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+Project Gutenberg’s Real Soldiers of Fortune, by Richard Harding Davis
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Real Soldiers of Fortune
+
+Author: Richard Harding Davis
+
+Posting Date: February 22, 2009 [EBook #3029]
+Last Updated: September 26, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK REAL SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Reed, and Ronald J. Wilson
+
+
+
+
+
+REAL SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE
+
+
+By Richard Harding Davis
+
+
+
+
+
+MAJOR-GENERAL HENRY RONALD DOUGLAS MACIVER
+
+ANY sunny afternoon, on Fifth Avenue, or at night in the _table d’hote_
+restaurants of University Place, you may meet the soldier of fortune who
+of all his brothers in arms now living is the most remarkable. You may
+have noticed him; a stiffly erect, distinguished-looking man, with gray
+hair, an imperial of the fashion of Louis Napoleon, fierce blue eyes,
+and across his forehead a sabre cut.
+
+This is Henry Ronald Douglas MacIver, for some time in India an ensign
+in the Sepoy mutiny; in Italy, lieutenant under Garibaldi; in Spain,
+captain under Don Carlos; in our Civil War, major in the Confederate
+army; in Mexico, lieutenant-colonel under the Emperor Maximilian;
+colonel under Napoleon III, inspector of cavalry for the Khedive of
+Egypt, and chief of cavalry and general of brigade of the army of King
+Milan of Servia. These are only a few of his military titles. In 1884
+was published a book giving the story of his life up to that year. It
+was called “Under Fourteen Flags.” If to-day General MacIver were to
+reprint the book, it would be called “Under Eighteen Flags.”
+
+MacIver was born on Christmas Day, 1841, at sea, a league off the shore
+of Virginia. His mother was Miss Anna Douglas of that State; Ronald
+MacIver, his father, was a Scot, a Rossshire gentleman, a younger son of
+the chief of the Clan MacIver. Until he was ten years old young MacIver
+played in Virginia at the home of his father. Then, in order that he
+might be educated, he was shipped to Edinburgh to an uncle, General
+Donald Graham. After five years his uncle obtained for him a commission
+as ensign in the Honorable East India Company, and at sixteen, when
+other boys are preparing for college, MacIver was in the Indian Mutiny,
+fighting, not for a flag, nor a country, but as one fights a wild
+animal, for his life. He was wounded in the arm, and, with a sword, cut
+over the head. As a safeguard against the sun the boy had placed inside
+his helmet a wet towel. This saved him to fight another day, but even
+with that protection the sword sank through the helmet, the towel, and
+into the skull. To-day you can see the scar. He was left in the road
+for dead, and even after his wounds had healed, was six weeks in the
+hospital.
+
+This tough handling at the very start might have satisfied some men, but
+in the very next war MacIver was a volunteer and wore the red shirt of
+Garibaldi. He remained at the front throughout that campaign, and until
+within a few years there has been no campaign of consequence in which he
+has not taken part. He served in the Ten Years’ War in Cuba, in
+Brazil, in Argentina, in Crete, in Greece, twice in Spain in Carlist
+revolutions, in Bosnia, and for four years in our Civil War under
+Generals Jackson and Stuart around Richmond. In this great war he was
+four times wounded.
+
+It was after the surrender of the Confederate army, that, with other
+Southern officers, he served under Maximilian in Mexico; in Egypt, and
+in France. Whenever in any part of the world there was fighting, or the
+rumor of fighting, the procedure of the general invariably was the
+same. He would order himself to instantly depart for the front, and on
+arriving there would offer to organize a foreign legion. The command of
+this organization always was given to him. But the foreign legion was
+merely the entering wedge. He would soon show that he was fitted for
+a better command than a band of undisciplined volunteers, and would
+receive a commission in the regular army. In almost every command in
+which he served that is the manner in which promotion came. Sometimes he
+saw but little fighting, sometimes he should have died several deaths,
+each of a nature more unpleasant than the others. For in war the obvious
+danger of a bullet is but a three hundred to one shot, while in the pack
+against the combatant the jokers are innumerable. And in the career of
+the general the unforeseen adventures are the most interesting. A man
+who in eighteen campaigns has played his part would seem to have
+earned exemption from any other risks, but often it was outside the
+battle-field that MacIver encountered the greatest danger. He fought
+several duels, in two of which he killed his adversary; several attempts
+were made to assassinate him, and while on his way to Mexico he was
+captured by hostile Indians. On returning from an expedition in Cuba he
+was cast adrift in an open boat and for days was without food.
+
+Long before I met General MacIver I had read his book and had heard of
+him from many men who had met him in many different lands while
+engaged in as many different undertakings. Several of the older war
+correspondents knew him intimately; Bennett Burleigh of the _Telegraph_
+was his friend, and E. F. Knight of the _Times_ was one of those who
+volunteered for a filibustering expedition which MacIver organized
+against New Guinea. The late Colonel Ochiltree of Texas told me tales
+of MacIver’s bravery, when as young men they were fellow officers in the
+Southern army, and Stephen Bonsal had met him when MacIver was United
+States Consul at Denia in Spain. When MacIver arrived at this post, the
+ex-consul refused to vacate the Consulate, and MacIver wished to settle
+the difficulty with duelling pistols. As Denia is a small place, the
+inhabitants feared for their safety, and Bonsal, who was our _charge
+d’affaires_ then, was sent from Madrid to adjust matters. Without
+bloodshed he got rid of the ex-consul, and later MacIver so endeared
+himself to the Denians that they begged the State Department to retain
+him in that place for the remainder of his life.
+
+Before General MacIver was appointed to a high position at the St. Louis
+Fair, I saw much of him in New York. His room was in a side street in
+an old-fashioned boarding-house, and overlooked his neighbor’s back yard
+and a typical New York City sumac tree; but when the general talked one
+forgot he was within a block of the Elevated, and roamed over all
+the world. On his bed he would spread out wonderful parchments, with
+strange, heathenish inscriptions, with great seals, with faded ribbons.
+These were signed by Sultans, Secretaries of War, Emperors, filibusters.
+They were military commissions, titles of nobility, brevets for
+decorations, instructions and commands from superior officers.
+Translated the phrases ran: “Imposing special confidence in,” “we
+appoint,” or “create,” or “declare,” or “In recognition of services
+rendered to our person,” or “country,” or “cause,” or “For bravery on
+the field of battle we bestow the Cross----”
+
+As must a soldier, the general travels “light,” and all his worldly
+possessions were crowded ready for mobilization into a small compass. He
+had his sword, his field blanket, his trunk, and the tin despatch
+boxes that held his papers. From these, like a conjurer, he would draw
+souvenirs of all the world. From the embrace of faded letters, he would
+unfold old photographs, daguerrotypes, and miniatures of fair women and
+adventurous men: women who now are queens in exile, men who, lifted on
+waves of absinthe, still, across a _cafe_ table, tell how they will win
+back a crown.
+
+Once in a written document the general did me the honor to appoint me
+his literary executor, but as he is young, and as healthy as myself, it
+never may be my lot to perform such an unwelcome duty. And to-day all
+one can write of him is what the world can read in “Under Fourteen
+Flags,” and some of the “foot-notes to history” which I have copied
+from his scrap-book. This scrap-book is a wonderful volume, but owing
+to “political” and other reasons, for the present, of the many clippings
+from newspapers it contains there are only a few I am at liberty to
+print. And from them it is difficult to make a choice. To sketch in a
+few thousand words a career that had developed under Eighteen Flags is
+in its very wealth embarrassing.
+
+Here is one story, as told by the scrap-book, of an expedition that
+failed. That it failed was due to a British Cabinet Minister; for had
+Lord Derby possessed the imagination of the Soldier of Fortune, his
+Majesty’s dominions might now be the richer by many thousands of square
+miles and many thousands of black subjects.
+
+On October 29, 1883, the following appeared in the London _Standard_:
+“The New Guinea Exploration and Colonization Company is already
+chartered, and the first expedition expects to leave before Christmas.”
+ “The prospectus states settlers intending to join the first party must
+contribute one hundred pounds toward the company. This subscription will
+include all expenses for passage money. Six months’ provisions will be
+provided, together with tents and arms for protection. Each subscriber
+of one hundred pounds is to obtain a certificate entitling him to one
+thousand acres.”
+
+The view of the colonization scheme taken by the _Times_ of London, of
+the same date, is less complaisant. “The latest commercial sensation is
+a proposed company for the seizure of New Guinea. Certain adventurous
+gentlemen are looking out for one hundred others who have money and
+a taste for buccaneering. When the company has been completed, its
+share-holders are to place themselves under military regulations, sail
+in a body for New Guinea, and without asking anybody’s leave, seize
+upon the island and at once, in some unspecified way, proceed to realize
+large profits. If the idea does not suggest comparisons with the large
+designs of Sir Francis Drake, it is at least not unworthy of Captain
+Kidd.”
+
+When we remember the manner in which some of the colonies of Great
+Britain were acquired, the _Times_ seems almost squeamish.
+
+In a Melbourne paper, June, 1884, is the following paragraph:
+
+“Toward the latter part of 1883 the Government of Queensland planted the
+flag of Great Britain on the shores of New Guinea. When the news reached
+England it created a sensation. The Earl of Derby, Secretary for the
+Colonies, refused, however, to sanction the annexation of New
+Guinea, and in so doing acted contrary to the sincere wish of every
+right-thinking Anglo-Saxon under the Southern Cross.
+
+“While the subsequent correspondence between the Home and Queensland
+governments was going on, Brigadier-General H. R. MacIver originated and
+organized the New Guinea Exploration and Colonization Company in London,
+with a view to establishing settlements on the island. The company,
+presided over by General Beresford of the British Army, and having
+an eminently representative and influential board of directors, had a
+capital of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, and placed the
+supreme command of the expedition in the hands of General MacIver.
+Notwithstanding the character of the gentlemen composing the board of
+directors, and the truly peaceful nature of the expedition, his Lordship
+informed General MacIver that in the event of the latter’s attempting to
+land on New Guinea, instructions would be sent to the officer in command
+of her Majesty’s fleet in the Western Pacific to fire upon the company’s
+vessel. This meant that the expedition would be dealt with as a
+filibustering one.”
+
+In _Judy_, September 21, 1887, appears:
+
+“We all recollect the treatment received by Brigadier-General MacI. in
+the action he took with respect to the annexation of New Guinea. The
+General, who is a sort of Pizarro, with a dash of D’Artagnan, was
+treated in a most scurvy manner by Lord Derby. Had MacIver not been
+thwarted in his enterprise, the whole of New Guinea would now have been
+under the British flag, and we should not be cheek-by-jowl with the
+Germans, as we are in too many places.”
+
+_Society_, September 3, 1887, says:
+
+“The New Guinea expedition proved abortive, owing to the blundering
+shortsightedness of the then Government, for which Lord Derby was
+chiefly responsible, but what little foothold we possess in New Guinea,
+is certainly due to General MacIver’s gallant effort.”
+
+Copy of statement made by J. Rintoul Mitchell, June 2, 1887:
+
+“About the latter end of the year 1883, when I was editor-in-chief of
+the _Englishman_ in Calcutta, I was told by Captain de Deaux, assistant
+secretary in the Foreign Office of the Indian Government, that he
+had received a telegram from Lord Derby to the effect that if General
+MacIver ventured to land upon the coast of New Guinea it would become
+the duty of Lord Ripon, Viceroy, to use the naval forces at his command
+for the purpose of deporting General MacI. Sir Aucland Calvin can
+certify to this, as it was discussed in the Viceregal Council.”
+
+Just after our Civil War MacIver was interested in another expedition
+which also failed. Its members called themselves the Knights of Arabia,
+and their object was to colonize an island much nearer to our shores
+than New Guinea. MacIver, saying that his oath prevented, would never
+tell me which island this was, but the reader can choose from
+among Cuba, Haiti, and the Hawaiian group. To have taken Cuba, the
+“colonizers” would have had to fight not only Spain, but the Cubans
+themselves, on whose side they were soon fighting in the Ten Years’ War;
+so Cuba may be eliminated. And as the expedition was to sail from the
+Atlantic side, and not from San Francisco, the island would appear to be
+the Black Republic. From the records of the times it would seem that the
+greater number of the Knights of Arabia were veterans of the Confederate
+army, and there is no question but that they intended to subjugate the
+blacks of Haiti and form a republic for white men in which slavery would
+be recognized. As one of the leaders of this filibustering expedition,
+MacIver was arrested by General Phil Sheridan and for a short time cast
+into jail.
+
+This chafed the general’s spirit, but he argued philosophically that
+imprisonment for filibustering, while irksome, brought with it
+no reproach. And, indeed, sometimes the only difference between a
+filibuster and a government lies in the fact that the government fights
+the gun-boats of only the enemy while a filibuster must dodge the boats
+of the enemy and those of his own countrymen. When the United States
+went to war with Spain there were many men in jail as filibusters, for
+doing that which at the time the country secretly approved, and later
+imitated. And because they attempted exactly the same thing for which
+Dr. Jameson was imprisoned in Holloway Jail, two hundred thousand of his
+countrymen are now wearing medals.
+
+The by-laws of the Knights of Arabia leave but little doubt as to its
+object.
+
+By-law No. II reads:
+
+“We, as Knights of Arabia, pledge ourselves to aid, comfort, and protect
+all Knights of Arabia, especially those who are wounded in obtaining our
+grand object.
+
+“III--Great care must be taken that no unbeliever or outsider shall gain
+any insight into the mysteries or secrets of the Order.
+
+“IV--The candidate will have to pay one hundred dollars cash to
+the Captain of the Company, and the candidate will receive from the
+Secretary a Knight of Arabia bond for one hundred dollars in gold, with
+ten per cent interest, payable ninety days after the recognition of (The
+Republic of----) by the United States, or any government.
+
+“V--All Knights of Arabia will be entitled to one hundred acres of
+land, location of said land to be drawn for by lottery. The products are
+coffee, sugar, tobacco, and cotton.”
+
+A local correspondent of the New York _Herald_ writes of the arrest of
+MacIver as follows:
+
+“When MacIver will be tried is at present unknown, as his case has
+assumed a complicated aspect. He claims British protection as a subject
+of her British Majesty, and the English Consul has forwarded a statement
+of his case to Sir Frederick Bruce at Washington, accompanied by a copy
+of the by-laws. General Sheridan also has forwarded a statement to
+the Secretary of War, accompanied not only by the by-laws, but very
+important documents, including letters from Jefferson Davis, Benjamin,
+the Secretary of State of the Confederate States, and other personages
+prominent in the Rebellion, showing that MacIver enjoyed the highest
+confidence of the Confederacy.”
+
+As to the last statement, an open letter I found in his scrap-book is an
+excellent proof. It is as follows: “To officers and members of all camps
+of United Confederate Veterans: It affords me the greatest pleasure to
+say that the bearer of this letter, General Henry Ronald MacIver, was an
+officer of great gallantry in the Confederate Army, serving on the staff
+at various times of General Stonewall Jackson, J. E. B. Stuart, and E.
+Kirby Smith, and that his official record is one of which any man may be
+proud.
+
+“Respectfully, MARCUS J. WRIGHT, “_Agent for the Collection of
+Confederate Records_.
+
+“War Records office, War Department, Washington, July 8, 1895.”
+
+At the close of the war duels between officers of the two armies were
+not infrequent. In the scrap-book there is the account of one of these
+affairs sent from Vicksburg to a Northern paper by a correspondent who
+was an eye-witness of the event. It tells how Major MacIver, accompanied
+by Major Gillespie, met, just outside of Vicksburg, Captain Tomlin of
+Vermont, of the United States Artillery Volunteers. The duel was with
+swords. MacIver ran Tomlin through the body. The correspondent writes:
+
+“The Confederate officer wiped his sword on his handkerchief. In a few
+seconds Captain Tomlin expired. One of Major MacIver’s seconds called to
+him: ‘He is dead; you must go. These gentlemen will look after the body
+of their friend.’ A negro boy brought up the horses, but before mounting
+MacIver said to Captain Tomlin’s seconds: ‘My friends are in haste for
+me to go. Is there anything I can do? I hope you consider that this
+matter has been settled honorably?’
+
+“There being no reply, the Confederates rode away.”
+
+In a newspaper of to-day so matter-of-fact an acceptance of an event so
+tragic would make strange reading.
+
+From the South MacIver crossed through Texas to join the Royalist army
+under the Emperor Maximilian. It was while making his way, with other
+Confederate officers, from Galveston to El Paso, that MacIver was
+captured by the Indians. He was not ill-treated by them, but for three
+months was a prisoner, until one night, the Indians having camped near
+the Rio Grande, he escaped into Mexico. There he offered his sword to
+the Royalist commander, General Mejia, who placed him on his staff, and
+showed him some few skirmishes. At Monterey MacIver saw big fighting,
+and for his share in it received the title of Count, and the order of
+Guadaloupe. In June, contrary to all rules of civilized war, Maximilian
+was executed and the empire was at an end. MacIver escaped to the coast,
+and from Tampico took a sailing vessel to Rio de Janeiro. Two months
+later he was wearing the uniform of another emperor, Dom Pedro, and,
+with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, was in command of the Foreign
+Legion of the armies of Brazil and Argentina, which at that time as
+allies were fighting against Paraguay.
+
+MacIver soon recruited seven hundred men, but only half of these ever
+reached the front. In Buenos Ayres cholera broke out and thirty thousand
+people died, among the number about half the Legion. MacIver was among
+those who suffered, and before he recovered was six weeks in hospital.
+During that period, under a junior officer, the Foreign Legion was sent
+to the front, where it was disbanded.
+
+On his return to Glasgow, MacIver foregathered with an old friend,
+Bennett Burleigh, whom he had known when Burleigh was a lieutenant
+in the navy of the Confederate States. Although today known as a
+distinguished war correspondent, in those days Burleigh was something of
+a soldier of fortune himself, and was organizing an expedition to assist
+the Cretan insurgents against the Turks. Between the two men it was
+arranged that MacIver should precede the expedition to Crete and
+prepare for its arrival. The Cretans received him gladly, and from the
+provisional government he received a commission in which he was given
+“full power to make war on land and sea against the enemies of Crete,
+and particularly against the Sultan of Turkey and the Turkish forces,
+and to burn, destroy, or capture any vessel bearing the Turkish flag.”
+
+This permission to destroy the Turkish navy single-handed strikes one
+as more than generous, for the Cretans had no navy, and before one could
+begin the destruction of a Turkish gun-boat it was first necessary to
+catch it and tie it to a wharf.
