The American consul, Major Roman, pleaded earnestly, but vainly, for mercy. M. Calvo would not interfere. Gaston in the hour of trial bore himself with manly fortitude, begging only, and not in vain, to be spared the indignity of dying with bound hands and bandaged eyes. The faith of his childhood returned to him, and his lifelong unrest shaped itself into perfect peace and resignation. The "old nobility," too, spoke out in his farewell letter to his brother, a curious blending of worldly pride, Christian humility, and philosophic fatalism. "It is my loyalty to my word that has dug my grave.... A mysterious chain, beginning at the cradle, leads to the tomb, and life is but a link thereof.... M. Calvo will bear witness that I died as became a gentleman.... To-morrow morning I shall have burned my last cap and fired my last cartridge.... Tell your children that Uncle Gaston died with a priest at his side, and that yet Uncle Gaston was a brave man.... If any wonder that I submit to this death, you may say that I look upon a suicide as a deserter.... I go to death a gentleman, and I die a Christian." The philosophy of this dying chevalier throws a little light upon his strange character. He died with touching and simple bravery, on August 12, 1854, at the age of thirty-six. Eleven years afterwards another and more imposing filibuster, lured to Mexico, partly by the intrigues of the same commercial house which had held the glittering bait before the eyes of poor Gaston, died with equal firmness at the hands of his executioners. Maximilian of Austria, Prim of Spain, and Napoleon of France, all played with fire, like the ill-fated Count Gaston Raoulx de Raousset-Boulbon, and all, like him, suffered. But another and stranger being had witnessed the bootless expedition to Guaymas in 1852, and drawn his own false moral from the example before him--with what results will be told hereafter. CHAPTER V William Walker--Boyhood and education--Doctor, Lawyer, Journalist-- Goes to California--Personal appearance and characteristics--Departure of the Sonora Expedition--A government proclaimed--Stern discipline-- Retreat from Sonora--Bad news at San Vincente--The adventurers cross the boundary--Walker resumes the pen. While De Boulbon, resting upon his fruitless victory of Hermosillo, awaited at San Francisco a chance to profit by the turn of the cards in Mexico, he was offered, and declined, a subordinate command in an expedition planned and conducted by the greatest of modern filibusters.