"Shouldn't wonder!" Tony went on, stolidly. "He says he repeated in writing the command he'd just received, and begged Vandyke, if it was correct, to confirm him in the same way. The messenger dashed off, leaving March wondering like thunder what it all meant: whether there was some fearful mistake, or whether there was a big crisis, and no time for written orders. He could see, of course, that it might be possible, and that Vandyke had ordered only those two guns to be fired just to scare the Mexicans off from playing any trick they were at. The spot he was to aim at suggested that explanation, for not much harm ought to be done with a few shots directed that way. Not much of what you might call '_material_ harm' I mean. But there was no end to the harm such an incident could do, if there'd been nothing to provoke it. You see the situation as March says he saw it, don't you?" "Yes, I see. But what happened after that?" "According to March, the orderly was back again in next to no time. March had stopped where he was, waiting for him, as he didn't want to give the snap away to me and the men till the last minute. And he was hoping against hope, till he got the return message. It was verbal again, in spite of his written request, and mighty peremptory, ordering him to obey without any more nonsense. That's March's story. Not seeing a way to get out of it, yet realizing the awful consequences should there be anything wrong, March was going to pass on the order to load and fire when he suddenly thought he'd compromise by firing blank only. You see he was in an awful fix anyway, had to make an instant decision, and did what he thought best at the moment, though in giving that order to fire blank he was already disobeying the orders of his superior officer. Vandyke's version is that he never sent any orders whatever. That his orderly was with him in his car, and had never left it for a minute. That March must have been deceived by some trick of resemblance--a sort of 'Captain of Kopenick' (if you know that story); getting off a hoax on him, a deadly hoax, meant to upset the whole situation between the United States and Mexico. He says March ought to have known better than to obey a verbal order when the thing was so serious, and that he was something worse than an ass to mistake a stranger for Johnson, the orderly, whose face March knew almost as well as his own. There's where Vandyke scores an extra point against March. It would be very unusual to send a verbal order." "That's why Eagle doubted it," I argued breathlessly. "_Could_ he have refused to obey the acting colonel, when the order was repeated?"