+
+At the close of the Cretan insurrection MacIver crossed to Athens and
+served against the brigands in Kisissia on the borders of Albania
+and Thessaly as volunteer aide to Colonel Corroneus, who had been
+commander-in-chief of the Cretans against the Turks. MacIver spent three
+months potting at brigands, and for his services in the mountains was
+recommended for the highest Greek decoration.
+
+From Greece it was only a step to New York, and almost immediately
+MacIver appears as one of the Goicouria-Christo expedition to Cuba,
+of which Goicouria was commander-in-chief, and two famous American
+officers, Brigadier-General Samuel C. Williams was a general and Colonel
+Wright Schumburg was chief of staff.
+
+In the scrap-book I find “General Order No. 11 of the Liberal Army of
+the Republic of Cuba, issued at Cedar Keys, October 3, 1869.” In it
+Colonel MacIver is spoken of as in charge of officers not attached to
+any organized corps of the division. And again:
+
+“General Order No. V, Expeditionary Division, Republic of Cuba, on board
+_Lilian_,” announces that the place to which the expedition is bound has
+been changed, and that General Wright Schumburg, who now is in command,
+orders “all officers not otherwise commissioned to join Colonel
+MacIver’s ‘Corps of Officers.’”
+
+The _Lilian_ ran out of coal, and to obtain firewood put in at Cedar
+Keys. For two weeks the patriots cut wood and drilled upon the beach,
+when they were captured by a British gun-boat and taken to Nassau.
+There they were set at liberty, but their arms, boat, and stores were
+confiscated.
+
+In a sailing vessel MacIver finally reached Cuba, and under Goicouria,
+who had made a successful landing, saw some “help yourself” fighting.
+Goicouria’s force was finally scattered, and MacIver escaped from the
+Spanish soldiery only by putting to sea in an open boat, in which he
+endeavored to make Jamaica.
+
+On the third day out he was picked up by a steamer and again landed at
+Nassau, from which place he returned to New York.
+
+At that time in this city there was a very interesting man named
+Thaddeus P. Mott, who had been an officer in our army and later
+had entered the service of Ismail Pasha. By the Khedive he had
+been appointed a general of division and had received permission to
+reorganize the Egyptian army.
+
+His object in coming to New York was to engage officers for that
+service. He came at an opportune moment. At that time the city was
+filled with men who, in the Rebellion, on one side or the other, had
+held command, and many of these, unfitted by four years of soldiering
+for any other calling, readily accepted the commissions which Mott had
+authority to offer. New York was not large enough to keep MacIver and
+Mott long apart, and they soon came to an understanding. The agreement
+drawn up between them is a curious document. It is written in a neat
+hand on sheets of foolscap tied together like a Commencement-day
+address, with blue ribbon. In it MacIver agrees to serve as colonel of
+cavalry in the service of the Khedive. With a few legal phrases omitted,
+the document reads as follows:
+
+“Agreement entered into this 24th day of March, 1870, between the
+Government of his Royal Highness and the Khedive of Egypt, represented
+by General Thaddeus P. Mott of the first part, and H. R. H. MacIver of
+New York City.
+
+“The party of the second part, being desirous of entering into the
+service of party of the first part, in the military capacity of a
+colonel of cavalry, promises to serve and obey party of the first part
+faithfully and truly in his military capacity during the space of five
+years from this date; that the party of the second part waives all
+claims of protection usually afforded to Americans by consular and
+diplomatic agents of the United States, and expressly obligates himself
+to be subject to the orders of the party of the first part, and to make,
+wage, and vigorously prosecute war against any and all the enemies of
+party of the first part; that the party of the second part will not
+under any event be governed, controlled by, or submit to, any order,
+law, mandate, or proclamation issued by the Government of the United
+States of America, forbidding party of the second part to serve party
+of the first part to make war according to any of the provisions herein
+contained, _it being, however, distinctly understood_ that nothing
+herein contained shall be construed as obligating party of the second
+part to bear arms or wage war against the United States of America.
+
+“Party of the first part promises to furnish party of the second part
+with horses, rations, and pay him for his services the same salary now
+paid to colonels of cavalry in United States army, and will furnish him
+quarters suitable to his rank in army. Also promises, in the case of
+illness caused by climate, that said party may resign his office and
+shall receive his expenses to America and two months’ pay; that he
+receives one-fifth of his regular pay during his active service,
+together with all expenses of every nature attending such enterprise.”
+
+It also stipulates as to what sums shall be paid his family or children
+in case of his death.
+
+To this MacIver signs this oath:
+
+“In the presence of the ever-living God, I swear that I will in all
+things honestly, faithfully, and truly keep, observe, and perform the
+obligations and promises above enumerated, and endeavor to conform to
+the wishes and desires of the Government of his Royal Highness, the
+Khedive of Egypt, in all things connected with the furtherance of his
+prosperity, and the maintenance of his throne.”
+
+On arriving at Cairo, MacIver was appointed inspector-general of
+cavalry, and furnished with a uniform, of which this is a description:
+“It consisted of a blue tunic with gold spangles, embroidered in gold
+up the sleeves and front, neat-fitting red trousers, and high
+patent-leather boots, while the inevitable fez completed the gay
+costume.”
+
+The climate of Cairo did not agree with MacIver, and, in spite of
+his “gay costume,” after six months he left the Egyptian service. His
+honorable discharge was signed by Stone Bey, who, in the favor of the
+Khedive, had supplanted General Mott.
+
+It is a curious fact that, in spite of his ill health, immediately after
+leaving Cairo, MacIver was sufficiently recovered to at once plunge into
+the Franco-Prussian War. At the battle of Orleans, while on the staff
+of General Chanzy, he was wounded. In this war his rank was that of a
+colonel of cavalry of the auxiliary army.
+
+His next venture was in the Carlist uprising of 1873, when he formed a
+Carlist League, and on several occasions acted as bearer of important
+messages from the “King,” as Don Carlos was called, to the sympathizers
+with his cause in France and England.
+
+MacIver was promised, if he carried out successfully a certain mission
+upon which he was sent, and if Don Carlos became king, that he would be
+made a marquis. As Don Carlos is still a pretender, MacIver is still a
+general. Although in disposing of his sword MacIver never allowed his
+personal predilections to weigh with him, he always treated himself to a
+hearty dislike of the Turks, and we next find him fighting against them
+in Herzegovina with the Montenegrins. And when the Servians declared
+war against the same people, MacIver returned to London to organize a
+cavalry brigade to fight with the Servian army.
+
+Of this brigade and of the rapid rise of MacIver to highest rank and
+honors in Servia, the scrap-book is most eloquent. The cavalry brigade
+was to be called the Knights of the Red Cross.
+
+In a letter to the editor of the _Hour_, the general himself speaks of
+it in the following terms:
+
+“It may be interesting to many of your readers to learn that a select
+corps of gentlemen is at present in course of organization under
+the above title with the mission of proceeding to the Levant to
+take measures in case of emergency for the defense of the Christian
+population, and more especially of British subjects who are to a great
+extent unprovided with adequate means of protection from the religious
+furies of the Mussulmans. The lives of Christian women and children are
+in hourly peril from fanatical hordes. The Knights will be carefully
+chosen and kept within strict military control, and will be under
+command of a practical soldier with large experience of the Eastern
+countries. Templars and all other crusaders are invited to give aid and
+sympathy.”
+
+Apparently MacIver was not successful in enlisting many Knights, for
+a war correspondent at the capital of Servia, waiting for the war to
+begin, writes as follows:
+
+“A Scotch soldier of fortune, Henry MacIver, a colonel by rank, has
+arrived at Belgrade with a small contingent of military adventurers.
+Five weeks ago I met him in Fleet Street, London, and had some talk
+about his ‘expedition.’ He had received a commission from the Prince of
+Servia to organize and command an independent cavalry brigade, and he
+then was busily enrolling his volunteers into a body styled ‘The Knights
+of the Red Cross.’ I am afraid some of his bold crusaders have earned
+more distinction for their attacks on Fleet Street bars than they are
+likely to earn on Servian battle-fields, but then I must not anticipate
+history.”
+
+Another paper tells that at the end of the first week of his service as
+a Servian officer, MacIver had enlisted ninety men, but that they were
+scattered about the town, many without shelter and rations:
+
+“He assembled his men on the Rialto, and in spite of official
+expostulation, the men were marched up to the Minister’s four
+abreast--and they marched fairly well, making a good show. The War
+Minister was taken by storm, and at once granted everything. It has
+raised the English colonel’s popularity with his men to fever heat.”
+
+This from the _Times_, London:
+
+“Our Belgrade correspondent telegraphs last night:
+
+“‘There is here at present a gentleman named MacIver. He came from
+England to offer himself and his sword to the Servians. The Servian
+Minister of War gave him a colonel’s commission. This morning I saw him
+drilling about one hundred and fifty remarkably fine-looking fellows,
+all clad in a good serviceable cavalry uniform, and he has horses.”’
+
+Later we find that:
+
+“Colonel MacIver’s Legion of Cavalry, organizing here, now numbers over
+two hundred men.”
+
+And again:
+
+“Prince Nica, a Roumanian cousin of the Princess Natalie of Servia, has
+joined Colonel MacIver’s cavalry corps.”
+
+Later, in the _Court Journal_, October 28, 1876, we read:
+
+“Colonel MacIver, who a few years ago was very well known in military
+circles in Dublin, now is making his mark with the Servian army. In
+the war against the Turks, he commands about one thousand Russo-Servian
+cavalry.”
+
+He was next to receive the following honors:
+
+“Colonel MacIver has been appointed commander of the cavalry of the
+Servian armies on the Morava and Timok, and has received the Cross of
+the Takovo Order from General Tchemaieff for gallant conduct in the
+field, and the gold medal for valor.”
+
+Later we learn from the _Daily News_:
+
+“Mr. Lewis Farley, Secretary of the ‘League in Aid of Christians of
+Turkey,’ has received the following letter, dated Belgrade, October 10,
+1876:
+
+“‘DEAR SIR: In reference to the embroidered banner so kindly worked by
+an English lady and forwarded by the League to Colonel MacIver, I have
+great pleasure in conveying to you the following particulars. On Sunday
+morning, the flag having been previously consecrated by the archbishop,
+was conducted by a guard of honor to the palace, and Colonel MacIver,
+in the presence of Prince Milan and a numerous suite, in the name and
+on behalf of yourself and the fair donor, delivered it into the hands
+of the Princess Natalie. The gallant Colonel wore upon this occasion his
+full uniform as brigade commander and chief of cavalry of the Servian
+army, and bore upon his breast the ‘Gold Cross of Takovo’ which he
+received after the battles of the 28th and 30th of September, in
+recognition of the heroism and bravery he displayed upon these eventful
+days. The beauty of the decoration was enhanced by the circumstances
+of its bestowal, for on the evening of the battle of the 30th, General
+Tchernaieff approached Colonel MacIver, and, unclasping the cross from
+his own breast, placed it upon that of the Colonel.
+
+“‘(Signed.) HUGH JACKSON,
+
+“‘_Member of Council of the League_.”
+
+In Servia and in the Servian army MacIver reached what as yet is the
+highest point of his career, and of his life the happiest period.
+
+He was _general de brigade_, which is not what we know as a brigade
+general, but is one who commands a division, a major-general. He was a
+great favorite both at the palace and with the people, the pay was good,
+fighting plentiful, and Belgrade gay and amusing. Of all the places
+he has visited and the countries he has served, it is of this Balkan
+kingdom that the general seems to speak most fondly and with the
+greatest feeling. Of Queen Natalie he was and is a most loyal and
+chivalric admirer, and was ever ready, when he found any one who did
+not as greatly respect the lady, to offer him the choice of swords or
+pistols. Even for Milan he finds an extenuating word.
+
+After Servia the general raised more foreign legions, planned further
+expeditions; in Central America reorganized the small armies of the
+small republics, served as United States Consul, and offered his sword
+to President McKinley for use against Spain. But with Servia the most
+active portion of the life of the general ceased, and the rest has been
+a repetition of what went before. At present his time is divided between
+New York and Virginia, where he has been offered an executive position
+in the approaching Jamestown Exposition. Both North and South he has
+many friends, many admirers. But his life is, and, from the nature of
+his profession, must always be, a lonely one.
+
+While other men remain planted in one spot, gathering about them a home,
+sons and daughters, an income for old age, MacIver is a rolling stone,
+a piece of floating sea-weed; as the present King of England called him
+fondly, “that vagabond soldier.”
+
+To a man who has lived in the saddle and upon transports, “neighbor”
+ conveys nothing, and even “comrade” too often means one who is no longer
+living.
+
+With the exception of the United States, of which he now is a
+naturalized citizen, the general has fought for nearly every country in
+the world, but if any of those for which he lost his health and blood,
+and for which he risked his life, remembers him, it makes no sign. And
+the general is too proud to ask to be remembered. To-day there is no
+more interesting figure than this man who in years is still young enough
+to lead an army corps, and who, for forty years, has been selling his
+sword and risking his life for presidents, pretenders, charlatans, and
+emperors.
+
+He finds some mighty changes: Cuba, which he fought to free, is free;
+men of the South, with whom for four years he fought shoulder to
+shoulder, are now wearing the blue; the empire of Mexico, for which he
+fought, is a republic; the empire of France, for which he fought, is a
+republic; the empire of Brazil, for which he fought is a republic; the
+dynasty in Servia, to which he owes his greatest honors, has been wiped
+out by murder. From none of the eighteen countries he has served has he
+a pension, berth, or billet, and at sixty he finds himself at home in
+every land, but with a home in none.
+
+Still he has his sword, his blanket, and in the event of war, to obtain
+a commission he has only to open his tin boxes and show the commissions
+already won. Indeed, any day, in a new uniform, and under the Nineteenth
+Flag, the general may again be winning fresh victories and honors.
+
+And so, this brief sketch of him is left unfinished. We will mark
+it--_To be continued_.
+
+
+
+
+BARON JAMES HARDEN-HICKEY
+
+THIS is an attempt to tell the story of Baron Harden-Hickey, the Man Who
+Made Himself King, the man who was born after his time.
+
+If the reader, knowing something of the strange career of Harden-Hickey,
+wonders why one writes of him appreciatively rather than in amusement,
+he is asked not to judge Harden-Hickey as one judges a contemporary.
+
+Harden-Hickey, in our day, was as incongruous a figure as was the
+American at the Court of King Arthur; he was as unhappily out of the
+picture as would be Cyrano de Bergerac on the floor of the Board
+of Trade. Judged, as at the time he was judged, by writers of comic
+paragraphs, by presidents of railroads, by amateur “statesmen” at
+Washington, Harden-Hickey was a joke. To the vacant mind of the village
+idiot, Rip Van Winkle returning to Falling Water also was a joke. The
+people of our day had not the time to understand Harden-Hickey; they
+thought him a charlatan, half a dangerous adventurer and half a fool;
+and Harden-Hickey certainly did not under stand them. His last words,
+addressed to his wife, showed this. They were: “I would rather die a
+gentleman than live a blackguard like your father.”
+
+As a matter of fact, his father-in-law, although living under the
+disadvantage of being a Standard Oil magnate, neither was, nor is, a
+blackguard, and his son-in-law had been treated by him generously
+and with patience. But for the duellist and soldier of fortune it was
+impossible to sympathize with a man who took no greater risk in life
+than to ride on one of his own railroads, and of the views the two men
+held of each other, that of John H. Flagler was probably the fairer and
+the more kindly.
+
+Harden-Hickey was one of the most picturesque, gallant, and pathetic
+adventurers of our day; but Flagler also deserves our sympathy.
+
+For an unimaginative and hard-working Standard Oil king to have a
+D’Artagnan thrust upon him as a son-in-law must be trying.
+
+James A. Harden-Hickey, James the First of Trinidad, Baron of the
+Holy Roman Empire, was born on December 8, 1854. As to the date all
+historians agree; as to where the important event took place they
+differ. That he was born in France his friends are positive, but at the
+time of his death in El Paso the San Francisco papers claimed him as a
+native of California. All agree that his ancestors were Catholics and
+Royalists who left Ireland with the Stuarts when they sought refuge in
+France. The version which seems to be the most probable is that he was
+born in San Francisco, where as one of the early settlers, his father,
+E. C. Hickey, was well known, and that early in his life, in order to
+educate him, the mother took him to Europe.
+
+There he was educated at the Jesuit College at Namur, then at Leipsic,
+and later entered the Military College of St. Cyr.
+
+James the First was one of those boys who never had the misfortune to
+grow up. To the moment of his death, in all he planned you can trace the
+effects of his early teachings and environment; the influences of the
+great Church that nursed him, and of the city of Paris, in which he
+lived. Under the Second Empire, Paris was at her maddest, baddest, and
+best. To-day under the republic, without a court, with a society kept in
+funds by the self-expatriated wives and daughters of our business men,
+she lacks the reasons for which Baron Haussmann bedecked her and made
+her beautiful. The good Loubet, the worthy Fallieres, except that they
+furnish the cartoonist with subjects for ridicule, do not add to the
+gayety of Paris. But when Harden-Hickey was a boy, Paris was never so
+carelessly gay, so brilliant, never so overcharged with life, color, and
+adventure.
+
+In those days “the Emperor sat in his box that night,” and in the box
+opposite sat Cora Pearl; veterans of the campaign of Italy, of Mexico,
+from the desert fights of Algiers, sipped sugar and water in front of
+Tortoni’s, the Cafe Durand, the Cafe Riche; the sidewalks rang with
+their sabres, the boulevards were filled with the colors of the gorgeous
+uniforms; all night of each night the Place Vendome shone with the
+carriage lamps of the visiting pashas from Egypt, of nabobs from
+India, of _rastaquoueres_ from the sister empire of Brazil; the state
+carriages, with the outriders and postilions in the green and gold of
+the Empress, swept through the Champs Elysees, and at the Bal Bulier,
+and at Mabile the students and “grisettes” introduced the cancan. The
+men of those days were Hugo, Thiers, Dumas, Daudet, Alfred de Musset;
+the magnificent blackguard, the Duc de Morny, and the great, simple
+Canrobert, the captain of barricades, who became a marshal of France.
+
+Over all was the mushroom Emperor, his anterooms crowded with the
+titled charlatans of Europe, his court radiant with countesses created
+overnight. And it was the Emperor, with his love of theatrical display,
+of gorgeous ceremonies; with his restless reaching after military glory,
+the weary, cynical adventurer, that the boy at St. Cyr took as his
+model.
+
+Royalist as was Harden-Hickey by birth and tradition, and Royalist as
+he always remained, it was the court at the Tuileries that filled his
+imagination. The Bourbons, whom he served, hoped some day for a court;
+at the Tuileries there was a court, glittering before his physical eyes.
