He was pinioned and led to the nearest village. The commandant of the detachment, one Urdanpilleta, went up to his prisoner and said to him, with an inexcusable pettiness of sarcasm: "My good lad, you are out of luck. In a few hours you are safe to be shot." "All right. We shall see about that," stoically answered Santa Cruz. The priest was led into a large two-storied house, and thrust into a room near the garret, there to enter on his preparation for death. There was a bed in the room, and from the sheets on that bed Santa Cruz made the rosary on which to tell his litany, which was not one for the dying. He tore them up, twisted them, tied them together, and letting himself out of the window as far as his improvised rope would go, dropped into the arms of a couple of friends beneath. Before the alarm could be given he was up to his neck in a marsh, where his head was concealed by a rank growth of rushes. After an enforced bath of twelve hours he sought refuge with a wood-cutter, who helped him to pass over by night into France. The tale of his escape added to his fame. He was no longer a cura, he was a cabecilla--a born leader in partisan warfare. The Carlists still kept the field in Catalonia, but in the north-west all was apparently over. Order reigned as in Warsaw. Nevertheless, it was felt that a spark would rekindle a conflagration. Santa Cruz was the spark. "If I had only thirty men at my back, I'd lift the flag again," Santa Cruz was overheard to boast. The thirty men presented themselves; and, on the 1st of December, 1872, the irrepressible priest, now surnamed the Peter the Hermit of Carlism, recrossed the frontier. Six days afterwards he stopped the mail train a few miles outside San Sebastian, and Madrid learned with stupor that the Carlist insurrection had flared up anew. "That was virtually the knell of the Savoy dynasty," said my informant, "and Santa Cruz it was who tolled the knell."