SPANISH BAYONET BY STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS NEW YORK _Copyright, 1926, By George H. Doran Company_ _Spanish Bayonet_ _Printed in the United States of America_ _To_ MY MOTHER AND FATHER _This Brightly-Painted Arrow_ Contents PRELUDE: _The Barbary Ape_ PART ONE: _The Pride of the Colonies_ PART TWO: _The Dazzling Net_ PART THREE: _The Pit of Oppression_ PART FOUR: _The Fire on the Beach_ SPANISH BAYONET PRELUDE: _The Barbary Ape_ They were dancing in the streets of Port Mahon. The time was shortly after Easter in the year of our Lord, 1769. Christ had died and risen again in the Cathedral, with flowers and candleflame and the songs of Easter Eve, when strollers pass through the narrow, rocky streets, singing the Fromajardis--the sorrows of Mary--and receive through opened lattice and shutter, small sanctified gifts of sweetmeats and pastry from hands blurred by the dusk. This year the sweetmeats had been few and poor, for the scanty crops of Minorca had failed for the third successive season, and all Lent the Vicar-General had excused his afflicted children from their duty of abstinence, so pinched were the times. But now, with the resurrection of the earth and the grave twilights of April, there was hope in the air, and the tiled and terrace-roofed houses that clung together in a town against the rock, like the nests of swallows upon a chimney of stone, knew again the music of the guitar. Below, in the famous harbor where all the fleets of Europe might ride at anchor, lay the ships which had brought that hope. Minorca had too many children to feed from a narrow and indurate breast--the ships would take some away, over the ocean, to a new country, where the British flag flew from the top of a palm-tree in the Floridas of America, and, after four years of labor for the master of the expedition, a man might claim his own fifty acres of fertile ground and take his siesta at noon in the shadow of his own trees. Sebastian Zafortezas, looking down at the harbor through the clear darkness, made out the riding-lights of those ships, and pondered the strange benevolencies of the English. Quick, loud-voiced, red-faced men who swore without punctilio and prayed without courtesy, who bathed themselves unnecessarily in frigid waters as a preparation for future torments of incessant fire, they nevertheless displayed an extraordinary unwillingness to let newly-reconquered subjects die quietly of starvation. They were all a little mad, of course, and the master of the ships in the harbor no doubt as mad as any.