+The Bourbons were pleasant old gentlemen, who later willingly supported
+him, and for whom always he was equally willing to fight, either with
+his sword or his pen. But to the last, in his mind, he carried pictures
+of the Second Empire as he, as a boy, had known it.
+
+Can you not imagine the future James the First, barelegged, in a
+black-belted smock, halting with his nurse, or his priest, to gaze up in
+awestruck delight at the great, red-breeched Zouaves lounging on guard
+at the Tuileries?
+
+“When I grow up,” said little James to himself, not knowing that he
+never would grow up, “I shall have Zouaves for _my_ palace guard.”
+
+And twenty years later, when he laid down the laws for his little
+kingdom, you find that the officers of his court must wear the mustache,
+“_a la_ Louis Napoleon,” and that the Zouave uniform will be worn by the
+Palace Guards.
+
+In 1883, while he still was at the War College, his father died, and
+when he graduated, which he did with honors, he found himself his own
+master. His assets were a small income, a perfect knowledge of the
+French language, and the reputation of being one of the most expert
+swordsman in Paris. He chose not to enter the army, and instead became
+a journalist, novelist, duellist, an _habitue_ of the Latin Quarter and
+the boulevards.
+
+As a novelist the titles of his books suggest their quality. Among
+them are: “Un Amour Vendeen,” “Lettres d’un Yankee,” “Un Amour dans
+le Monde,” “Memoires d’un Gommeux,” “Merveilleuses Aventures de
+Nabuchodonosor, Nosebreaker.”
+
+Of the Catholic Church he wrote seriously, apparently with deep
+conviction, with high enthusiasm. In her service as a defender of the
+faith he issued essays, pamphlets, “broadsides.” The opponents of the
+Church in Paris he attacked relentlessly.
+
+As a reward for his championship he received the title of baron.
+
+In 1878, while only twenty-four, he married the Countess de Saint-Pery,
+by whom he had two children, a boy and a girl, and three years later
+he started _Triboulet_. It was this paper that made him famous to “all
+Paris.”
+
+It was a Royalist sheet, subsidized by the Count de Chambord and
+published in the interest of the Bourbons. Until 1888 Harden-Hickey was
+its editor, and even by his enemies it must be said that he served his
+employers with zeal. During the seven years in which the paper amused
+Paris and annoyed the republican government, as its editor Harden-Hickey
+was involved in forty-two lawsuits, for different editorial
+indiscretions, fined three hundred thousand francs, and was a principal
+in countless duels.
+
+To his brother editors his standing interrogation was: “Would you prefer
+to meet me upon the editorial page, or in the Bois de Boulogne?” Among
+those who met him in the Bois were Aurelien Scholl, H. Lavenbryon, M.
+Taine, M. de Cyon, Philippe Du Bois, Jean Moreas.
+
+In 1888, either because, his patron the Count de Chambord having died,
+there was no more money to pay the fines, or because the patience of
+the government was exhausted, _Triboulet_ ceased to exist, and
+Harden-Hickey, claiming the paper had been suppressed and he himself
+exiled, crossed to London.
+
+From there he embarked upon a voyage around the world, which lasted two
+years, and in the course of which he discovered the island kingdom of
+which he was to be the first and last king. Previous to his departure,
+having been divorced from the Countess de Saint-Pery, he placed his boy
+and girl in the care of a fellow-journalist and very dear friend, the
+Count de la Boissiere, of whom later we shall hear more.
+
+Harden-Hickey started around the world on the _Astoria_, a British
+merchant vessel bound for India by way of Cape Horn, Captain Jackson
+commanding.
+
+When off the coast of Brazil the ship touched at the uninhabited island
+of Trinidad. Historians of James the First say that it was through
+stress of weather that the _Astoria_ was driven to seek refuge there,
+but as, for six months of the year, to make a landing on the island is
+almost impossible, and as at any time, under stress of weather, Trinidad
+would be a place to avoid, it is more likely Jackson put in to replenish
+his water-casks, or to obtain a supply of turtle meat.
+
+Or it may have been that, having told Harden-Hickey of the derelict
+island, the latter persuaded the captain to allow him to land and
+explore it. Of this, at least, we are certain, a boat was sent ashore,
+Harden-Hickey went ashore in it, and before he left the island, as a
+piece of no man’s land, belonging to no country, he claimed it in his
+own name, and upon the beach raised a flag of his own design.
+
+The island of Trinidad claimed by Harden-Hickey must not be confused
+with the larger Trinidad belonging to Great Britain and lying off
+Venezuela.
+
+The English Trinidad is a smiling, peaceful spot of great tropical
+beauty; it is one of the fairest places in the West Indies. At every
+hour of the year the harbor of Port of Spain holds open its arms to
+vessels of every draught. A governor in a pith helmet, a cricket club, a
+bishop in gaiters, and a botanical garden go to make it a prosperous
+and contented colony. But the little derelict Trinidad, in latitude
+20 degrees 30 minutes south, and longitude 29 degrees 22 minutes west,
+seven hundred miles from the coast of Brazil, is but a spot upon the
+ocean. On most maps it is not even a spot. Except by birds, turtles, and
+hideous land-crabs, it is uninhabited; and against the advances of man
+its shores are fortified with cruel ridges of coral, jagged limestone
+rocks, and a tremendous towering surf which, even in a dead calm, beats
+many feet high against the coast.
+
+In 1698 Dr. Halley visited the island, and says he found nothing living
+but doves and land-crabs. “Saw many green turtles in sea, but by reason
+of the great surf, could catch none.”
+
+After Halley’s visit, in 1700 the island was settled by a few Portuguese
+from Brazil. The ruins of their stone huts are still in evidence. But
+Amaro Delano, who called in 1803, makes no mention of the Portuguese;
+and when, in 1822, Commodore Owen visited Trinidad, he found nothing
+living there save cormorants, petrels, gannets, man-of-war birds, and
+“turtles weighing from five hundred to seven hundred pounds.”
+
+In 1889 E. F. Knight, who in the Japanese-Russian War represented the
+London _Morning Post_, visited Trinidad in his yacht in search of buried
+treasure.
+
+Alexander Dalrymple, in his book entitled “Collection of Voages, chiefly
+in the Southern Atlantick Ocean, 1775,” tells how, in 1700, he “took
+possession of the island in his Majesty’s name as knowing it to be
+granted by the King’s letter patent, leaving a Union Jack flying.”
+
+So it appears that before Harden-Hickey seized the island it already had
+been claimed by Great Britain, and later, on account of the Portuguese
+settlement, by Brazil. The answer Harden-Hickey made to these claims
+was that the English never settled in Trinidad, and that the Portuguese
+abandoned it, and, therefore, their claims lapsed. In his “prospectus”
+ of his island, Harden-Hickey himself describes it thus:
+
+“Trinidad is about five miles long and three miles wide. In spite of
+its rugged and uninviting appearance, the inland plateaus are rich with
+luxuriant vegetation.
+
+“Prominent among this is a peculiar species of bean, which is not only
+edible, but extremely palatable. The surrounding seas swarm with fish,
+which as yet are wholly unsuspicious of the hook. Dolphins, rock-cod,
+pigfish, and blackfish may be caught as quickly as they can be hauled
+out. I look to the sea birds and the turtles to afford our principal
+source of revenue. Trinidad is the breeding-place of almost the entire
+feathery population of the South Atlantic Ocean. The exportation of
+guano alone should make my little country prosperous. Turtles visit the
+island to deposit eggs, and at certain seasons the beach is literally
+alive with them. The only drawback to my projected kingdom is the fact
+that it has no good harbor and can be approached only when the sea is
+calm.”
+
+As a matter of fact sometimes months pass before it is possible to
+effect a landing.
+
+Another asset of the island held out by the prospectus was its great
+store of buried treasure. Before Harden-Hickey seized the island, this
+treasure had made it known. This is the legend. In 1821 a great store
+of gold and silver plate plundered from Peruvian churches had been
+concealed on the islands by pirates near Sugar Loaf Hill, on the shore
+of what is known as the Southwest Bay. Much of this plate came from
+the cathedral at Lima, having been carried from there during the war
+of independence when the Spanish residents fled the country. In their
+eagerness to escape they put to sea in any ship that offered, and these
+unarmed and unseaworthy vessels fell an easy prey to pirates. One of
+these pirates on his death-bed, in gratitude to his former captain, told
+him the secret of the treasure. In 1892 this captain was still living,
+in Newcastle, England, and although his story bears a family resemblance
+to every other story of buried treasure, there were added to the tale of
+the pirate some corroborative details. These, in twelve years, induced
+five different expeditions to visit the island. The two most important
+were that of E. F. Knight and one from the Tyne in the bark _Aurea_.
+
+In his “Cruise of the _Alerte_,” Knight gives a full description of the
+island, and of his attempt to find the treasure. In this, a landslide
+having covered the place where it was buried, he was unsuccessful.
+
+But Knight’s book is the only source of accurate information concerning
+Trinidad, and in writing his prospectus it is evident that Harden-Hickey
+was forced to borrow from it freely. Knight himself says that the most
+minute and accurate description of Trinidad is to be found in the “Frank
+Mildmay” of Captain Marryat. He found it so easy to identify each spot
+mentioned in the novel that he believes the author of “Midshipman Easy”
+ himself touched there.
+
+After seizing Trinidad, Harden-Hickey rounded the Cape and made north to
+Japan, China, and India. In India he became interested in Buddhism, and
+remained for over a year questioning the priests of that religion and
+studying its tenets and history.
+
+On his return to Paris, in 1890, he met Miss Annie Harper Flagler,
+daughter of John H. Flagler. A year later, on St. Patrick’s Day,
+1891, at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, Miss Flagler became the
+Baroness Harden-Hickey. The Rev. John Hall married them.
+
+For the next two years Harden-Hickey lived in New York, but so quietly
+that, except that he lived quietly, it is difficult to find out anything
+concerning him. The man who, a few years before, had delighted Paris
+with his daily feuilletons, with his duels, with his forty-two lawsuits,
+who had been the master of revels in the Latin Quarter, in New York
+lived almost as a recluse, writing a book on Buddhism. While he was in
+New York I was a reporter on the _Evening Sun_, but I cannot recall ever
+having read his name in the newspapers of that day, and I heard of him
+only twice; once as giving an exhibition of his water-colors at the
+American Art Galleries, and again as the author of a book I found in a
+store in Twenty-second Street, just east of Broadway, then the home of
+the Truth Seeker Publishing Company.
+
+It was a grewsome compilation and had just appeared in print. It was
+called “Euthanasia, or the Ethics of Suicide.” This book was an apology
+or plea for self-destruction. In it the baron laid down those occasions
+when he considered suicide pardonable, and when obligatory. To support
+his arguments and to show that suicide was a noble act, he quoted Plato,
+Cicero, Shakespeare, and even misquoted the Bible. He gave a list of
+poisons, and the amount of each necessary to kill a human being. To show
+how one can depart from life with the least pain, he illustrated the
+text with most unpleasant pictures, drawn by himself.
+
+The book showed how far Harden-Hickey had strayed from the teachings
+of the Jesuit College at Namur, and of the Church that had made him
+“noble.”
+
+All of these two years had not been spent only in New York.
+Harden-Hickey made excursions to California, to Mexico, and to Texas,
+and in each of these places bought cattle ranches and mines. The money
+to pay for these investments came from his father-in-law. But not
+directly. Whenever he wanted money he asked his wife, or De la
+Boissiere, who was a friend also of Flagler, to obtain it for him.
+
+His attitude toward his father-in-law is difficult to explain. It is not
+apparent that Flagler ever did anything which could justly offend him;
+indeed, he always seems to have spoken of his son-in-law with tolerance,
+and often with awe, as one would speak of a clever, wayward child. But
+Harden-Hickey chose to regard Flagler as his enemy, as a sordid man
+of business who could not understand the feelings and aspirations of a
+genius and a gentleman.
+
+Before Harden-Hickey married, the misunderstanding between his wife’s
+father and himself began. Because he thought Harden-Hickey was marrying
+his daughter for her money, Flagler opposed the union. Consequently,
+Harden-Hickey married Miss Flagler without “settlements,” and for the
+first few years supported her without aid from her father. But his
+wife had been accustomed to a manner of living beyond the means of the
+soldier of fortune, and soon his income, and then even his capital, was
+exhausted. From her mother the baroness inherited a fortune. This was
+in the hands of her father as executor. When his own money was gone,
+Harden-Hickey endeavored to have the money belonging to his wife placed
+to her credit, or to his. To this, it is said, Flagler, on the ground
+that Harden-Hickey was not a man of business, while he was, objected,
+and urged that he was, and that if it remained in his hands the money
+would be better invested and better expended. It was the refusal of
+Flagler to intrust Harden-Hickey with the care of his wife’s money that
+caused the breach between them.
+
+As I have said, you cannot judge Harden-Hickey as you would a
+contemporary. With the people among whom he was thrown, his ideas were
+entirely out of joint. He should have lived in the days of “The Three
+Musketeers.” People who looked upon him as working for his own hand
+entirely misunderstood him. He was absolutely honest, and as absolutely
+without a sense of humor. To him, to pay taxes, to pay grocers’ bills,
+to depend for protection upon a policeman, was intolerable. He lived
+in a world of his own imagining. And one day, in order to make his
+imaginings real, and to escape from his father-in-law’s unromantic world
+of Standard Oil and Florida hotels, in a proclamation to the powers
+he announced himself as King James the First of the Principality of
+Trinidad.
+
+The proclamation failed to create a world crisis. Several of the powers
+recognized his principality and his title; but, as a rule, people
+laughed, wondered, and forgot. That the daughter of John Flagler was
+to rule the new principality gave it a “news interest,” and for a few
+Sundays in the supplements she was hailed as the “American Queen.”
+
+When upon the subject of the new kingdom Flagler himself was
+interviewed, he showed an open mind.
+
+“My son-in-law is a very determined man,” he said; “he will carry out
+any scheme in which he is interested. Had he consulted me about this,
+I would have been glad to have aided him with money or advice. My
+son-in-law is an extremely well-read, refined, well-bred man. He does
+not court publicity. While he was staying in my house he spent nearly
+all the time in the library translating an Indian book on Buddhism. My
+daughter has no ambition to be a queen or anything else than what she
+is--an American girl. But my son-in-law means to carry on this Trinidad
+scheme, and--he will.”
+
+From his father-in-law, at least, Harden-Hickey could not complain that
+he had met with lack of sympathy.
+
+The rest of America was amused; and after less than nine days,
+indifferent. But Harden-Hickey, though unobtrusively, none the less
+earnestly continued to play the part of king. His friend De la Boissiere
+he appointed his Minister of Foreign Affairs, and established in a
+Chancellery at 217 West Thirty-sixth Street, New York, and from there
+was issued a sort of circular, or prospectus, written by the king, and
+signed by “Le Grand Chancelier, Secretaire d’Etat pour les Affaires
+Etrangeres, M. le Comte de la Boissiere.”
+
+The document, written in French, announced that the new state would
+be governed by a military dictatorship, that the royal standard was a
+yellow triangle on a red ground, and that the arms of the principality
+were “d’Or chape de Gueules.” It pointed out naively that those who
+first settled on the island would be naturally the oldest inhabitants,
+and hence would form the aristocracy. But only those who at home enjoyed
+social position and some private fortune would be admitted into this
+select circle.
+
+For itself the state reserved a monopoly of the guano, of the turtles,
+and of the buried treasure. And both to discover the treasure and to
+encourage settlers to dig and so cultivate the soil, a percentage of the
+treasure was promised to the one who found it.
+
+Any one purchasing ten $200 bonds was entitled to a free passage to the
+island, and after a year, should he so desire it, a return trip. The
+hard work was to be performed by Chinese coolies, the aristocracy
+existing beautifully, and, according to the prospectus, to enjoy _“vie
+d’un genre tout nouveau, et la recherche de sensations nouvelles.”_
+
+To reward his subjects for prominence in literature, the arts, and the
+sciences, his Majesty established an order of chivalry. The official
+document creating this order reads:
+
+
+“We, James, Prince of Trinidad, have resolved to commemorate our
+accession to the throne of Trinidad by the institution of an Order of
+Chivalry, destined to reward literature, industry, science, and the
+human virtues, and by these presents have established and do institute,
+with cross and crown, the Order of the Insignia of the Cross of
+Trinidad, of which we and our heirs and successors shall be the
+sovereigns.
+
+“Given in our Chancellery the Eighth of the month of December, one
+thousand eight hundred and ninety-three, and of our reign, the First
+Year.
+
+“JAMES.”
+
+There were four grades: Chevalier, Commander, Grand Officer, and Grand
+Cross; and the name of each member of the order was inscribed in
+“The Book of Gold.” A pension of one thousand francs was given to a
+Chevalier, of two thousand francs to a Commander, and of three thousand
+francs to a Grand Officer. Those of the grade of Grand Cross were
+content with a plaque of eight diamond-studded rays, with, in the
+centre, set in red enamel, the arms of Trinidad. The ribbon was red and
+yellow.
+
+A rule of the order read: “The costume shall be identical with that of
+the Chamberlains of the Court of Trinidad, save the buttons, which shall
+bear the impress of the Crown of the Order.”
+
+For himself, King James commissioned a firm of jewelers to construct a
+royal crown. In design it was similar to the one which surmounted the
+cross of Trinidad. It is shown in the photograph of the insignia. Also,
+the king issued a set of postage-stamps on which was a picture of
+the island. They were of various colors and denominations, and among
+stamp-collectors enjoyed a certain sale.
+
+To-day, as I found when I tried to procure one to use in this book, they
+are worth many times their face value.
+
+For some time the affairs of the new kingdom progressed favorably. In
+San Francisco, King James, in person, engaged four hundred coolies and
+fitted out a schooner which he sent to Trinidad, where it made regular
+trips between his principality and Brazil; an agent was established
+on the island, and the construction of docks, wharves, and houses
+was begun, while at the chancellery in West Thirty-sixth Street, the
+Minister of Foreign Affairs was ready to furnish would-be settlers with
+information.
+
+And then, out of a smiling sky, a sudden and unexpected blow was struck
+at the independence of the little kingdom. It was a blow from which it
+never recovered.
+
+In July of 1895, while constructing a cable to Brazil, Great Britain
+found the Island of Trinidad lying in the direct line she wished to
+follow, and, as a cable station, seized it. Objection to this was made
+by Brazil, and at Bahia a mob with stones pelted the sign of the English
+Consul-General.
