Vincent, because she was suddenly to him the woman, did what every man once in his life will do for one woman: he sacrificed his sense of humor. With all seriousness he stiffened up. “It was under my flag he was shot down. I’ve served under it. Give me another flag for Guatemala and I’ll go down there and those murderers shall die against a wall, with your flag flying over their heads, its shadow wavering at their feet on the yellow sand.” Maria Rivas, because she was the Woman in this case, understood perfectly. “A revolution?” she said, very quietly. He bent over her hand gravely and youthfully. His manner was confident, as if he saw very clearly what was to be done and knew how to do it, not as if he had promised a girl with tear stains on her cheeks to overturn a government because of a murder one afternoon on a steamer in a foreign port. This was the beginning of the affair. Its continuation was in a little town on the Guatemalan coast, where Vincent landed with a ton of munitions of war, marked “Manufactures of Metal,” and thirty ragged soldiers. A month later he had a thousand insurgents and twenty tons of munitions, and his blood had drunk in the fever that burns up the years in hours. The first thing Vincent did under its spell was to march on Ocos and take it. When the town was his and the _comandante_ in irons, the young man took out of his pocketbook a little list of names, made out in Maria Rivas’s hand. He compared this list with the list of prisoners, and ordered out a firing squad. Half an hour later the shadow of the flag made by the Woman in the Vallejo Street flat wavered over the sand on which lay six men in a tangle. Generalissimo Thomas Vincent went out into the sun and looked at the last postures of the six, and then out across the brimming waters of the Pacific. A mail steamer lay out there in the midst of a cluster of canoes, the American flag drooping from her staff. An Irishman in a major’s uniform came out of the cool of the barracks and stopped beside Vincent. “Another week ought to see us in the capital,” he said slowly. “But I don’t like this business, general. These beggars don’t amount to anything. Why did you order them shot?” A barefoot girl of some ten years crept around the corner of the sunbaked wall. She picked her way over the sand, darting hot glances fearfully at the two officers. Suddenly she stooped over the crooked body of one of the motionless ones. She tugged at the sleeve of a shirt, and as the face turned slightly upward to her effort, she fell to beating on the ground with both hands, and sobbed in the heat, dry-eyed.