I knew that the only men of ours still outside of the city were a few scouts, but I could not let Fiske suspect that, so I whipped out my notebook and wrote: “To commanders of all military posts: Pass bearer, Joseph Fiske, his family, servants, and baggage-train. “ROYAL MACKLIN, “Vice-President of Honduras” I tore out the page and gave it him, and he read it carefully and bowed. “Does this include my friends?” he asked, nodding toward the Isthmian men. “You can pass them off as your servants,” I answered, and he smiled grimly. The men had formed around the gun, and it was being pushed toward me, but as I turned to meet it I was again halted, this time by young Fiske, who rode his horse in front of mine, and held out his hand. “You must shake hands with me!” he cried, “I acted like a cad.” He bent forward, raising his other arm to shield his face from the storm. “I say, I acted like a cad,” he shouted, “and I ask your pardon.” I took his hand and nodded. At the same moment as we held each other’s hands the window of the carriage was pushed down and his sister leaned out and beckoned to me. Her face, beaten by the rain, and with her hair blown across it, was filled with distress. “I want to thank you,” she cried. “Thank you,” she repeated, “for my brother. I thank you. I wanted you to know.” She stretched out her hand and I took it, and released it instantly, and as she withdrew her face from the window of the carriage, I dug my spurs into my pony and galloped on with the gun. What followed is all confused. I remember that we reached the third and last post just after the men had abandoned it, but that we overtook them, and with them fought our way through the streets. But through what streets, or how long it took us to reach the palace I do not know. No one thing is very clear to me. Even the day after, I remembered it only as a bad dream, in which I saw innumerable, dark-skinned faces pressing upon me with open mouths, and white eyeballs; lit by gleams of lightning and flashes of powder. I remember going down under my pony and thinking how cool and pleasant it was in the wet mud, and of being thrown back on him again as though I were a pack-saddle, and I remember wiping the rain out of my eyes with a wet sleeve, and finding the sleeve warm with blood. And then there was a pitchy blackness through which I kept striking at faces that sprang out of the storm, faces that when they were beaten down were replaced by other faces; drunken, savage, exulting. I remember the ceaseless booming of the thunder that shook the houseslike an earthquake, the futile popping of revolvers, the whining shells overhead, the cries and groans, the Spanish oaths, and the heavy breathing of my men about me, and always just in front of us, the breathless whir of the gatling.