+
+By right of Halley’s discovery, England claimed the island; as a
+derelict from the main land, Brazil also claimed it. Between the rivals,
+the world saw a chance for war, and the fact that the island really
+belonged to our King James for a moment was forgotten.
+
+But the Minister of Foreign Affairs was at his post. With promptitude
+and vigor he acted. He addressed a circular note to all the powers of
+Europe, and to our State Department a protest. It read as follows:
+
+
+  “GRANDE CHANCELLERIE DE LA PRINCIPAUTE DE
+  TRINIDAD,
+  27 WEST THIRTY-SIXTH STREET,
+  NEW YORK CITY, U. S. A.,
+
+“NEW YORK, _July_ 30, 1895.
+
+_“To His Excellency Mr. the Secretary of State of the Republic of the
+United States of North America, Washington, D. C.:_
+
+“EXCELLENCY.--I have the honor to recall to your memory:
+
+“1. That in the course of the month of September, 1893, Baron
+Harden-Hickey officially notified all the Powers of his taking
+possession of the uninhabited island of Trinidad; and
+
+“2. That in course of January, 1894, he renewed to all these Powers the
+official notification of the said taking of possession, and informed
+them at the same time that from that date the land would be known
+as ‘Principality of Trinidad’; that he took the title of ‘Prince of
+Trinidad,’ and would reign under the name of James I.
+
+“In consequence of these official notifications several Powers have
+recognized the new Principality and its Prince, and at all events none
+thought it necessary at that epoch to raise objections or formulate
+opposition.
+
+“The press of the entire world has, on the other hand, often acquainted
+readers with these facts, thus giving to them all possible publicity. In
+consequence of the accomplishment of these various formalities, and
+as the law of nations prescribes that ‘derelict’ territories belong to
+whoever will take possession of them, and as the island of Trinidad,
+which has been abandoned for years, certainly belongs to the aforesaid
+category, his Serene Highness Prince James I was authorized to regard
+his rights on the said island as perfectly valid and indisputable.
+
+“Nevertheless, your Excellency knows that recently, in spite of all
+the legitimate rights of my august sovereign, an English war-ship
+has disembarked at Trinidad a detachment of armed troops and taken
+possession of the island in the name of England.
+
+“Following this assumption of territory, the Brazilian Government,
+invoking a right of ancient Portuguese occupation (long ago outlawed),
+has notified the English Government to surrender the island to Brazil.
+
+“I beg of your Excellency to ask of the Government of the United
+States of North America to recognize the Principality of Trinidad as
+an independent State, and to come to an understanding with the other
+American Powers in order to guarantee its neutrality.
+
+“Thus the Government of the United States of North America will once
+more accord its powerful assistance to the cause of right and of
+justice, misunderstood by England and Brazil, put an end to a situation
+which threatens to disturb the peace, re-establish concord between two
+great States ready to appeal to arms, and affirm itself, moreover, as
+the faithful interpreter of the Monroe Doctrine.
+
+“In the expectation of your reply please accept, Excellency, the
+expression of my elevated consideration.
+
+“The Grand Chancellor, Secretary for Foreign Affairs,
+
+“COMTE DE LA BOISSIERE.”
+
+At that time Richard Olney was Secretary of State, and in his treatment
+of the protest, and of the gentleman who wrote it, he fully upheld the
+reputation he made while in office of lack of good manners. Saying he
+was unable to read the handwriting in which the protest was written,
+he disposed of it in a way that would suggest itself naturally to a
+statesman and a gentleman. As a “crank” letter he turned it over to the
+Washington correspondents. You can imagine what they did with it.
+
+The day following the reporters in New York swept down upon the
+chancellery and upon the Minister of Foreign Affairs. It was the “silly
+season” in August, there was no real news in town, and the troubles of
+De la Boissiere were allowed much space.
+
+They laughed at him and at his king, at his chancellery, at his broken
+English, at his “grave and courtly manners,” even at his clothes. But in
+spite of the ridicule, between the lines you could read that to the man
+himself it all was terribly real.
+
+I had first heard of the island of Trinidad from two men I knew
+who spent three months on it searching for the treasure, and when
+Harden-Hickey proclaimed himself lord of the island, through the papers
+I had carefully followed his fortunes. So, partly out of curiosity and
+partly out of sympathy, I called at the chancellery.
+
+I found it in a brownstone house, in a dirty neighborhood just west of
+Seventh Avenue, and of where now stands the York Hotel. Three weeks ago
+I revisited it and found it unchanged. At the time of my first visit,
+on the jamb of the front door was pasted a piece of paper on which
+was written in the handwriting of De la Boissiere: “Chancellerie de la
+Principaute de Trinidad.”
+
+The chancellery was not exactly in its proper setting. On its door-step
+children of the tenements were playing dolls with clothes-pins; in the
+street a huckster in raucous tones was offering wilted cabbages to women
+in wrappers leaning from the fire escapes; the smells and the heat of
+New York in midsummer rose from the asphalt. It was a far cry to the
+wave-swept island off the coast of Brazil.
+
+De la Boissiere received me with distrust. The morning papers had made
+him man-shy; but, after a few “Your Excellencies” and a respectful
+inquiry regarding “His Royal Highness,” his confidence revived. In the
+situation he saw nothing humorous, not even in an announcement on the
+wall which read: “Sailings to Trinidad.” Of these there were _two_; on
+March 1, and on October 1. On the table were many copies of the
+royal proclamation, the postage-stamps of the new government, the
+thousand-franc bonds, and, in pasteboard boxes, the gold and red
+enamelled crosses of the Order of Trinidad.
+
+He talked to me frankly and fondly of Prince James. Indeed, I never
+met any man who knew Harden-Hickey well who did not speak of him with
+aggressive loyalty. If at his eccentricities they smiled, it was with
+the smile of affection. It was easy to see De la Boissiere regarded him
+not only with the affection of a friend, but with the devotion of a
+true subject. In his manner he himself was courteous, gentle, and so
+distinguished that I felt as though I were enjoying, on intimate terms,
+an audience with one of the prime-ministers of Europe.
+
+And he, on his part, after the ridicule of the morning papers, to have
+any one with outward seriousness accept his high office and his king,
+was, I believe, not ungrateful.
+
+I told him I wished to visit Trinidad, and in that I was quite serious.
+The story of an island filled with buried treasure, and governed by a
+king, whose native subjects were turtles and seagulls, promised to make
+interesting writing.
+
+The count was greatly pleased. I believe in me he saw his first
+bona-fide settler, and when I rose to go he even lifted one of
+the crosses of Trinidad and, before my envious eyes, regarded it
+uncertainly.
+
+Perhaps, had he known that of all decorations it was the one I
+most desired; had I only then and there booked my passage, or sworn
+allegiance to King James, who knows but that to-day I might be a
+chevalier, with my name in the “Book of Gold”? But instead of bending
+the knee, I reached for my hat; the count replaced the cross in its
+pasteboard box, and for me the psychological moment had passed.
+
+Others, more deserving of the honor, were more fortunate. Among my
+fellow-reporters who, like myself, came to scoff, and remained to pray,
+was Henri Pene du Bois, for some time, until his recent death, the
+brilliant critic of art and music of the _American_. Then he was on
+the _Times_, and Henry N. Cary, now of the _Morning Telegraph_, was his
+managing editor.
+
+When Du Bois reported to Cary on his assignment, he said: “There is
+nothing funny in that story. It’s pathetic. Both those men are in
+earnest. They are convinced they are being robbed of their rights. Their
+only fault is that they have imagination, and that the rest of us lack
+it. That’s the way it struck me, and that’s the way the story ought to
+be written.”
+
+“Write it that way,” said Cary.
+
+So, of all the New York papers, the _Times_, for a brief period, became
+the official organ of the Government of James the First, and in time
+Cary and Du Bois were created Chevaliers of the Order of Trinidad, and
+entitled to wear uniforms “Similar to those of the Chamberlains of the
+Court, save that the buttons bear the impress of the Royal Crown.”
+
+The attack made by Great Britain and Brazil upon the independence of the
+principality, while it left Harden-Hickey in the position of a king in
+exile, brought him at once another crown, which, by those who offered
+it to him, was described as of incomparably greater value than that of
+Trinidad.
+
+In the first instance the man had sought the throne; in this case the
+throne sought the man.
+
+In 1893 in San Francisco, Ralston J. Markowe, a lawyer and a one-time
+officer of artillery in the United States army, gained renown as one
+of the Morrow filibustering expedition which attempted to overthrow the
+Dole government in the Hawaiian Isles and restore to the throne Queen
+Liliuokalani. In San Francisco Markowe was nicknamed the “Prince of
+Honolulu,” as it was understood, should Liliuokalani regain her
+crown, he would be rewarded with some high office. But in the star
+of Liliuokalani, Markowe apparently lost faith, and thought he saw
+in Harden-Hickey timber more suitable for king-making. Accordingly,
+twenty-four days after the “protest” was sent to our State Department,
+Markowe switched his allegiance to Harden-Hickey, and to him addressed
+the following letter:
+
+“SAN FRANCISCO, August 26, 1895.
+
+BARON HARDEN-HICKEY, LOS ANGELES, CAL.:
+
+“Monseigneur--Your favor of August 16 has been received.
+
+“1. I am the duly authorized agent of the Royalist party in so far as
+it is possible for any one to occupy that position under existing
+circumstances. With the Queen in prison and absolutely cut off from
+all communication with her friends, it is out of the question for me to
+carry anything like formal credentials.
+
+“2. Alienating any part of the territory cannot give rise to any
+constitutional questions, for the reason that the constitutions, like
+the land tenures, are in a state of such utter confusion that only a
+strong hand can unravel them, and the restoration will result in the
+establishment of a strong military government. If I go down with the
+expedition I have organized I shall be in full control of the situation
+and in a position to carry out all my contracts.
+
+“3. It is the island of Kauai on which I propose to establish you as an
+independent sovereign.
+
+“4. My plan is to successively occupy all the islands, leaving the
+capital to the last. When the others have fallen, the capital, being cut
+off from all its resources, will be easily taken, and may very likely
+fall without effort. I don’t expect in any case to have to fortify
+myself or to take the defensive, or to have to issue a call to arms, as
+I shall have an overwhelming force to join me at once, in addition to
+those who go with me, who by themselves will be sufficient to carry
+everything before them without active cooperation from the people there.
+
+“5. The Government forces consist of about 160 men and boys, with very
+imperfect military training, and of whom about forty are officers. They
+are organized as infantry. There are also about 600 citizens enrolled
+as a reserve guard, who may be called upon in case of an emergency,
+and about 150 police. We can fully rely upon the assistance of all the
+police and from one-quarter to one-half of the other troops. And of the
+remainder many will under no circumstances engage in a sharp fight in
+defense of the present government. There are now on the island plenty
+of men and arms to accomplish our purpose, and if my expedition does
+not get off very soon the people there will be organized to do the work
+without other assistance from here than the direction of a few leaders,
+of which they stand more in need than anything else.
+
+“6. The tonnage of the vessel is 146. She at present has berth-room for
+twenty men, but bunks can be arranged in the hold for 256 more, with
+provision for ample ventilation. She has one complete set of sails and
+two extra spars. The remaining information in regard to her I will have
+to obtain and send you to-morrow. I think it must be clear to you that
+the opportunity now offered you will be of incomparably greater value
+at once than Trinidad would ever be. Still hoping that I may have an
+interview with you at an early date, respectfully yours,
+
+“RALSTON J. MARKOWE.”
+
+What Harden-Hickey thought of this is not known, but as two weeks before
+he received it he had written Markowe, asking him by what authority he
+represented the Royalists of Honolulu, it seems evident that when the
+crown of Hawaii was first proffered him he did not at once spurn it.
+
+He now was in the peculiar position of being a deposed king of an island
+in the South Atlantic, which had been taken from him, and king-elect of
+an island in the Pacific, which was his if he could take it.
+
+This was in August of 1895. For the two years following, Harden-Hickey
+was a soldier of misfortunes. Having lost his island kingdom, he could
+no longer occupy himself with plans for its improvement. It had been
+his toy. They had taken it from him, and the loss and the ridicule which
+followed hurt him bitterly.
+
+And for the lands he really owned in Mexico and California, and which,
+if he were to live in comfort, it was necessary he should sell, he
+could find no purchaser; and, moreover, having quarrelled with his
+father-in-law, he had cut off his former supply of money. The need of it
+pinched him cruelly.
+
+The advertised cause of this quarrel was sufficiently characteristic
+to be the real one. Moved by the attack of Great Britain upon his
+principality, Harden-Hickey decided upon reprisals. It must be
+remembered that always he was more Irish than French. On paper
+he organized an invasion of England from Ireland, the home of his
+ancestors. It was because Flagler refused to give him money for this
+adventure that he broke with him. His friends say this was the real
+reason of the quarrel, which was a quarrel on the side of Harden-Hickey
+alone.
+
+And there were other, more intimate troubles. While not separated from
+his wife, he now was seldom in her company. When the Baroness was in
+Paris, Harden-Hickey was in San Francisco; when she returned to San
+Francisco, he was in Mexico. The fault seems to have been his. He was
+greatly admired by pretty women. His daughter by his first wife, now a
+very beautiful girl of sixteen, spent much time with her stepmother;
+and when not on his father’s ranch in Mexico, his son also, for months
+together, was at her side. The husband approved of this, but he himself
+saw his wife infrequently. Nevertheless, early in the spring of 1898,
+the Baroness leased a house in Brockton Square, in Riverside, Cal.,
+where it was understood by herself and by her friends her husband would
+join her. At that time in Mexico he was trying to dispose of a large
+tract of land. Had he been able to sell it, the money for a time would
+have kept one even of his extravagances contentedly rich. At least,
+he would have been independent of his wife and of her father. Up to
+February of 1898 his obtaining this money seemed probable.
+
+Early in that month the last prospective purchaser decided not to buy.
+
+There is no doubt that had Harden-Hickey then turned to his
+father-in-law, that gentleman, as he had done before, would have opened
+an account for him.
+
+But the Prince of Trinidad felt he could no longer beg, even for the
+money belonging to his wife, from the man he had insulted. He could no
+longer ask his wife to intercede for him. He was without money of his
+own, with out the means of obtaining it; from his wife he had ceased to
+expect even sympathy, and from the world he knew, the fact that he was
+a self-made king caused him always to be pointed out with ridicule as a
+charlatan, as a jest.
+
+The soldier of varying fortunes, the duellist and dreamer, the devout
+Catholic and devout Buddhist, saw the forty-third year of his life only
+as the meeting-place of many fiascos.
+
+His mind was tormented with imaginary wrongs, imaginary slights,
+imaginary failures.
+
+This young man, who could paint pictures, write books, organize colonies
+oversea, and with a sword pick the buttons from a waistcoat, forgot the
+twenty good years still before him; forgot that men loved him for the
+mistakes he had made; that in parts of the great city of Paris his name
+was still spoken fondly, still was famous and familiar.
+
+In his book on the “Ethics of Suicide,” for certain hard places in life
+he had laid down an inevitable rule of conduct.
+
+As he saw it he had come to one of those hard places, and he would not
+ask of others what he himself would not perform.
+
+From Mexico he set out for California, but not to the house his wife had
+prepared for him.
+
+Instead, on February 9, 1898, at El Paso, he left the train and
+registered at a hotel.
+
+At 7.30 in the evening he went to his room, and when, on the following
+morning, they kicked in the door, they found him stretched rigidly upon
+the bed, like one lying in state, with, near his hand, a half-emptied
+bottle of poison.
+
+On a chair was pinned this letter to his wife:
+
+“My DEAREST,--No news from you, although you have had plenty of time to
+write. Harvey has written me that he has no one in view at present to
+buy my land. Well, I shall have tasted the cup of bitterness to the very
+dregs, but I do not complain. Good-by. I forgive you your conduct toward
+me and trust you will be able to forgive yourself. I prefer to be a dead
+gentleman to a living blackguard like your father.”
+
+
+And when they searched his open trunk for something that might identify
+the body on the bed, they found the crown of Trinidad.
+
+You can imagine it: the mean hotel bedroom, the military figure with
+its white face and mustache, “_a la_ Louis Napoleon,” at rest upon the
+pillow, the startled drummers and chambermaids peering in from the hall,
+and the landlord, or coroner, or doctor, with a bewildered countenance,
+lifting to view the royal crown of gilt and velvet.
+
+The other actors in this, as Harold Frederic called it, “Opera Bouffe
+Monarchy,” are still living.
+
+The Baroness Harden-Hickey makes her home in this country.
+
+The Count de la Boissiere, ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs, is still a
+leader of the French colony in New York, and a prosperous commission
+merchant with a suite of offices on Fifty-fourth Street. By the will of
+Harden-Hickey he is executor of his estate, guardian of his children,
+and what, for the purpose of this article, is of more importance, in
+his hands lies the future of the kingdom of Trinidad. When Harden-Hickey
+killed himself the title to the island was in dispute. Should young
+Harden-Hickey wish to claim it, it still would be in dispute. Meanwhile,
+by the will of the First James, De la Boissiere is appointed perpetual
+regent, a sort of “receiver,” and executor of the principality.
+
+To him has been left a royal decree signed and sealed, but blank. In the
+will the power to fill in this blank with a statement showing the final
+disposition of the island has been bestowed upon De la Boissiere.
+
+So, some day, he may proclaim the accession of a new king, and give a
+new lease of life to the kingdom of which Harden-Hickey dreamed.
+
+But unless his son, or wife, or daughter should assert his or her
+rights, which is not likely to happen, so ends the dynasty of James the
+First of Trinidad, Baron of the Holy Roman Empire.
+
+To the wise ones in America he was a fool, and they laughed at him; to
+the wiser ones, he was a clever rascal who had evolved a new real-estate
+scheme and was out to rob the people--and they respected him. To my
+mind, of them all, Harden-Hickey was the wisest.
+
+Granted one could be serious, what could be more delightful than to be
+your own king on your own island?
+
+The comic paragraphers, the business men of “hard, common sense,” the
+captains of industry who laughed at him and his national resources
+of buried treasure, turtles’ eggs, and guano, with his body-guard of
+Zouaves and his Grand Cross of Trinidad, certainly possessed many things
+that Harden-Hickey lacked. But they in turn lacked the things that made
+him happy; the power to “make believe,” the love of romance, the touch
+of adventure that plucked him by the sleeve.
+
+When, as boys, we used to say: “Let’s pretend we’re pirates,” as a man,
+Harden-Hickey begged: “Let’s pretend I’m a king.”
+
+But the trouble was, the other boys had grown up and would not pretend.
