About a month later news came to the band that Antonio Maceo, having evaded the Spanish army in the province of Pinar del Rio, and got on the other side of Weyler's _trocha_, had been killed in a skirmish not far from Havana, which city he had proposed to threaten, with the object of causing the withdrawal of the Spanish troops from the western end of the island. This news, which proved to be true, was a very heavy blow to the revolutionaries, who regarded Antonio as far and away their most capable and energetic leader; and soon afterward they sustained a further very serious loss, in the person of Rius Rivera, who had arrived in Pinar del Rio to take the place of Maceo, but who, in the month of March, 1897, was wounded in a skirmish near San Cristobal, being afterwards captured and deported. Nor was this all; for about the same time Layas, another very prominent and effective revolutionary leader, was killed in a fight in the province of Havana. Yet, serious as those misfortunes were deemed to be, they did not discourage the revolutionaries; on the contrary, they but spurred the latter to more strenuous efforts, and the brief, and often fragmentary, items of intelligence which filtered through to them from time to time concerning the incessant harrying of the Spaniards by Don Hermoso and his active band of guerrillas were cheering as cordial to them, stimulating them to emulative feats of daring and enterprise which rapidly reduced Weyler to the very verge of despair. Meanwhile the course of events in Cuba was being very keenly watched in the United States, and was steadily increasing the already dangerous tension which had been gradually growing between that country and Spain; and this was further increased by the occurrence of the Rius incident. Rius, it may be mentioned, was a Cuban, who, like many other natives of the same island, had resided in the United States, and had deemed it good policy to secure naturalisation papers as an American, after which he had returned to Cuba. The Spanish authorities--who may or may not have had good reason--suspected Rius of being a dangerous person, and arrested him; whereupon the United States Consul, ever watchful of the rights of American citizens, promptly demanded that the man should be immediately brought to trial, and released if no offence could be proved against him. The machinery of diplomacy is sometimes apt to move a trifle slowly, and ere it had moved far enough to bring about the satisfaction of the Consul's demands it was stated that Rius had died suddenly in prison. This put General Fitzhugh Lee upon his mettle: he very strongly suspected that there was more in this man's death than met the eye, and he insisted upon having the body medically examined, with the result that Rius was found to have been killed by a blow on the back of the head; while, scratched by a nail on the back of a chair in his cell, was found a statement to the effect that he was certain the prison