There were not mules enough for all the wagons—I felt perfectly certain that the natives had simply bolted into the forest with a lot of them—but there were sufficient for four, and I chose two, full of field-gun ammunition, and sent them up the road, and then we set about and collected all the rifles lying on the ground, and as many boxes of rifle ammunition as we could stow on another two, and I felt jolly pleased with myself when all four were jolting on their way to San Fernando. I made the officers understand that the prisoners’ arms were to be untied, but it wasn’t till I began cutting the cords adrift myself that they, rather sullenly, ordered their men to release the others. You can just imagine how gratefully they looked at me, and I felt certain that they wouldn’t be such fools as to try and escape, with five hundred fierce little _machetos_ all round them, and thousands more in the forest. It was quite light by the time every one was under way, and I began to feel most horribly hungry and tired. Up above in the clear sky a number of vultures were slowly circling round and round with their long necks stretching downwards, waiting till we went away before they came down for their horrible feast, and as I left the clearing, and looked back, I saw any number of the little brown men sneaking out of the woods again to carry on looting, but I couldn’t be bothered with them, and they would keep those vultures away. I had rescued all that was most valuable, and wanted to get back to San Fernando as quickly as possible. When we got up to where poor little Navarro was lying, by the roadside, I gave him some brandy from a bottle I’d stowed away in a wagon; it did him a power of good, and he now seemed quite sensible, looking very miserable when he saw the guns coming along. ’The horse of _El General_,’ he said sadly, as the black horse limped past with the groom. I put him on top of one of the wagons, but the jolting was so painful that he had to be carried on the litter again. He knew me all right now, and I gave him back my cigarette case, pulling his own out of my pocket to show him. ’San Sebastian,’ he said, smiling; ’I remember always.’ Well, off we went, the three guns and the four wagons on ahead, the two hundred prisoners, surrounded by the little _machetos_, marching behind them, and Navarro, on his litter, the groom with Zorilla’s black horse, and myself, on my little stallion, ’Jim,’ bringing up the rear. I’d found some ammunition for that revolver, and had loaded it, but my face and yellowish hair was all that was wanted to make any one obey me, and I rode along on my tired little horse, absolutely bossing the show. You may laugh if you like, but there I was in charge of the whole blooming crowd, feeling simply dead tired, but kept awake by the excitement of it. ’Any one assisting the aforesaid Gerald Wilson——’ kept running through my head, and I grinned every time I thought of it.