+
+For some reason his end always reminds me of the closing line of
+Pinero’s play, when the adventuress, Mrs. Tanqueray, kills herself, and
+her virtuous stepchild says: “If we had only been kinder!”
+
+
+
+
+WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL
+
+IN the strict sense of the phrase, a soldier of fortune is a man who for
+pay, or for the love of adventure, fights under the flag of any country.
+
+In the bigger sense he is the kind of man who in any walk of life makes
+his own fortune, who, when he sees it coming, leaps to meet it, and
+turns it to his advantage.
+
+Than Winston Spencer Churchill to-day there are few young men--and he is
+a very young man--who have met more varying fortunes, and none who has
+more frequently bent them to his own advancement. To him it has been
+indifferent whether, at the moment, the fortune seemed good or evil, in
+the end always it was good.
+
+As a boy officer, when other subalterns were playing polo, and at the
+Gaiety Theatre attending night school, he ran away to Cuba and fought
+with the Spaniards. For such a breach of military discipline, any other
+officer would have been court-martialled. Even his friends feared that
+by his foolishness his career in the army was at an end. Instead, his
+escapade was made a question in the House of Commons, and the fact
+brought him such publicity that the _Daily Graphic_ paid him handsomely
+to write on the Cuban Revolution, and the Spanish Government rewarded
+him with the Order of Military Merit.
+
+At the very outbreak of the Boer war he was taken prisoner. It seemed
+a climax of misfortune. With his brother officers he had hoped in that
+campaign to acquit himself with credit, and that he should lie inactive
+in Pretoria appeared a terrible calamity. To the others who, through
+many heart-breaking months, suffered imprisonment, it continued to be
+a calamity. But within six weeks of his capture Churchill escaped, and,
+after many adventures, rejoined his own army to find that the calamity
+had made him a hero.
+
+When after the battle of Omdurman, in his book on “The River War,” he
+attacked Lord Kitchener, those who did not like him, and they were many,
+said: “That’s the end of Winston in the army. He’ll never get another
+chance to criticise K. of K.”
+
+But only two years later the chance came, when, no longer a subaltern,
+but as a member of the House of Commons, he patronized Kitchener by
+defending him from the attacks of others.
+
+Later, when his assaults upon the leaders of his own party closed to
+him, even in his own constituency, the Conservative debating clubs,
+again his ill-wishers said: “This _is_ the end. He has ridiculed those
+who sit in high places. He has offended his cousin and patron, the Duke
+of Marlborough. Without political friends, without the influence and
+money of the Marlborough family he is a political nonentity.” That was
+eighteen months ago. To-day, at the age of thirty-two, he is one of the
+leaders of the Government party, Under-Secretary for the Colonies, and
+with the Liberals the most popular young man in public life.
+
+Only last Christmas, at a banquet, Sir Edward Grey, the new Foreign
+Secretary, said of him: “Mr. Winston Churchill has achieved distinction
+in at least five different careers--as a soldier, a war correspondent,
+a lecturer, an author, and last, but not least, as a politician. I
+have understated it even now, for he has achieved two careers as a
+politician--one on each side of the House. His first career on the
+Government side was a really distinguished career. I trust the second
+will be even more distinguished--and more prolonged. The remarkable
+thing is that he has done all this when, unless appearances very much
+belie him, he has not reached the age of sixty-four, which is the
+minimum age at which the politician ceases to be young.”
+
+Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born thirty-two years ago, in
+November, 1874. By birth he is half-American. His father was Lord
+Randolph Churchill, and his mother was Jennie Jerome, of New York.
+On the father’s side he is the grandchild of the seventh Duke of
+Marlborough, on the distaff side, of Leonard Jerome.
+
+To a student of heredity it would be interesting to try and discover
+from which of these ancestors Churchill drew those qualities which in
+him are most prominent, and which have led to his success.
+
+What he owes to his father and mother it is difficult to overestimate,
+almost as difficult as to overestimate what he has accomplished by his
+own efforts.
+
+He was not a child born a full-grown genius of commonplace parents.
+Rather his fate threatened that he should always be known as the son
+of his father. And certainly it was asking much of a boy that he should
+live up to a father who was one of the most conspicuous, clever, and
+erratic statesmen of the later Victorian era, and a mother who is as
+brilliant as she is beautiful.
+
+For at no time was the American wife content to be merely ornamental.
+Throughout the political career of her husband she was his helpmate, and
+as an officer of the Primrose League, as an editor of the _Anglo-Saxon
+Review_, as, for many hot, weary months in Durban Harbor, the head
+of the hospital ship _Maine_, she has shown an acute mind and real
+executive power. At the polls many votes that would not respond to the
+arguments of the husband, and later of the son, were gained over to the
+cause by the charm and wit of the American woman.
+
+In his earlier days, if one can have days any earlier than those he now
+enjoys, Churchill was entirely influenced by two things: the tremendous
+admiration he felt for his father, which filled him with ambition to
+follow in his orbit, and the camaraderie of his mother, who treated him
+less like a mother than a sister and companion.
+
+Indeed, Churchill was always so precocious that I cannot recall the time
+when he was young enough to be Lady Randolph’s son; certainly, I cannot
+recall the time when she was old enough to be his mother.
+
+When first I knew him he had passed through Harrow and Sandhurst and was
+a second lieutenant in the Queen’s Own Hussars. He was just of age, but
+appeared much younger.
+
+He was below medium height, a slight, delicate-looking boy; although, as
+a matter of fact, extremely strong, with blue eyes, many freckles, and
+hair which threatened to be a decided red, but which now has lost its
+fierceness. When he spoke it was with a lisp, which also has changed,
+and which now appears to be merely an intentional hesitation.
+
+His manner of speaking was nervous, eager, explosive. He used many
+gestures, some of which were strongly reminiscent of his father, of
+whom he, unlike most English lads, who shy at mentioning a distinguished
+parent, constantly spoke.
+
+He even copied his father in his little tricks of manner. Standing with
+hands shoved under the frock-coat and one resting on each hip as though
+squeezing in the waist line; when seated, resting the elbows on the arms
+of the chair and nervously locking and unclasping fingers, are tricks
+common to both.
+
+He then had and still has a most embarrassing habit of asking many
+questions; embarrassing, sometimes, because the questions are so frank,
+and sometimes because they lay bare the wide expanse of one’s own
+ignorance.
+
+At that time, although in his twenty-first year, this lad twice had been
+made a question in the House of Commons.
+
+That in itself had rendered him conspicuous. When you consider out of
+Great Britain’s four hundred million subjects how many live, die, and
+are buried without at any age having drawn down upon themselves the
+anger of the House of Commons, to have done so twice, before one has
+passed his twenty-first year, seems to promise a lurid future.
+
+The first time Churchill disturbed the august assemblage in which so
+soon he was to become a leader was when he “ragged” a brother subaltern
+named Bruce and cut up his saddle and accoutrements. The second time was
+when he ran away to Cuba to fight with the Spaniards.
+
+After this campaign, on the first night of his arrival in London, he
+made his maiden speech. He delivered it in a place of less dignity
+than the House of Commons, but one, throughout Great Britain and her
+colonies, as widely known and as well supported. This was the Empire
+Music Hall.
+
+At the time Mrs. Ormiston Chant had raised objections to the presence in
+the Music Hall of certain young women, and had threatened, unless they
+ceased to frequent its promenade, to have the license of the Music Hall
+revoked. As a compromise, the management ceased selling liquor, and
+on the night Churchill visited the place the bar in the promenade was
+barricaded with scantling and linen sheets. With the thirst of tropical
+Cuba still upon him, Churchill asked for a drink, which was denied him,
+and the crusade, which in his absence had been progressing fiercely,
+was explained. Any one else would have taken no for his answer, and
+have sought elsewhere for his drink. Not so Churchill. What he did is
+interesting, because it was so extremely characteristic. Now he would
+not do it; then he was twenty-one.
+
+He scrambled to the velvet-covered top of the railing which divides
+the auditorium from the promenade, and made a speech. It was a plea in
+behalf of his “Sisters, the Ladies of the Empire Promenade.”
+
+“Where,” he asked of the ladies themselves and of their escorts crowded
+below him in the promenade, “does the Englishman in London always find a
+welcome? Where does he first go when, battle-scarred and travel-worn,
+he reaches home? Who is always there to greet him with a smile, and
+join him in a drink? Who is ever faithful, ever true--the Ladies of the
+Empire Promenade.”
+
+The laughter and cheers that greeted this, and the tears of the ladies
+themselves, naturally brought the performance on the stage to a stop,
+and the vast audience turned in the seats and boxes.
+
+They saw a little red-haired boy in evening clothes, balancing himself
+on the rail of the balcony, and around him a great crowd, cheering,
+shouting, and bidding him “Go on!”
+
+Churchill turned with delight to the larger audience, and repeated his
+appeal. The house shook with laughter and applause.
+
+The commissionaires and police tried to reach him and a good-tempered
+but very determined mob of well-dressed gentlemen and cheering girls
+fought them back. In triumph Churchill ended his speech by begging his
+hearers to give “fair play” to the women, and to follow him in a charge
+upon the barricades.
+
+The charge was instantly made, the barricades were torn down, and the
+terrified management ordered that drink be served to its victorious
+patrons.
+
+Shortly after striking this blow for the liberty of others, Churchill
+organized a dinner which illustrated the direction in which at that age
+his mind was working, and showed that his ambition was already abnormal.
+The dinner was given to those of his friends and acquaintances who “were
+under twenty-one years of age, and who in twenty years would control the
+destinies of the British Empire.”
+
+As one over the age limit, or because he did not consider me an
+empire-controlling force, on this great occasion, I was permitted to
+be present. But except that the number of incipient empire-builders was
+very great, that they were very happy, and that save the host himself
+none of them took his idea seriously, I would not call it an evening of
+historical interest. But the fact is interesting that of all the
+boys present, as yet, the host seems to be the only one who to any
+conspicuous extent is disturbing the destinies of Great Britain.
+However, the others can reply that ten of the twenty years have not yet
+passed.
+
+When he was twenty-three Churchill obtained leave of absence from his
+regiment, and as there was no other way open to him to see fighting, as
+a correspondent he joined the Malakand Field Force in India.
+
+It may be truthfully said that by his presence in that frontier war he
+made it and himself famous. His book on that campaign is his best piece
+of war reporting. To the civilian reader it has all the delight of one
+of Kipling’s Indian stories, and to writers on military subjects it is
+a model. But it is a model very few can follow, and which Churchill
+himself was unable to follow, for the reason that only once is it given
+a man to be twenty-three years of age.
+
+The picturesque hand-to-hand fighting, the night attacks, the charges up
+precipitous hills, the retreats made carrying the wounded under constant
+fire, which he witnessed and in which he bore his part, he never
+again can see with the same fresh and enthusiastic eyes. Then it was
+absolutely new, and the charm of the book and the value of the book are
+that with the intolerance of youth he attacks in the service evils that
+older men prefer to let lie, and that with the ingenuousness of youth he
+tells of things which to the veteran have become unimportant, or which
+through usage he is no longer even able to see.
+
+In his three later war books, the wonder of it, the horror of it, the
+quick admiration for brave deeds and daring men, give place, in “The
+River War,” to the critical point of view of the military expert, and
+in his two books on the Boer war to the rapid impressions of the
+journalist. In these latter books he tells you of battles he has seen,
+in the first one he made you see them.
+
+For his services with the Malakand Field Force he received the campaign
+medal with clasp, and, “in despatches,” Brigadier-General Jeffreys
+praises “the courage and resolution of Lieutenant W. L. S. Churchill,
+Fourth Hussars, with the force as correspondent of the _Pioneer_.”
+
+From the operations around Malakand, he at once joined Sir William
+Lockhart as orderly officer, and with the Tirah Expedition went through
+that campaign.
+
+For this his Indian medal gained a second clasp.
+
+This was in the early part of 1898. In spite of the time taken up as
+an officer and as a correspondent, he finished his book on the Malakand
+Expedition and then, as it was evident Kitchener would soon attack
+Khartum, he jumped across to Egypt and again as a correspondent took
+part in the advance upon that city.
+
+Thus, in one year, he had seen service in three campaigns.
+
+On the day of the battle his luck followed him. Kitchener had attached
+him to the Twenty-first Lancers, and it will be remembered the event of
+the battle was the charge made by that squadron. It was no canter, no
+easy “pig-sticking”; it was a fight to get in and a fight to get out,
+with frenzied followers of the Khalifa hanging to the bridle reins,
+hacking at the horses’ hamstrings, and slashing and firing point-blank
+at the troopers. Churchill was in that charge. He received the medal
+with clasp.
+
+Then he returned home and wrote “The River War.” This book is the last
+word on the campaigns up the Nile. From the death of Gordon in Khartum
+to the capture of the city by Kitchener, it tells the story of the many
+gallant fights, the wearying failures, the many expeditions into the
+hot, boundless desert, the long, slow progress toward the final winning
+of the Sudan.
+
+The book made a distinct sensation. It was a work that one would expect
+from a lieutenant-general, when, after years of service in Egypt, he
+laid down his sword to pen the story of his life’s work. From a Second
+Lieutenant, who had been on the Nile hardly long enough to gain the
+desert tan, it was a revelation. As a contribution to military history
+it was so valuable that for the author it made many admirers, but on
+account of his criticisms of his superior officers it gained him even
+more enemies.
+
+This is a specimen of the kind of thing that caused the retired army
+officer to sit up and choke with apoplexy:
+
+“General Kitchener, who never spares himself, cares little for others.
+He treated all men like machines, from the private soldiers, whose
+salutes he disdained, to the superior officers, whom he rigidly
+controlled. The comrade who had served with him and under him for many
+years, in peace and peril, was flung aside as soon as he ceased to be of
+use. The wounded Egyptian and even the wounded British soldier did not
+excite his interest.”
+
+When in the service clubs they read that, the veterans asked each other
+their favorite question of what is the army coming to, and to their
+own satisfaction answered it by pointing out that when a lieutenant of
+twenty-four can reprimand the commanding general the army is going to
+the dogs.
+
+To the newspapers, hundreds of them, over their own signatures, on
+the service club stationery, wrote violent, furious letters, and the
+newspapers themselves, besides the ordinary reviews, gave to the book
+editorial praise and editorial condemnation.
+
+Equally disgusted were the younger officers of the service. They
+nicknamed his book “A Subaltern’s Advice to Generals,” and called
+Churchill himself a “Medal Snatcher.” A medal snatcher is an officer
+who, whenever there is a rumor of war, leaves his men to the care of
+any one, and through influence in high places and for the sake of the
+campaign medal has himself attached to the expeditionary force. But
+Churchill never was a medal hunter. The routine of barrack life irked
+him, and in foreign parts he served his country far better than by
+remaining at home and inspecting awkward squads and attending guard
+mount. Indeed, the War Office could cover with medals the man who wrote
+“The Story of the Malakand Field Force” and “The River War” and still be
+in his debt.
+
+In October, 1898, a month after the battle of Omdurman, Churchill
+made his debut as a political speaker at minor meetings in Dover and
+Rotherhithe. History does not record that these first speeches set fire
+to the Channel. During the winter he finished and published his “River
+War,” and in the August of the following summer, 1899, at a by-election,
+offered himself as Member of Parliament for Oldham.
+
+In the _Daily Telegraph_ his letters from the three campaigns in India
+and Egypt had made his name known, and there was a general desire to
+hear him and to see him. In one who had attacked Kitchener of Khartum,
+the men of Oldham expected to find a stalwart veteran, bearded, and with
+a voice of command. When they were introduced to a small red-haired boy
+with a lisp, they refused to take him seriously. In England youth is an
+unpardonable thing. Lately, Curzon, Churchill, Edward Grey, Hugh Cecil,
+and others have made it less reprehensible. But, in spite of a vigorous
+campaign, in which Lady Randolph took an active part, Oldham decided
+it was not ready to accept young Churchill for a member. Later he was
+Oldham’s only claim to fame.
+
+A week after he was defeated he sailed for South Africa, where war with
+the Boers was imminent. He had resigned from his regiment and went south
+as war correspondent for the _Morning Post_.
+
+Later in the war he held a commission as Lieutenant in the South African
+Light Horse, a regiment of irregular cavalry, and on the staffs
+of different generals acted as galloper and aide-de-camp. To this
+combination of duties, which was in direct violation of a rule of the
+War Office, his brother officers and his fellow correspondents objected;
+but, as in each of his other campaigns he had played this dual role, the
+press censors considered it a traditional privilege, and winked at it.
+As a matter of record, Churchill’s soldiering never seemed to interfere
+with his writing, nor, in a fight, did his duty to his paper ever
+prevent him from mixing in as a belligerent.
+
+War was declared October 9th, and only a month later, while scouting in
+the armored train along the railroad line between Pietermaritzburg and
+Colenso, the cars were derailed and Churchill was taken prisoner.
+
+The train was made up of three flat cars, two armored cars, and between
+them the engine, with three cars coupled to the cow-catcher and two to
+the tender.
+
+On the outward trip the Boers did not show themselves, but as soon as
+the English passed Frere station they rolled a rock on the track at a
+point where it was hidden by a curve. On the return trip, as the English
+approached this curve the Boers opened fire with artillery and pompoms.
+The engineer, in his eagerness to escape, rounded the curve at full
+speed, and, as the Boers had expected, hit the rock. The three forward
+cars were derailed, and one of them was thrown across the track, thus
+preventing the escape of the engine and the two rear cars. From these
+Captain Haldane, who was in command, with a detachment of the Dublins,
+kept up a steady fire on the enemy, while Churchill worked to clear the
+track. To assist him he had a company of Natal volunteers, and those who
+had not run away of the train hands and break-down crew.
+
+“We were not long left in the comparative safety of a railroad
+accident,” Churchill writes to his paper. “The Boers’ guns, swiftly
+changing their position, reopened fire from a distance of thirteen
+hundred yards before any one had got out of the stage of exclamations.
+The tapping rifle-fire spread along the hills, until it encircled the
+wreckage on three sides, and from some high ground on the opposite side
+of the line a third field-gun came into action.”
+
+For Boer marksmen with Mausers and pompoms, a wrecked railroad train
+at thirteen hundred yards was as easy a bull’s-eye as the hands of the
+first baseman to the pitcher, and while the engine butted and snorted
+and the men with their bare bands tore at the massive beams of the
+freight-car, the bullets and shells beat about them.
