At the commencement of the war, with the exception of the little band on the island of Margarita, the patriotic cause was represented by a few scattered groups along the banks of the Orinoco, on the plains of Barcelona and of Casanare. These groups pursued a kind of guerilla warfare, quite independently of one another, and without any plan to achieve. They were kept together by the fact that submission meant death. The leader of one of these groups, Paez by name, presents one of the most picturesque and striking characters that history has produced. He was a Llanero, or native of the elevated plains of Barinas, and quite illiterate. As owner of herds of half-wild cattle, he became chief of a band of herdsmen, which he organized into an army, known as the "Guides of the Apure," a tributary of the Orinoco, and whose banks were the base of Paez's operations. Only one of his many daring exploits can be here recorded. That occurred on the 3rd of June, 1819, when Paez was opposing the advance of Morillo himself. With 150 picked horsemen, he swam the river Orinoco and galloped towards the Spanish camp. "Eight hundred of the royalist cavalry," writes W. Pilling, General Mitre's translator, "with two small guns, sallied out to meet him. He slowly retreated, drawing them on to a place called Las Queseras del Medio, where a battalion of infantry lay in ambush by the river. Then, splitting his men into groups of twenty, he charged the enemy on all sides, forcing them under the fire of the infantry, and recrossed the river with two killed and a few wounded, leaving the plain strewn with the dead of the enemy." [=British Soldiers Join the Insurgents=]