"Och! I will manage to take it again. Now, we are even. Farewell!" The Chief then bowed courteously to his enemies, made a prodigious bound back, and disappeared in the lofty grass. The Apache warriors uttered their war yell twice, and almost immediately their black outlines disappeared in the gloom. Tranquil waited for a few minutes, and then turned to his comrades. "Now, we will set out," he said; "the road is free." "You got out of the scrape cleverly," Loyal Heart said to him; "but it was a terrible risk." The Canadian smiled, but made no further reply. Then they started. CHAPTER XII. THE SUMMONS. Europeans, accustomed to the gigantic wars of the Old World, in which enormous masses of two to three hundred thousand men on both sides come into collision on the battle field, where armies have divisions of thirty or forty thousand men, a cavalry often of sixty to eighty thousand sabres, and in which the guns are counted by hundreds, have a difficulty in forming an idea of the way in which war is waged in certain parts of America, as well as the component strength of the armies of the New World. In Mexico, a population of several millions can hardly collect ten thousand men under arms, an enormous number in those countries. The various republics which were formed on the dismemberment of the Spanish colonies, such as Peru, Chile, New Granada, Bolivia, Paraguay, &c., cannot succeed in assembling more than two or three thousand men under their banners, and that, too, with immense sacrifices; for these countries, which, territorially speaking, are each far larger than England, are nearly deserted, being incessantly decimated by civil war, which gnaws at them like a hideous leprosy, and left almost uninhabitable by the neglect of the various governments, which succeed each other with a giddy and almost fabulous rapidity. These governments, submitted to rather than accepted by these unfortunate nations, although powerless for good, owing to their precarious duration, are omnipotent for evil, and profit by it to plunder the people, and load their creatures with riches, not troubling themselves about the abyss they are opening beneath their feet, and which, daily growing deeper, will eventually swallow up all these accidental nationalities, which will be dead almost ere they are born, and have only known liberty by name, though never in a position to appreciate its blessings.