But now, while the city burst into flames, and the smoke went up as from a volcano, the American garrison broke loose, rifled the liquor stores and lay drunk in the blazing streets, so the allied army swooped down, cutting off the retreat to the lake. Henningsen, veteran of the Carlist and Hungarian revolts, a knight errant of lost causes, took three weeks to fight his way three miles, before Walker could cover his embarkment on the lake. There had been four hundred men in the garrison, but only one hundred and fifty answered the roll-call in their refuge on the Isle of Omotepe. In the plaza of the capital city they had planted a spear, and on the spear hung a rawhide with this inscription:-- “Here was Granada!” In taking that heap of blackened ruins four thousand out of six thousand of the allies had perished; but even they were more fortunate than a Costa Rican army of invasion, which killed fifty of the filibusters, at a cost of ten thousand men slain by war and pestilence. It always worked out that the killing of one filibuster cost on the average eight of his adversaries. Four months followed of confused fighting, in which the Americans slowly lost ground, until at last they were besieged in the town of Rivas, melting the church bells for cannon-balls, dying at their posts of starvation. The neighboring town of San Jorge was held by two thousand Costa Ricans, and these Walker attempted to dislodge. His final charge was made with fifteen men into the heart of the town. No valor could win against such odds, and the orderly retreat began on Rivas. Two hundred men lay in ambush to take Walker at a planter’s house by the wayside, and as he rode wearily at the head of his men they opened fire from cover at a range of fifteen yards. Walker reined in his horse, fired six revolver-shots into the windows, then rode on quietly erect while the storm of lead raged about him, and saddle after saddle was emptied. A week afterward the allies assaulted Rivas, but left six hundred men dead in the field, so terrific was the fire from the ramparts. It was in these days that a British naval officer came under flag of truce from the coast to treat for Walker’s surrender. “I presume, sir,” was the filibuster’s greeting, “that you have come to apologize for the outrage offered to my flag, and to the commander of the Nicaraguan schooner-of-war _Granada_.” “If they had another schooner,” said the Englishman afterward, “I believe they would have declared war on Great Britain.” Then the United States navy treated with this peppery little lawyer, and on the first of May, 1857, he grudgingly consented to being rescued. During his four years’ fight for empire, Walker had enlisted three thousand five hundred Americans--and the proportion of wounds was one hundred and thirty-seven for every hundred men. A thousand fell. The allied republics had twenty-one thousand soldiers and ten thousand Indians--and lost fifteen thousand killed.