- forded I ti a deal of joy. I "If we had Bolivar " Monahan j ventured. I Doctor Lindsay laughed. "Does our Irish Venezuelan patriot, who comes from Killarney, and who, therefore, mast believe in fairies, imagine that General Bolivar might free us from this impasse?" "Sure," said the Irishman ; "at a word from Simon Bolivar men will spring, full-armed, like spirits out of the earth. But we haven't the spirit of Bolivar with us now; Instead, we have a spineless jellyfish who sits and broods over his blunders, knowing that we face starvation or capture by the Puerto Cabello garrison when the army behind us shall have pushed us westward to the mouth of this funnel of jungle that holds us helpless." Ten days before this a vastly superior su-perior force had pushed us out of Maracay. Fighting every foot of the way we had been beaten back, ever back. Eastward and northward we had gone, contending desperately, hopelessly, yet never giving up ; each night finding us farther into the Spanish Span-ish area, weaker, less able to endure, with a morale that gave way with the slow passage of time. Between Colonel Pini and myself an armed truce existed. Whether, by some miraculous turn of good fortune, we won free, or whether the malevolent malevo-lent jungle or the Spaniards claimed us, the result to me would be the same; for the friendship of a few trusted aides of Bolivar might never save me in a court, because I was guilty and could not offer a defense. Yet no apprehension of what Pini might do to me could prevail against my happiness, because I had seen the Senorita again, had caught the tender cadences of her voice, had won forgiveness. for-giveness. As the days went by the shoulders of our soldiers drooped, the light went out of their eyes, and the flesh went off their bodies, for food we had almost al-most none; and the desperate heat of the overwhelming jungle sickeped them, and the gloom and silence of this dread desolation entered their souls, yet that vital spark still burned within them. We came, one day, to a great rent in the close-packed trees and the interlacing in-terlacing vines of our forest prison. It was such a path as some monster dragon of the deep, emerging from the sea, might have made in its passage through the jungle; yet we knew that no dragon of the deep existed, knew that no animal might have laid these mighty trees fiat and pushed others out of its path. I recalled the day of the storm, and the wreck of the Santa Lucrecia, and the dark bulk that had passed in the gloom as I fought for my life with the waves. I remembered that the tremendous thrust of the wind had lifted the ocean into the maze of woods, and had deposited de-posited me in a tree. The Santa Lucrecia, Lu-crecia, then, had freed herself from the clutches of the reef and, riding the elevated waters of the tidal wave, had driven over the fiat door of the jungle which lay only a few feet 1 above the level of the sea and had j found at last a grave in the fores' whence it had come. And the Santa Lucrecia, I remembered, had a cargo j of arms and ammunition and food! "Colonel Pini," said I, in the long I silence that had held us, "may not J this small army of ours given food ' and arms and powder and ball win I through the lines of Spain? If I fill thorn with food, and put weapons and ammunition into their hands ?" 1 "Are you mad?" he cried. "If 1 do these things, my colonel, ; may 1 ask that this court will be for-j for-j got, that my wounded arm and the : broken door at Maracay and the ! Senorita?" I "Lindsay and Captain Monahan may I witness," said Pini. and he smiled, ''my ! promise to forget Maracay if you ot-' ot-' tain the manna for these starving sol diers." "I will tell you. then, my colonel, ' that this path marks the first and last ! land passage of the Santa Lucrecia. : and if we only follow it we will come ! upon a store sufficient for an army." j I For three days we ate and rested ' and caroused, unmindful of the forces "Lindsay and Captain Monahan May Witness," Said Pini, Still Smiling. that were checkered with green and brown. Free, at last, of enemy interference, inter-ference, we skirted the lake and bent our steps toward the town of Tina-quillo, Tina-quillo, near which, we knew, would lie the lines of Bolivar, and where, before be-fore the sun had set, we fell, exhausted exhaust-ed but happy, into the arms of our own. Verily the spirit of the dead had armed the living! Storm-clouds were gathering in the south and east, and thunder rumbled along the crest of the Carabobo hills while we stood at attention, waiting for General Bolivar to pin upon the jacket of Colonel Pini the coveted Order Or-der of Liberators. He complimented the. colonel upon the courage of himself him-self and his men in breaking through the Spanish lines and taking the town of Maracay, and he offered mild apology apol-ogy that Paez and Plaza had failed to help him hold it. Francisco touched my elbow. "Do not your fingers ache. Garde, do not those capable hands of yours itch to take hold of Pini's throat?" "Why should they," said I, for I knew'' that Monahan had talked ; "did not Pini give me my life?" "For the Order of Liberators," he said, smiling, "a cherished decoration decora-tion . . . and to think that a man like Pinl should have got it." "As far as I am concerned, Francisco, Fran-cisco, our colonel may have it ; surely it will give him little joy." Now I remember re-member the look in Pini's eyes when they had rested on the Senorita, and a flame or rage scorched me. I wondered won-dered then if I would not yet have to deal with the colonel, and I hoped in my heart that I would. "Has there been any news of the Senorita, or of Polito?" Francisco's finger, I knew, was upon the pulse of Venezuela. "None, except that Adolfo is now in command of the Valencia garrison, and we may assume that the Senorita and her brother are there also." "It is good news, my friend, for Valencia is scarce twenty miles from here." "With only a Spanish army of seven or eight thousand soldiers barring our |