+
+“I have had in the last four years many strange and varied experiences,”
+ continues young Churchill, “but nothing was so thrilling as this; to
+wait and struggle among these clanging, rending iron boxes, with the
+repeated explosions of the shells, the noise of the projectiles striking
+the cars, the hiss as they passed in the air, the grunting and puffing
+of the engine--poor, tortured thing, hammered by at least a dozen
+shells, any one of which, by penetrating the boiler, might have made an
+end of all--the expectation of destruction as a matter of course, the
+realization of powerlessness--all this for seventy minutes by the clock,
+with only four inches of twisted iron between danger, captivity, and
+shame on one side--and freedom on the other.”
+
+The “protected” train had proved a deathtrap, and by the time the line
+was clear every fourth man was killed or wounded. Only the engine,
+with the more severely wounded heaped in the cab and clinging to its
+cow-catcher and foot-rails, made good its escape. Among those left
+behind, a Tommy, without authority, raised a handkerchief on his rifle,
+and the Boers instantly ceased firing and came galloping forward to
+accept surrender. There was a general stampede to escape. Seeing that
+Lieutenant Franklin was gallantly trying to hold his men, Churchill,
+who was safe on the engine, jumped from it and ran to his assistance. Of
+what followed, this is his own account:
+
+“Scarcely had the locomotive left me than I found myself alone in a
+shallow cutting, and none of our soldiers, who had all surrendered,
+to be seen. Then suddenly there appeared on the line at the end of the
+cutting two men not in uniform. ‘Plate-layers,’ I said to myself, and
+then, with a surge of realization, ‘Boers.’ My mind retains a momentary
+impression of these tall figures, full of animated movement, clad in
+dark flapping clothes, with slouch, storm-driven hats, posing their
+rifles hardly a hundred yards away. I turned and ran between the
+rails of the track, and the only thought I achieved was this: ‘Boer
+marksmanship.’
+
+“Two bullets passed, both within a foot, one on either side. I flung
+myself against the banks of the cutting. But they gave no cover. Another
+glance at the figures; one was now kneeling to aim. Again I darted
+forward. Again two soft kisses sucked in the air, but nothing struck me.
+I must get out of the cutting--that damnable corridor. I scrambled up
+the bank. The earth sprang up beside me, and a bullet touched my hand,
+but outside the cutting was a tiny depression. I crouched in this,
+struggling to get my wind. On the other side of the railway a horseman
+galloped up, shouting to me and waving his hand. He was scarcely forty
+yards off. With a rifle I could have killed him easily. I knew nothing
+of the white flag, and the bullets had made me savage. I reached down
+for my Mauser pistol. I had left it in the cab of the engine. Between me
+and the horseman there was a wire fence. Should I continue to fly?
+The idea of another shot at such a short range decided me. Death stood
+before me, grim and sullen; Death without his light-hearted companion,
+Chance. So I held up my hand, and like Mr. Jorrock’s foxes, cried
+‘Capivy!’ Then I was herded with the other prisoners in a miserable
+group, and about the same time I noticed that my hand was bleeding, and
+it began to pour with rain.
+
+“Two days before I had written to an officer at home: ‘There has been a
+great deal too much surrendering in this war, and I hope people who do
+so will not be encouraged.’”
+
+With other officers, Churchill was imprisoned in the State Model
+Schools, situated in the heart of Pretoria. It was distinctly
+characteristic that on the very day of his arrival he began to plan to
+escape.
+
+Toward this end his first step was to lose his campaign hat, which he
+recognized was too obviously the hat of an English officer. The burgher
+to whom he gave money to purchase him another innocently brought him a
+Boer sombrero.
+
+Before his chance to escape came a month elapsed, and the opportunity
+that then offered was less an opportunity to escape than to get himself
+shot.
+
+The State Model Schools were surrounded by the children’s playgrounds,
+penned in by a high wall, and at night, while they were used as a
+prison, brilliantly lighted by electric lights. After many nights of
+observation, Churchill discovered that while the sentries were pacing
+their beats there was a moment when to them a certain portion of the
+wall was in darkness. This was due to cross-shadows cast by the electric
+lights. On the other side of this wall there was a private house set in
+a garden filled with bushes. Beyond this was the open street.
+
+To scale the wall was not difficult; the real danger lay in the fact
+that at no time were the sentries farther away than fifteen yards, and
+the chance of being shot by one or both of them was excellent. To a
+brother officer Churchill confided his purpose, and together they agreed
+that some night when the sentries had turned from the dark spot on the
+wall they would scale it and drop among the bushes in the garden. After
+they reached the garden, should they reach it alive, what they were to
+do they did not know. How they were to proceed through the streets
+and out of the city, how they were to pass unchallenged under its many
+electric lights and before the illuminated shop windows, how to dodge
+patrols, and how to find their way through two hundred and eighty
+miles of a South African wilderness, through an utterly unfamiliar,
+unfriendly, and sparsely settled country into Portuguese territory and
+the coast, they left to chance. But with luck they hoped to cover the
+distance in a fortnight, begging corn at the Kaffir kraals, sleeping by
+day, and marching under cover of the darkness.
+
+They agreed to make the attempt on the 11th of December, but on that
+night the sentries did not move from the only part of the wall that was
+in shadow. On the night following, at the last moment, something delayed
+Churchill’s companion, and he essayed the adventure alone. He writes:
+
+“Tuesday, the 12th! Anything was better than further suspense. Again
+night came. Again the dinner bell sounded. Choosing my opportunity,
+I strolled across the quadrangle and secreted myself in one of the
+offices. Through a chink I watched the sentries. For half an hour they
+remained stolid and obstructive. Then suddenly one turned and walked up
+to his comrade and they began to talk. Their backs were turned.
+
+“I darted out of my hiding-place and ran to the wall, seized the top with
+my hands and drew myself up. Twice I let myself down again in sickly
+hesitation, and then with a third resolve scrambled up. The top was
+flat. Lying on it, I had one parting glimpse of the sentries, still
+talking, still with their backs turned, but, I repeat, still fifteen
+yards away. Then I lowered myself into the adjoining garden and crouched
+among the shrubs. I was free. The first step had been taken, and it was
+irrevocable.”
+
+Churchill discovered that the house into the garden of which he had so
+unceremoniously introduced himself was brilliantly lighted, and that the
+owner was giving a party. At one time two of the guests walked into the
+garden and stood, smoking and chatting, in the path within a few yards
+of him.
+
+Thinking his companion might yet join him, for an hour he crouched in
+the bushes, until from the other side of the wall he heard the voices of
+his friend and of another officer.
+
+“It’s all up!” his friend whispered. Churchill coughed tentatively.
+The two voices drew nearer. To confuse the sentries, should they be
+listening, the one officer talked nonsense, laughed loudly, and quoted
+Latin phrases, while the other, in a low and distinct voice, said:
+“I cannot get out. The sentry suspects. It’s all up. Can you get back
+again?”
+
+To go back was impossible. Churchill now felt that in any case he was
+sure to be recaptured, and decided he would, as he expresses it, at
+least have a run for his money.
+
+“I shall go on alone,” he whispered.
+
+He heard the footsteps of his two friends move away from him across the
+play yard. At the same moment he stepped boldly out into the garden and,
+passing the open windows of the house, walked down the gravel path to
+the street. Not five yards from the gate stood a sentry. Most of those
+guarding the school-house knew him by sight, but Churchill did not turn
+his head, and whether the sentry recognized him or not, he could not
+tell.
+
+For a hundred feet he walked as though on ice, inwardly shrinking as he
+waited for the sharp challenge, and the rattle of the Mauser thrown to
+the “Ready.” His nerves were leaping, his heart in his throat, his spine
+of water. And then, as he continued to advance, and still no tumult
+pursued him, he quickened his pace and turned into one of the main
+streets of Pretoria. The sidewalks were crowded with burghers, but no
+one noticed him. This was due probably to the fact that the Boers wore
+no distinctive uniform, and that with them in their commandoes were many
+English Colonials who wore khaki riding breeches, and many Americans,
+French, Germans, and Russians, in every fashion of semi-uniform.
+
+If observed, Churchill was mistaken for one of these, and the very
+openness of his movements saved him from suspicion.
+
+Straight through the town he walked until he reached the suburbs, the
+open veldt, and a railroad track. As he had no map or compass he knew
+this must be his only guide, but he knew also that two railroads left
+Pretoria, the one along which he had been captured, to Pietermaritzburg,
+and the other, the one leading to the coast and freedom. Which of the
+two this one was he had no idea, but he took his chance, and a hundred
+yards beyond a station waited for the first outgoing train. About
+midnight, a freight stopped at the station, and after it had left it and
+before it had again gathered headway, Churchill swung himself up upon
+it, and stretched out upon a pile of coal. Throughout the night the
+train continued steadily toward the east, and so told him that it was
+the one he wanted, and that he was on his way to the neutral territory
+of Portugal.
+
+Fearing the daylight, just before the sun rose, as the train was pulling
+up a steep grade, he leaped off into some bushes. All that day he lay
+hidden, and the next night he walked. He made but little headway. As all
+stations and bridges were guarded, he had to make long detours, and the
+tropical moonlight prevented him from crossing in the open. In this way,
+sleeping by day, walking by night, begging food from the Kaffirs, five
+days passed.
+
+Meanwhile, his absence had been at once discovered, and, by the
+Boers, every effort was being made to retake him. Telegrams giving his
+description were sent along both railways, three thousand photographs
+of him were distributed, each car of every train was searched, and
+in different parts of the Transvaal men who resembled him were being
+arrested. It was said he had escaped dressed as a woman; in the uniform
+of a Transvaal policeman whom he had bribed; that he had never left
+Pretoria, and that in the disguise of a waiter he was concealed in the
+house of a British sympathizer. On the strength of this rumor the houses
+of all suspected persons were searched.
+
+In the Volksstem it was pointed out as a significant fact that a week
+before his escape Churchill had drawn from the library Mill’s “Essay on
+Liberty.”
+
+In England and over all British South Africa the escape created as much
+interest as it did in Pretoria. Because the attempt showed pluck, and
+because he had outwitted the enemy, Churchill for the time became a sort
+of popular hero, and to his countrymen his escape gave as much pleasure
+as it was a cause of chagrin to the Boers.
+
+But as days passed and nothing was heard of him, it was feared he
+had lost himself in the Machadodorp Mountains, or had succumbed
+to starvation, or, in the jungle toward the coast, to fever, and
+congratulations gave way to anxiety.
+
+The anxiety was justified, for at this time Churchill was in a very bad
+way. During the month in prison he had obtained but little exercise. The
+lack of food and of water, the cold by night and the terrific heat by
+day, the long stumbling marches in the darkness, the mental effect upon
+an extremely nervous, high-strung organization of being hunted, and of
+having to hide from his fellow men, had worn him down to a condition
+almost of collapse.
+
+Even though it were neutral soil, in so exhausted a state he dared not
+venture into the swamps and waste places of the Portuguese territory;
+and, sick at heart as well as sick in body, he saw no choice left him
+save to give himself up.
+
+But before doing so he carefully prepared a tale which, although most
+improbable, he hoped might still conceal his identity and aid him to
+escape by train across the border.
+
+One night after days of wandering he found himself on the outskirts of
+a little village near the boundary line of the Transvaal and Portuguese
+territory. Utterly unable to proceed further, he crawled to the nearest
+zinc-roofed shack, and, fully prepared to surrender, knocked at the
+door. It was opened by a rough-looking, bearded giant, the first white
+man to whom in many days Churchill had dared address himself.
+
+To him, without hope, he feebly stammered forth the speech he had
+rehearsed. The man listened with every outward mark of disbelief. At
+Churchill himself he stared with open suspicion. Suddenly he seized the
+boy by the shoulder, drew him inside the hut, and barred the door.
+
+“You needn’t lie to me,” he said. “You are Winston Churchill, and I--am
+the only Englishman in this village.”
+
+The rest of the adventure was comparatively easy. The next night his
+friend in need, an engineer named Howard, smuggled Churchill Into a
+freight-car, and hid him under sacks of some soft merchandise.
+
+At Komatie-Poort, the station on the border, for eighteen hours the car
+in which Churchill lay concealed was left in the sun on a siding, and
+before it again started it was searched, but the man who was conducting
+the search lifted only the top layer of sacks, and a few minutes later
+Churchill heard the hollow roar of the car as it passed over the bridge,
+and knew that he was across the border.
+
+Even then he took no chances, and for two days more lay hidden at the
+bottom of the car.
+
+When at last he arrived in Lorenzo Marques he at once sought out the
+English Consul, who, after first mistaking him for a stoker from one of
+the ships in the harbor, gave him a drink, a bath, and a dinner.
+
+As good luck would have it, the _Induna_ was leaving that night for
+Durban, and, escorted by a body-guard of English residents armed with
+revolvers, and who were taking no chances of his recapture by the Boer
+agents, he was placed safely on board. Two days later he arrived at
+Durban, where he was received by the Mayor, the populace, and a brass
+band playing: “Britons Never, Never, Never shall be Slaves!”
+
+For the next month Churchill was bombarded by letters and telegrams
+from every part of the globe, some invited him to command filibustering
+expeditions, others sent him woollen comforters, some forwarded
+photographs of himself to be signed, others photographs of themselves,
+possibly to be admired, others sent poems, and some bottles of whiskey.
+
+One admirer wrote: “My congratulations on your wonderful and glorious
+deeds, which will send such a thrill of pride and enthusiasm through
+Great Britain and the United States of America, that the Anglo-Saxon
+race will be irresistible.”
+
+Lest so large an order as making the Anglo-Saxon race irresistible might
+turn the head of a subaltern, an antiseptic cablegram was also sent him,
+from London, reading:
+
+“Best friends here hope you won’t go making further ass of yourself.
+
+“McNEILL.”
+
+One day in camp we counted up the price per word of this cablegram, and
+Churchill was delighted to find that it must have cost the man who sent
+it five pounds.
+
+On the day of his arrival in Durban, with the cheers still in the air,
+Churchill took the first train to “the front,” then at Colenso. Another
+man might have lingered. After a month’s imprisonment and the hardships
+of the escape, he might have been excused for delaying twenty-four hours
+to taste the sweets of popularity and the flesh-pots of the Queen Hotel.
+But if the reader has followed this brief biography he will know that
+to have done so would have been out of the part. This characteristic of
+Churchill’s to get on to the next thing explains his success. He has no
+time to waste on postmortems, he takes none to rest on his laurels.
+
+As a war correspondent and officer he continued with Buller until the
+relief of Ladysmith, and with Roberts until the fall of Pretoria. He
+was in many actions, in all the big engagements, and came out of the war
+with another medal and clasps for six battles.
+
+On his return to London he spent the summer finishing his second book on
+the war, and in October at the general election as a “khaki” candidate,
+as those were called who favored the war, again stood for Oldham. This
+time, with his war record to help him, he wrested from the Liberals one
+of Oldham’s two seats. He had been defeated by thirteen hundred votes;
+he was elected by a majority of two hundred and twenty-seven.
+
+The few months that intervened between his election and the opening of
+the new Parliament were snatched by Churchill for a lecturing tour at
+home, and in the United States and Canada. His subject was the war and
+his escape from Pretoria.
+
+When he came to this country half of the people here were in sympathy
+with the Boers, and did not care to listen to what they supposed would
+be a strictly British version of the war. His manager, without asking
+permission of those whose names he advertised, organized for Churchill’s
+first appearance in various cities, different reception committees.
+
+Some of those whose names, without their consent, were used for these
+committees, wrote indignantly to the papers, saying that while for
+Churchill, personally, they held every respect, they objected to being
+used to advertise an anti-Boer demonstration.
+
+While this was no fault of Churchill’s, who, until he reached this
+country knew nothing of it, it was neither for him nor for the success
+of his tour the best kind of advance work.
+
+During the fighting to relieve Ladysmith, with General Buller’s force,
+Churchill and I had again been together, and later when I joined the
+Boer army, at the Zand River Battle, the army with which he was a
+correspondent had chased the army with which I was a correspondent,
+forty miles. I had been one of those who refused to act on his reception
+committee, and he had come to this country with a commission from twenty
+brother officers to shoot me on sight. But in his lecture he was using
+the photographs I had taken of the scene of his escape, and which I had
+sent him from Pretoria as a souvenir, and when he arrived I was at the
+hotel to welcome him, and that same evening three hours after midnight
+he came, in a blizzard, pounding at our door for food and drink. What is
+a little thing like a war between friends?
+
+During his “tour,” except of hotels, parlor-cars, and “Lyceums,” he saw
+very little of this country or of its people, and they saw very little
+of him. On the trip, which lasted about two months, he cleared ten
+thousand dollars. This, to a young man almost entirely dependent for an
+income upon his newspaper work and the sale of his books, nearly repaid
+him for the two months of “one night stands.” On his return to London he
+took his seat in the new Parliament.
+
+It was a coincidence that he entered Parliament at the same age as
+did his father. With two other members, one born six days earlier than
+himself, he enjoyed the distinction of being among the three youngest
+members of the new House.
+
+The fact did not seem to appall him. In the House it is a tradition that
+young and ambitious members sit “below” the gangway; the more modest
+and less assured are content to place themselves “above” it, at a point
+farthest removed from the leaders.
+
+On the day he was sworn in there was much curiosity to see where
+Churchill would elect to sit. In his own mind there was apparently no
+doubt. After he had taken the oath, signed his name, and shaken the hand
+of the Speaker, without hesitation he seated himself on the bench next
+to the Ministry. Ten minutes later, so a newspaper of the day describes
+it, he had cocked his hat over his eyes, shoved his hands into his
+trousers pockets, and was lolling back eying the veterans of the House
+with critical disapproval.
+
+His maiden speech was delivered in May, 1901, in reply to David Lloyd
+George, who had attacked the conduct of British soldiers in South
+Africa. Churchill defended them, and in a manner that from all sides
+gained him honest admiration. In the course of the debate he produced
+and read a strangely apropos letter which, fifteen years before, had
+been written by his father to Lord Salisbury. His adroit use of
+this filled H. W. Massingham, the editor of the _Daily News_, with
+enthusiasm. Nothing in parliamentary tactics, he declared, since Mr.
+Gladstone died, had been so clever. He proclaimed that Churchill would
+be Premier. John Dillon, the Nationalist leader, said he never before
+had seen a young man, by means of his maiden effort, spring into the
+front rank of parliamentary speakers. He promised that the Irish members
+would ungrudgingly testify to his ability and honesty of purpose. Among
+others to at once recognize the rising star was T. P. O’Connor, himself
+for many years of the parliamentary firmament one of the brightest
+stars. In _M. A. P._ he wrote: “I am inclined to think that the dash of
+American blood which he has from his mother has been an improvement on
+the original stock, and that Mr. Winston Churchill may turn out to be a
+stronger and abler politician than his father.”
