We drove to the Club, and there we found any number of fellows from the _Hercules_, and most of the European residents too. They had the same anxious look about them as we’d noticed outside, and one of them, turning to me, said that practically everything depended on my brother and his personal influence and popularity with the ragged armed mob who were going to march into Santa Cruz. He told me that Gerald had just gone up to his room, so Ginger and Bob and I went up and found him changing into clean things, José, with a huge black and green rosette in his coat, helping him. I introduced Ginger, and unbuckling our sword-belts we sat on his bed and yarned to him. ’How are your chaps going to behave?’ I asked him. ’So long as I can keep my eye on them they’ll be all right,’ he said, ’but I don’t like the idea of leaving them outside when I have to go into the cathedral, or to that banquet they talk so much about. I wish to goodness I hadn’t to go through this tomfoolery; I have to ride immediately behind the President’s carriage. (How the dickens can he expect to be popular if he don’t ride a horse?) He won’t let me off the job either, although he’s jealous of me, and hates hearing people singing out my name, but he knows he can’t keep my little brown chaps in hand himself, so he’s going to keep me as close to him as possible.’ ’But _must_ they come in?’ Ginger asked. ’Yes!’ he said; ’they must. They must have their triumphal entry. I’ve had bother enough keeping them out as long as this, but they won’t go home till they can say that they’ve marched through Santa Cruz as victors. Thank goodness, they’ve hardly got a cartridge among them.’ ’How many are there?’ Ginger began to ask, when there was a gentle tap on the door, and one of the Club servants came in, handed Gerald a visiting card, and went out again. ’I don’t know who the chap is,’ Gerald said, looking at it; ’I wish people wouldn’t bother me now.’ There was another tap at the door, and in came a man, dressed in a black frock-coat and grey trousers, holding a tall silk hat with the thumb and the stumps of the fingers of his right hand. For a second I seemed to feel frozen with fear, for it was the ex-policeman, the man whose fingers I’d cut off on the beach at San Fernando, and as I sprang at him, he drew a revolver from his breast with his left hand, dodged round me, and fired point-blank at Gerald. I heard Gerald catch his breath, and I’d caught the revolver, hurled it away, and got the brute by the neck in a second, José, with a scream, rushing across to help me. He reeled over the foot of Gerald’s bed, and whether José choked him, or I broke his back in my rage, I don’t know, but he gave a shudder, slipped out of our hands, and flopped down on the floor—dead. Oh! that I had killed him that day at San Fernando! I turned to Gerald, who was standing where he’d been shot, with his hand over his stomach, Ginger and Bob holding his arms.