Right here, however, the widow was led off into a common enough strategic mistake. Instead of turning her victorious energy upon the vacillating troop outside, she allowed herself to be hypnotised by the already thoroughly conquered. At the head of the stairs, pirouetting madly and roaring like a bull, was the be-kettled colonel, and upon him she turned her batteries. It was a wonderful exhibition. Things culinary flew through the air--three saucepans, a rolling-pin, a grill, a teapot, a pile of tin plates. Then came canned goods: tomatoes, pears, peaches; beef, roast and corned; mutton, chicken, hare, pork, peas, maize, string beans; jellies: apple, currant, lemon, cherry; jams: apricot, peach, grape, plum, lychee. Two hams and a small sack of flour came as an interregnum. Blind, deaf, helpless, the poor colonel swayed, doubled up, whirred, thrashed his arms beneath the avalanche. Resonant whang-angs of his headgear announced particularly brilliant shots; dull thuds more vital ones. At last, with a parting shower of little potted cheeses, the widow's ammunition ran out. She folded her arms, drew herself up to her full height, and, her eyes shining humorously beneath her shaggy brows, "Well, boys," she asked, "what is it you want?" Gomez was coming up the stairs again, under safe escort. "We are ladrones, madam," he explained, politely. "We want--we want----" he stammered, uneasy, before that great dominating figure. "We want--ah--the dinero, the money----" he stopped, then with a vague apologetic shrug of his shoulders: "the dinero, and you." "Ah?" sang the widow, sardonically, "you want me, do you?" Gomez hesitated. He was not at all sure about that. But his orders were imperative. "Papa Gato wants you," he said, with more precision. "Ah--it's your papa wants me, is it? Very well----" her lips tightened into a line ominously straight--"he shall have me; oh, yes, indeed!" Thus it was that an hour later the widow, erect and tense in a carro drawn by a pacific carabao, surrounded by an escort of tulisanes with the grave and preoccupied air of people bearing a case of dynamite, followed by the holiday-decked populace and the delirious blare and roar of the band, passed along the main street, by the Casa Popular, beneath the triumphal arch, to the outskirts of the pueblo, and on into the open country. The band, marking time with the populace on the edge of the town, which they were not to leave, was playing "Hail the Deliverer, Hail!" III Long and in detail will Major General Gomez remember (he has now ample leisure for such exercises of memory between the four walls of a place called Bilibid) that march back to camp. And his bringing it to a successful termination will always stand as his most serious claim to military glory.