+
+It was all a part of Churchill’s “luck” that when he entered Parliament
+the subject in debate was the conduct of the war.
+
+Even in those first days of his career in the House, in debates where
+angels feared to tread, he did not hesitate to rush in, but this subject
+was one on which he spoke with knowledge. Over the older men who were
+forced to quote from hearsay or from what they had read, Churchill had
+the tremendous advantage of being able to protest: “You only read of
+that. I was there. I saw it.”
+
+In the House he became at once one of the conspicuous and picturesque
+figures, one dear to the heart of the caricaturist, and one from the
+strangers’ gallery most frequently pointed out. He was called “the
+spoiled child of the House,” and there were several distinguished
+gentlemen who regretted they were forced to spare the rod. Broderick,
+the Secretary for War, was one of these. Of him and of his recruits in
+South Africa, Churchill spoke with the awful frankness of the _enfant
+terrible_. And although he addressed them more with sorrow than with
+anger, to Balfour and Chamberlain he daily administered advice and
+reproof, while mere generals and field-marshals, like Kitchener and
+Roberts, blushing under new titles, were held up for public reproof and
+briefly but severely chastened. Nor, when he saw Lord Salisbury going
+astray, did he hesitate in his duty to the country, but took the Prime
+Minister by the hand and gently instructed him in the way he should go.
+
+This did not tend to make him popular, but in spite of his unpopularity,
+in his speeches against national extravagancies he made so good a fight
+that he forced the Government, unwillingly, to appoint a committee to
+investigate the need of economy. For a beginner this was a distinct
+triumph.
+
+With Lord Hugh Cecil, Lord Percy, Ian Malcolm, and other clever young
+men, he formed inside the Conservative Party a little group that in its
+obstructive and independent methods was not unlike the Fourth Party of
+his father. From its leader and its filibustering, guerilla-like tactics
+the men who composed it were nicknamed the “Hughligans.” The Hughligans
+were the most active critics of the Ministry and of all in their own
+party, and as members of the Free Food League they bitterly attacked
+the fiscal proposals of Mr. Chamberlain. When Balfour made Chamberlain’s
+fight for fair trade, or for what virtually was protection, a measure
+of the Conservatives, the lines of party began to break, and men were no
+longer Conservatives or Liberals, but Protectionists or Free Traders.
+
+Against this Churchill daily protested, against Chamberlain, against his
+plan, against that plan being adopted by the Tory Party. By tradition,
+by inheritance, by instinct, Churchill was a Tory.
+
+“I am a Tory,” he said, “and I have as much right in the party as has
+anybody else, certainly as much as certain people from Birmingham. They
+can’t turn us out, and we, the Tory Free Traders, have as much right
+to dictate the policy of the Conservative Party as have any reactionary
+Fair Traders.” In 1904 the Conservative Party already recognized
+Churchill as one working outside the breastworks. Just before the Easter
+vacation of that year, when he rose to speak a remarkable demonstration
+was made against him by his Unionist colleagues, all of them rising and
+leaving the House.
+
+To the Liberals who remained to hear him he stated that if to his
+constituents his opinions were obnoxious, he was ready to resign his
+seat. It then was evident he would go over to the Liberal Party. Some
+thought he foresaw which way the tidal wave was coming, and to being
+slapped down on the beach and buried in the sand, he preferred to be
+swept forward on its crest. Others believed he left the Conservatives
+because he could not honestly stomach the taxed food offered by Mr.
+Chamberlain.
+
+In any event, if he were to be blamed for changing from one party to
+the other, he was only following the distinguished example set him by
+Gladstone, Disraeli, Harcourt, and his own father.
+
+It was at the time of this change that he was called “the best hated
+man in England,” but the Liberals welcomed him gladly, and the National
+Liberal Club paid him the rare compliment of giving in his honor a
+banquet. There were present two hundred members. Up to that time this
+dinner was the most marked testimony to his importance in the political
+world. It was about then, a year since, that he prophesied: “Within
+nine months there will come such a tide and deluge as will sweep through
+England and Scotland, and completely wash out and effect a much-needed
+spring cleaning in Downing Street.”
+
+When the deluge came, at Manchester, Mr. Balfour was defeated, and
+Churchill was victorious, and when the new Government was formed the
+tidal wave landed Churchill in the office of Under-Secretary for the
+Colonies.
+
+While this is being written the English papers say that within a
+month he again will be promoted. For this young man of thirty the only
+promotion remaining is a position in the Cabinet, in which august body
+men of fifty are considered young.
+
+His is a picturesque career. Of any man of his few years speaking our
+language, his career is probably the most picturesque. And that he is
+half an American gives all of us an excuse to pretend we share in his
+successes.
+
+
+
+
+CAPTAIN PHILO NORTON McGIFFIN
+
+IN the Chinese-Japanese War the battle of the Yalu was the first battle
+fought between warships of modern make, and, except on paper, neither
+the men who made them nor the men who fought them knew what the ships
+could do, or what they might not do. For years every naval power had
+been building these new engines of war, and in the battle which was to
+test them the whole world was interested. But in this battle Americans
+had a special interest, a human, family interest, for the reason that
+one of the Chinese squadron, which was matched against some of the same
+vessels of Japan which lately swept those of Russia from the sea, was
+commanded by a young graduate of the American Naval Academy. This young
+man, who, at the time of the battle of the Yalu, was thirty-three years
+old, was Captain Philo Norton McGiffin. So it appears that five years
+before our fleet sailed to victory in Manila Bay another graduate of
+Annapolis, and one twenty years younger than in 1898 was Admiral Dewey,
+had commanded in action a modern battleship, which, in tonnage, in
+armament, and in the number of the ships’ company, far outclassed
+Dewey’s _Olympia_.
+
+McGiffin, who was born on December 13, 1860, came of fighting stock.
+Back in Scotland the family is descended from the Clan MacGregor and the
+Clan MacAlpine.
+
+“These are Clan-Alpine’s warriors true, And, Saxon--I am Roderick Dhu.”
+
+McGiffin’s great-grandfather, born in Scotland, emigrated to this
+country and settled in “Little Washington,” near Pittsburg, Pa. In the
+Revolutionary War he was a soldier. Other relatives fought in the War of
+1812, one of them holding a commission as major. McGiffin’s own father
+was Colonel Norton McGiffin, who served in the Mexican War, and in
+the Civil War was Lieutenant-Colonel of the Eighty-fifth Pennsylvania
+Volunteers. So McGiffin inherited his love for arms.
+
+In Washington he went to the high school and at the Washington Jefferson
+College had passed through his freshman year. But the honors that might
+accrue to him if he continued to live on in the quiet and pretty old
+town of Washington did not tempt him. To escape into the world he
+wrote his Congressman, begging him to obtain for him an appointment to
+Annapolis. The Congressman liked the letter, and wrote Colonel McGiffin
+to ask if the application of his son had his approval. Colonel McGiffin
+was willing, and in 1877 his son received his commission as cadet
+midshipman. I knew McGiffin only as a boy with whom in vacation time I
+went coon hunting in the woods outside of Washington. For his age he was
+a very tall boy, and in his midshipman undress uniform, to my youthful
+eyes, appeared a most bold and adventurous spirit.
+
+At Annapolis his record seems to show he was pretty much like other
+boys. According to his classmates, with all of whom I find he was very
+popular, he stood high in the practical studies, such as seamanship,
+gunnery, navigation, and steam engineering, but in all else he was near
+the foot of the class, and in whatever escapade was risky and reckless
+he was always one of the leaders. To him discipline was extremely
+irksome. He could maintain it among others, but when it applied to
+himself it bored him. On the floor of the Academy building on which was
+his room there was a pyramid of cannon balls--relics of the War of 1812.
+They stood at the head of the stairs, and one warm night, when he could
+not sleep, he decided that no one else should do so, and, one by one,
+rolled the cannon balls down the stairs. They tore away the banisters
+and bumped through the wooden steps and leaped off into the lower halls.
+For any one who might think of ascending to discover the motive power
+back of the bombardment they were extremely dangerous. But an officer
+approached McGiffin in the rear, and, having been caught in the act, he
+was sent to the prison ship. There he made good friends with his jailer,
+an old man-of-warsman named “Mike.” He will be remembered by many naval
+officers who as midshipmen served on the _Santee_. McGiffin so won
+over Mike that when he left the ship he carried with him six charges of
+gunpowder. These he loaded into the six big guns captured in the Mexican
+War, which lay on the grass in the centre of the Academy grounds, and at
+midnight on the eve of July 1st he fired a salute. It aroused the entire
+garrison, and for a week the empty window frames kept the glaziers busy.
+
+About 1878 or 1879 there was a famine in Ireland. The people of New York
+City contributed provisions for the sufferers, and to carry the supplies
+to Ireland the Government authorized the use of the old _Constellation_.
+At the time the voyage was to begin each cadet was instructed to
+consider himself as having been placed in command of the _Constellation_
+and to write a report on the preparations made for the voyage, on the
+loading of the vessel, and on the distribution of the stores. This
+exercise was intended for the instruction of the cadets; first in the
+matter of seamanship and navigation, and second in making official
+reports. At that time it was a very difficult operation to get a gun out
+of the port of a vessel where the gun was on a covered deck. To do this
+the necessary tackles had to be rigged from the yard-arm and the yard
+and mast properly braced and stayed, and then the lower block of the
+tackle carried in through the gun port, which, of course, gave the fall
+a very bad reeve. The first part of McGiffin’s report dealt with a new
+method of dismounting the guns and carrying them through the gun ports,
+and so admirable was his plan, so simple and ingenious, that it was
+used whenever it became necessary to dismount a gun from one of the
+old sailing ships. Having, however, offered this piece of good work,
+McGiffin’s report proceeded to tell of the division of the ship into
+compartments that were filled with a miscellaneous assortment of stores,
+which included the old “fifteen puzzles,” at that particular time very
+popular. The report terminated with a description of the joy of the
+famished Irish as they received the puzzle-boxes. At another time the
+cadets were required to write a report telling of the suppression of the
+insurrection on the Isthmus of Panama. McGiffin won great praise for
+the military arrangements and disposition of his men, but, in the same
+report, he went on to describe how he armed them with a new gun known as
+Baines’s Rhetoric and told of the havoc he wrought in the enemy’s
+ranks when he fired these guns loaded with similes and metaphors and
+hyperboles.
+
+Of course, after each exhibition of this sort he was sent to the
+_Santee_ and given an opportunity to meditate.
+
+On another occasion, when one of the instructors lectured to the cadets,
+he required them to submit a written statement embodying all that they
+could recall of what had been said at the lecture. One of the rules
+concerning this report provided that there should be no erasures or
+interlineations, but that when mistakes were made the objectionable or
+incorrect expressions should be included within parentheses; and that
+the matter so enclosed within parentheses would not be considered a part
+of the report. McGiffin wrote an excellent _resume_ of the lecture,
+but he interspersed through it in parentheses such words as “applause,”
+ “cheers,” “cat-calls,” and “groans,” and as these words were enclosed
+within parentheses he insisted that they did not count, and made a very
+fair plea that he ought not to be punished for words which slipped in
+by mistake, and which he had officially obliterated by what he called
+oblivion marks.
+
+He was not always on mischief bent. On one occasion, when the house of a
+professor caught fire, McGiffin ran into the flames and carried out two
+children, for which act he was commended by the Secretary of the Navy.
+
+It was an act of Congress that determined that the career of McGiffin
+should be that of a soldier of fortune. This was a most unjust act,
+which provided that only as many midshipmen should receive commissions
+as on the warships there were actual vacancies. In those days, in 1884,
+our navy was very small. To-day there is hardly a ship having her full
+complement of officers, and the difficulty is not to get rid of those we
+have educated, but to get officers to educate. To the many boys who, on
+the promise that they would be officers of the navy, had worked for
+four years at the Academy and served two years at sea, the act was most
+unfair. Out of a class of about ninety, only the first twelve were given
+commissions and the remaining eighty turned adrift upon the uncertain
+seas of civil life. As a sop, each was given one thousand dollars.
+
+McGiffin was not one of the chosen twelve. In the final examinations on
+the list he was well toward the tail. But without having studied
+many things, and without remembering the greater part of them, no
+one graduates from Annapolis, even last on the list; and with his one
+thousand dollars in cash, McGiffin had also this six years of education
+at what was then the best naval college in the world. This was his only
+asset--his education--and as in his own country it was impossible to
+dispose of it, for possible purchasers he looked abroad.
+
+At that time the Tong King war was on between France and China, and he
+decided, before it grew rusty, to offer his knowledge to the followers
+of the Yellow Dragon. In those days that was a hazard of new fortunes
+that meant much more than it does now. To-day the East is as near as San
+Francisco; the Japanese-Russian War, our occupation of the Philippines,
+the part played by our troops in the Boxer trouble, have made the
+affairs of China part of the daily reading of every one. Now, one can
+step into a brass bed at Forty-second Street and in four days at the
+Coast get into another brass bed, and in twelve more be spinning down
+the Bund of Yokohama in a rickshaw. People go to Japan for the winter
+months as they used to go to Cairo.
+
+But in 1885 it was no such light undertaking, certainly not for a young
+man who had been brought up in the quiet atmosphere of an inland
+town, where generations of his family and other families had lived and
+intermarried, content with their surroundings.
+
+With very few of his thousand dollars left him, McGiffin arrived in
+February, 1885, in San Francisco. From there his letters to his family
+give one the picture of a healthy, warm-hearted youth, chiefly anxious
+lest his mother and sister should “worry.” In our country nearly every
+family knows that domestic tragedy when the son and heir “breaks home
+ties,” and starts out to earn a living; and if all the world loves a
+lover, it at least sympathizes with the boy who is “looking for a job.”
+ The boy who is looking for the job may not think so, but each of those
+who has passed through the same hard place gives him, if nothing else,
+his good wishes. McGiffin’s letters at this period gain for him from
+those who have had the privilege to read them the warmest good feeling.
+
+They are filled with the same cheery optimism, the same slurring over
+of his troubles, the same homely jokes, the same assurances that he is
+feeling “bully,” and that it all will come out right, that every boy,
+when he starts out in the world, sends back to his mother.
+
+“I am in first-rate health and spirits, so I don’t want you to fuss
+about me. I am big enough and ugly enough to scratch along somehow, and
+I will not starve.”
+
+To his mother he proudly sends his name written in Chinese characters,
+as he had been taught to write it by the Chinese Consul-General in San
+Francisco, and a pen-picture of two elephants. “I am going to bring you
+home _two_ of these,” he writes, not knowing that in the strange and
+wonderful country to which he is going elephants are as infrequent as
+they are in Pittsburg.
+
+He reached China in April, and from Nagasaki on his way to Shanghai
+the steamer that carried him was chased by two French gunboats. But,
+apparently much to his disappointment, she soon ran out of range of
+their guns. Though he did not know it then, with the enemy he had
+travelled so far to fight this was his first and last hostile meeting;
+for already peace was in the air.
+
+Of that and of how, in spite of peace, he obtained the “job” he wanted,
+he must tell you himself in a letter home:
+
+TIEN-TSIN, CHINA, April 13, 1885.
+
+“MY DEAR MOTHER--I have not felt much in the humor for writing, for
+I did not know what was going to happen. I spent a good deal of money
+coming out, and when I got here, I knew, unless something turned up,
+I was a gone coon. We got off Taku forts Sunday evening and the next
+morning we went inside; the channel is very narrow and sown with
+torpedoes. We struck one--an electric one--in coming up, but it didn’t
+go off. We were until 10.30 P.M. in coming up to Tien-Tsin--thirty miles
+in a straight line, but nearly seventy by the river, which is only about
+one hundred feet wide--and we grounded ten times.
+
+“Well--at last we moored and went ashore. Brace Girdle, an engineer, and
+I went to the hotel, and the first thing we heard was--that _peace was
+declared!_ I went back on board ship, and I didn’t sleep much--I never
+was so blue in my life. I knew if they didn’t want me that I might as
+well give up the ghost, for I could never get away from China. Well--I
+worried around all night without sleep, and in the morning I felt as
+if I had been drawn through a knot-hole. I must have lost ten pounds. I
+went around about 10 A.M. and gave my letters to Pethick, an American
+U. S. Vice-Consul and interpreter to Li Hung Chang. He said he would fix
+them for me. Then I went back to the ship, and as our captain was going
+up to see Li Hung Chang, I went along out of desperation. We got in,
+and after a while were taken in through corridor after corridor of the
+Viceroy’s palace until we got into the great Li, when we sat down and
+had tea and tobacco and talked through an interpreter. When it came
+my turn he asked: ‘Why did you come to China?’ I said: ‘To enter the
+Chinese service for the war.’ ‘How do you expect to enter?’ ‘I expect
+_you_ to give me a commission!’ ‘I have no place to offer you.’ ‘I think
+you have--I have come all the way from America to get it.’ ‘What would
+you like?’ ‘I would like to get the new torpedo-boat and go down the
+Yang-tse-Kiang to the blockading squadron.’ ‘Will you do that?’ ‘Of
+course.’
+
+“He thought a little and said: ‘I will see what can be done. Will you
+take $100 a month for a start?’ I said: ‘That depends.’ (Of course
+I would take it.) Well, after parley, he said he would put me on the
+flagship, and if I did well he would promote me. Then he looked at me
+and said: ‘How old are you?’ When I told him I was twenty-four I thought
+he would faint--for in China a man is a _boy_ until he is over thirty.
+He said I would _never_ do--I was a child. I could not know anything at
+all. I could not convince him, but at last he compromised--I was to pass
+an examination at the Arsenal at the Naval College, in all branches,
+and if they passed me I would have a show. So we parted. I reported for
+examination next day, but was put off--same the next day. But to-day I
+was told to come, and sat down to a stock of foolscap, and had a
+pretty stiff exam. I am only just through. I had seamanship, gunnery,
+navigation, nautical astronomy, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, conic
+sections, curve tracing, differential and integral calculus. I had only
+three questions out of five to answer in each branch, but in the first
+three I answered all five. After that I only had time for three, but
+at the end he said I need not finish, he was perfectly satisfied. I had
+done remarkably well, and he would report to the Viceroy to-morrow. He
+examined my first papers--seamanship--said I was _perfect_ in it, so I
+will get _along_, you need not fear. I told the Consul--he was very well
+pleased--he is a nice man.
+
+“I feel pretty well now--have had dinner and am smoking a good Manila
+cheroot. I wrote hard all day, wrote fifteen sheets of foolscap and made
+about a dozen drawings--got pretty tired.
