It was to the effect that he had fought Florence Kearney, and given more and worse wounds than he himself had received--enough of them, and sufficiently dangerous, to make it likely that his adversary would not long survive. He did not say this to Luisa Valverde--only to her father. When she heard it second hand, it came nigh killing her. But then the informant had gone away--perhaps luckily for himself--and could not further be questioned. When met again in Mexico, months after, he told the same tale. He had no doubt, however, that his duelling adversary, so terribly gashed as to be in danger of dying, still lived. For an American paper which gave an account of the battle of Mier, had spoken of Captain Kearney in eulogistic terms, while not giving his name in the death list; this Santander had read. The presumption, therefore, was of Kearney being among the survivors. Thus stood things in the city of Mexico at the time the Mier prisoners entered it, as relates to the persons who have so far found place in our story--Carlos Santander, a colonel on the staff of the Dictator; Don Ignacio Valverde, a Minister of State; his daughter, a reigning belle of society, with no aspirations therefor, but solely on account of her beauty; Florence Kearney, late Captain of the Texan filibusters, with Cris Rock, guide, scout, and general skirmisher of the same--these last shut up in a loathsome prison, one linked leg to leg with a robber, the other sharing the chain of a murderer, alike crooked in soul as in body! That for the Texan prisoners there was yet greater degradation in store--one of them, Kearney, was made aware the moment after the gaol-governor had so unceremoniously shut the door of their cell. The teaching of Don Ignacio in New Orleans had not been thrown away upon him; and this, with the practice since accruing through conversation with the soldiers of their escort, had made him almost a master of the Spanish tongue. Carlos Santander either did not think of this, or supposed the cloister door too thick to permit of speech in the ordinary tone passing through it. It did, notwithstanding; what he said outside to the governor reaching the Irishman's ear, and giving him a yet closer clue to that hitherto enigma--the why he and Cris Rock had been cast into a common gaol, among the veriest and vilest of malefactors. The words of Santander were-- "As you see, Senor Don Pedro, the two Tejanos are old acquaintances of mine. I met them not in Texas, but the United States--New Orleans-- where we had certain relations; I need not particularise you. Only to say that both the gentlemen left me very much in their debt; and I now wish, above all things, to wipe out the score. I hope I may count upon you to help me!"