+
+“I have had a hard scramble for the service and only got in by the
+skin of my teeth. I guess I will go to bed--I will sleep well
+to-night--Thursday.
+
+“I did not hear from the Naval Secretary, Tuesday, so yesterday morning
+I went up to the Admiralty and sent in my card. He came out and received
+me very well--said I had passed a ‘very splendid examination’; had been
+recommended very strongly to the Viceroy, who was very much pleased;
+that the Director of the Naval College over at the Arsenal had wanted me
+and would I go over at once? I _would_. It was about five miles. We (a
+friend, who is a great rider here) went on steeplechase ponies--we were
+ferried across the Pei Ho in a small scow and then had a long ride.
+There _is_ a path--but Pritchard insisted on taking all the ditches,
+and as my pony jumped like a cat, it wasn’t nice at first, but I didn’t
+squeal and kept my seat and got the swing of it at last and rather liked
+it. I think I will keep a horse here--you can hire one and a servant
+together for $7 a month; that is $5.60 of our money, and pony and man
+found in everything.
+
+“Well--at last we got to the Arsenal--a place about four miles around,
+fortified, where all sorts of arms--cartridges, shot and shell, engines,
+and _everything_--are made. The Naval College is inside surrounded by
+a moat and wall. I thought to myself, if the cadet here is like to the
+thing I used to be at the U. S. N. A. _that_ won’t keep him in. I went
+through a lot of yards till I was ushered into a room finished in black
+ebony and was greeted very warmly by the Director. We took seats on a
+raised platform--Chinese style and pretty soon an interpreter came, one
+of the Chinese professors, who was educated abroad, and we talked and
+drank tea. He said I had done well, that he had the authority of the
+Viceroy to take me there as ‘Professor’ of seamanship and gunnery; in
+addition I might be required to teach navigation or nautical astronomy,
+or drill the cadets in infantry, artillery, and fencing. For this I was
+to receive what would be in our money $1,800 per annum, as near as we
+can compare it, paid in gold each month. Besides, I will have a house
+furnished for my use, and it is their intention, as soon as I _show_
+that I _know_ something, to considerably increase my pay. They asked
+the Viceroy to give me 130 T per month (about $186) and house, but the
+Viceroy said I was _but a boy_; that I had seen no years and had only
+come here a week ago with no one to vouch for me, and that I might turn
+out an impostor. But he would risk 100 T on me anyhow, and as soon as
+I was reported favorably on by the college I would be raised--the
+agreement is to be for three years. For a few months I am to command
+a training ship--an ironclad that is in dry dock at present, until a
+captain in the English Navy comes out, who has been sent for to command
+her.
+
+“_So Here I am_--twenty-four years old and captain of a man-of-war--a
+better one than any in our own navy--only for a short time, of course,
+but I would be a pretty long time before I would command one at home.
+Well--I accepted and will enter on my duties in a week, as soon as my
+house is put in order. I saw it--it has a long veranda, very broad; with
+flower garden, apricot trees, etc., just covered with blossoms; a wide
+hall on the front, a room about 18x15, with a 13-foot ceiling; then back
+another rather larger, with a cupola skylight in the centre, where I
+am going to put a shelf with flowers. The Government is to furnish the
+house with bed, tables, chairs, sideboards, lounges, stove for kitchen.
+I have grates (American) in the room, but I don’t need them. We have
+snow, and a good deal of ice in winter, but the thermometer never gets
+below zero. I have to supply my own crockery. I will have two servants
+and cook; I will only get one and the cook first--they only cost $4
+to $5.50 per month, and their board amounts to very little. I can get
+along, don’t you think so? Now I want you to get Jim to pack up all
+my professional works on gunnery, surveying, seamanship, mathematics,
+astronomy, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, conic sections, calculus,
+mechanics, and _every_ book of that description I own, including those
+paperbound ‘Naval Institute’ papers, and put them in a box, together
+with any photos, etc., you think I would like--I have none of you or Pa
+or the family (including Carrie)--and send to me.
+
+“I just got in in time--didn’t I? Another week would have been too late.
+My funds were getting low; I would not have had _anything_ before long.
+The U. S. Consul, General Bromley, is much pleased. The interpreter says
+it was all in the way I did with the Viceroy in the interview.
+
+“I will have a chance to go to Peking and later to a tiger hunt in
+Mongolia, but for the present I am going to study, work, and _stroke_
+these mandarins till I get a raise. I am the only instructor in both
+seamanship and gunnery, and I must know _everything_, both practically
+and theoretically. But it will be good for me and the only thing is,
+that if I were put back into the Navy I would be in a dilemma. I think
+I will get my ‘influence’ to work, and I want you people at home to
+look out, and in case I _am_--if it were represented to the Sec. that
+my position here was giving me an immense lot of practical knowledge
+professionally--more than I could get on a ship at sea--I think he would
+give me two years’ leave on half or quarter pay. Or, I would be willing
+to do without pay--only to be kept on the register in my rank.
+
+“I will write more about this. Love to all.”
+
+
+It is characteristic of McGiffin that in the very same letter in which
+he announces he has entered foreign service he plans to return to
+that of his own country. This hope never left him. You find the same
+homesickness for the quarterdeck of an American man-of-war all through
+his later letters. At one time a bill to reinstate the midshipmen who
+had been cheated of their commissions was introduced into Congress. Of
+this McGiffin writes frequently as “our bill.” “It may pass,” he writes,
+“but I am tired hoping. I have hoped so long. And if it should,” he adds
+anxiously, “there may be a time limit set in which a man must rejoin, or
+lose his chance, so do not fail to let me know as quickly as you can.”
+ But the bill did not pass, and McGiffin never returned to the navy that
+had cut him adrift. He settled down at Tien-Tsin and taught the young
+cadets how to shoot. Almost all of those who in the Chinese-Japanese War
+served as officers were his pupils. As the navy grew, he grew with
+it, and his position increased in importance. More Mexican dollars per
+month, more servants, larger houses, and buttons of various honorable
+colors were given him, and, in return, he established for China a modern
+naval college patterned after our own. In those days throughout China
+and Japan you could find many of these foreign advisers. Now, in Japan,
+the Hon. W. H. Dennison of the Foreign Office, one of our own people, is
+the only foreigner with whom the Japanese have not parted, and in China
+there are none. Of all of those who have gone none served his employers
+more faithfully than did McGiffin. At a time when every official
+robbed the people and the Government, and when “squeeze” or “graft”
+ was recognized as a perquisite, McGiffin’s hands were clean. The shells
+purchased for the Government by him were not loaded with black sand,
+nor were the rifles fitted with barrels of iron pipe. Once a year he
+celebrated the Thanksgiving Day of his own country by inviting to a
+great dinner all the Chinese naval officers who had been at least in
+part educated in America. It was a great occasion, and to enjoy
+it officers used to come from as far as Port Arthur, Shanghai, and
+Hong-Kong. So fully did some of them appreciate the efforts of their
+host that previous to his annual dinner, for twenty-four hours, they
+delicately starved themselves.
+
+During ten years McGiffin served as naval constructor and professor
+of gunnery and seamanship, and on board ships at sea gave practical
+demonstrations in the handling of the new cruisers. In 1894 he applied
+for leave, which was granted, but before he had sailed for home war with
+Japan was declared and he withdrew his application. He was placed
+as second in command on board the _Chen Yuen_, a seven-thousand-ton
+battleship, a sister ship to the _Ting Yuen_, the flagship of Admiral
+Ting Ju Chang. On the memorable 17th of September, 1894, the battle of
+the Yalu was fought, and so badly were the Chinese vessels hammered that
+the Chinese navy, for the time being, was wiped out of existence.
+
+From the start the advantage was with the Japanese fleet. In heavy guns
+the Chinese were the better armed, but in quick-firing guns the Japanese
+were vastly superior, and while the Chinese battleships _Ting Yuen_ and
+_Chen Yuen_, each of 7,430 tons, were superior to any of the Japanese
+warships, the three largest of which were each of 4,277 tons, the gross
+tonnage of the Japanese fleet was 36,000 to 21,000 of the Chinese.
+During the progress of the battle the ships engaged on each side
+numbered an even dozen, but at the very start, before a decisive shot
+was fired by either contestant, the _Tsi Yuen_, 2,355 tons, and _Kwan
+Chiae_, 1,300 tons, ran away, and before they had time to get into the
+game the _Chao Yung_ and _Yang Wei_ were in flames and had fled to the
+nearest land. So the battle was fought by eight Chinese ships against
+twelve of the Japanese. Of the Chinese vessels, the flagship, commanded
+by Admiral Ting, and her sister ship, which immediately after the
+beginning of the fight was for four hours commanded by McGiffin, were
+the two chief aggressors, and in consequence received the fire of the
+entire Japanese squadron. Toward the end of the fight, which without
+interruption lasted for five long hours, the Japanese did not even
+consider the four smaller ships of the enemy, but, sailing around the
+two ironclads in a circle, fired only at them. The Japanese themselves
+testified that these two ships never lost their formation, and that
+when her sister ironclad was closely pressed the _Chen Yuen_, by her
+movements and gun practice, protected the _Ting Yuen_, and, in fact,
+while she could not prevent the heavy loss the fleet encountered,
+preserved it from annihilation. During the fight this ship was almost
+continuously on fire, and was struck by every kind of projectile, from
+the thirteen-inch Canet shells to a rifle bullet, four hundred times.
+McGiffin himself was so badly wounded, so beaten about by concussions,
+so burned, and so bruised by steel splinters, that his health and
+eyesight were forever wrecked. But he brought the _Chen Yuen_ safely
+into Port Arthur and the remnants of the fleet with her.
+
+On account of his lack of health he resigned from the Chinese service
+and returned to America. For two years he lived in New York City,
+suffering in body without cessation the most exquisite torture. During
+that time his letters to his family show only tremendous courage. On the
+splintered, gaping deck of the _Chen Yuen_, with the fires below it,
+and the shells bursting upon it, he had shown to his Chinese crew the
+courage of the white man who knew he was responsible for them and for
+the honor of their country. But far greater and more difficult was the
+courage he showed while alone in the dark sick-room, and in the private
+wards of the hospitals.
+
+In the letters he dictates from there he still is concerned only lest
+those at home shall “worry”; he reassures them with falsehoods, jokes
+at their fears; of the people he can see from the window of the hospital
+tells them foolish stories; for a little boy who has been kind he asks
+them to send him his Chinese postage stamps; he plans a trip he will
+take with them when he is stronger, knowing he never will be stronger.
+The doctors had urged upon him a certain operation, and of it to a
+friend he wrote: “I know that I will have to have a piece about three
+inches square cut out of my skull, and this nerve cut off near the
+middle of the brain, as well as my eye taken out (for a couple of hours
+only, provided it is not mislaid, and can be found). Doctor ------ and
+his crowd show a bad memory for failures. As a result of this operation
+others have told me--I forget the percentage of deaths, which does not
+matter, but--that a large percentage have become insane. And some lost
+their sight.”
+
+While threatened with insanity and complete blindness, and hourly from
+his wounds suffering a pain drugs could not master, he dictated for the
+_Century Magazine_ the only complete account of the battle of the Yalu.
+In a letter to Mr. Richard Watson Gilder he writes: “...my eyes are
+troubling me. I cannot see even what I am writing now, and am getting
+the article under difficulties. I yet hope to place it in your hands by
+the 21st, still, if my eyes grow worse------”
+
+“Still, if my eyes grow worse------”
+
+The unfinished sentence was grimly prophetic.
+
+Unknown to his attendants at the hospital, among the papers in his
+despatch-box he had secreted his service revolver. On the morning of the
+11th of February, 1897, he asked for this box, and on some pretext sent
+the nurse from the room. When the report of the pistol brought them
+running to his bedside, they found the pain-driven body at peace, and
+the tired eyes dark forever.
+
+In the article in the _Century_ on the battle of the Yalu, he had said:
+
+“Chief among those who have died for their country is Admiral Ting Ju
+Chang, a gallant soldier and true gentleman. Betrayed by his countrymen,
+fighting against odds, almost his last official act was to stipulate
+for the lives of his officers and men. His own he scorned to save, well
+knowing that his ungrateful country would prove less merciful than his
+honorable foe. Bitter, indeed, must have been the reflections of the
+old, wounded hero, in that midnight hour, as he drank the poisoned cup
+that was to give him rest.”
+
+And bitter indeed must have been the reflections of the young wounded
+American, robbed, by the parsimony of his country, of the right he had
+earned to serve it, and who was driven out to give his best years and
+his life for a strange people under a strange flag.
+
+
+
+
+GENERAL WILLIAM WALKER,
+
+THE KING OF THE FILIBUSTERS
+
+IT is safe to say that to members of the younger generation the name of
+William Walker conveys absolutely nothing. To them, as a name, “William
+Walker” awakens no pride of race or country. It certainly does not
+suggest poetry and adventure. To obtain a place in even this group
+of Soldiers of Fortune, William Walker, the most distinguished of all
+American Soldiers of Fortune, the one who but for his own countrymen
+would have single-handed attained the most far-reaching results, had to
+wait his turn behind adventurers of other lands and boy officers of
+his own. And yet had this man with the plain name, the name that
+to-day means nothing, accomplished what he adventured, he would on this
+continent have solved the problem of slavery, have established an empire
+in Mexico and in Central America, and, incidentally, have brought us
+into war with all of Europe. That is all he would have accomplished.
+
+In the days of gold in San Francisco among the “Forty-niners” William
+Walker was one of the most famous, most picturesque and popular figures.
+Jack Oakhurst, gambler; Colonel Starbottle, duellist; Yuba Bill,
+stage-coach driver, were his contemporaries. Bret Harte was one of his
+keenest admirers, and in two of his stories, thinly disguised under a
+more appealing name, Walker is the hero. When, later, Walker came to New
+York City, in his honor Broadway from the Battery to Madison Square was
+bedecked with flags and arches. “It was roses, roses all the way.” The
+house-tops rocked and swayed.
+
+In New Orleans, where in a box at the opera he made his first
+appearance, for ten minutes the performance came to a pause, while the
+audience stood to salute him.
+
+This happened less than fifty years ago, and there are men who as boys
+were out with “Walker of Nicaragua,” and who are still active in the
+public life of San Francisco and New York.
+
+Walker was born in 1824, in Nashville, Tenn. He was the oldest son of
+a Scotch banker, a man of a deeply religious mind, and interested in
+a business which certainly is removed, as far as possible, from
+the profession of arms. Indeed, few men better than William Walker
+illustrate the fact that great generals are born, not trained.
+Everything in Walker’s birth, family tradition, and education pointed
+to his becoming a member of one of the “learned” professions. It was
+the wish of his father that he should be a minister of the Presbyterian
+Church, and as a child he was trained with that end in view. He himself
+preferred to study medicine, and after graduating at the University of
+Tennessee, at Edinburgh he followed a course of lectures, and for two
+years travelled in Europe, visiting many of the great hospitals.
+
+Then having thoroughly equipped himself to practise as a physician,
+after a brief return to his native city, and as short a stay in
+Philadelphia, he took down his shingle forever, and proceeded to
+New Orleans to study law. In two years he was admitted to the bar of
+Louisiana. But because clients were few, or because the red tape of the
+law chafed his spirit, within a year, as already he had abandoned
+the Church and Medicine, he abandoned his law practice and became
+an editorial writer on the New Orleans _Crescent_. A year later the
+restlessness which had rebelled against the grave professions led him to
+the gold fields of California, and San Francisco. There, in 1852, at
+the age of only twenty-eight, as editor of the San Francisco _Herald_,
+Walker began his real life which so soon was to end in both disaster and
+glory.
+
+Up to his twenty-eighth year, except in his restlessness, nothing in his
+life foreshadowed what was to follow. Nothing pointed to him as a man
+for whom thousands of other men, from every capital of the world, would
+give up their lives.
+
+Negatively, by abandoning three separate callings, and in making it
+plain that a professional career did not appeal to him, Walker had
+thrown a certain sidelight on his character; but actively he never had
+given any hint that under the thoughtful brow of the young doctor and
+lawyer there was a mind evolving schemes of empire, and an ambition
+limited only by the two great oceans.
+
+Walker’s first adventure was undoubtedly inspired by and in imitation
+of one which at the time of his arrival in San Francisco had just been
+brought to a disastrous end. This was the De Boulbon expedition into
+Mexico. The Count Gaston Raoulx de Raousset-Boulbon was a young French
+nobleman and Soldier of Fortune, a _chasseur d’Afrique_, a duellist,
+journalist, dreamer, who came to California to dig gold. Baron
+Harden-Hickey, who was born in San Francisco a few years after Boulbon
+at the age of thirty was shot in Mexico, also was inspired to dreams of
+conquest by this same gentleman adventurer.
+
+Boulbon was a young man of large ideas. In the rapid growth of
+California he saw a threat to Mexico and proposed to that government, as
+a “buffer” state between the two republics, to form a French colony
+in the Mexican State of Sonora. Sonora is that part of Mexico which
+directly joins on the south with our State of Arizona. The President of
+Mexico gave Boulbon permission to attempt this, and in 1852 he landed at
+Guaymas in the Gulf of California with two hundred and sixty well-armed
+Frenchmen. The ostensible excuse of Boulbon for thus invading foreign
+soil was his contract with the President under which his “emigrants”
+ were hired to protect other foreigners working in the “Restauradora”
+ mines from the attacks of Apache Indians from our own Arizona. But there
+is evidence that back of Boulbon was the French Government, and that
+he was attempting, in his small way, what later was attempted by
+Maximilian, backed by a French army corps and Louis Napoleon, to
+establish in Mexico an empire under French protection. For both the
+filibuster and the emperor the end was the same; to be shot by the
+fusillade against a church wall.
+
+In 1852, two years before Boulbon’s death, which was the finale to his
+second filibustering expedition into Sonora, he wrote to a friend in
+Paris: “Europeans are disturbed by the growth of the United States. And
+rightly so. Unless she be dismembered; unless a powerful rival be built
+up beside her (_i.e._, France in Mexico), America will become, through
+her commerce, her trade, her population, her geographical position upon
+two oceans, the inevitable mistress of the world. In ten years Europe
+dare not fire a shot without her permission. As I write fifty Americans
+prepare to sail for Mexico and go perhaps to victory. _Voila les
+Etats-Unis_.”
+
+These fifty Americans who, in the eyes of Boulbon, threatened the peace
+of Europe, were led by the ex-doctor, ex-lawyer, ex-editor, William
+Walker, _aged twenty-eight years_. Walker had attempted but had failed
+to obtain from the Mexican Government such a contract as the one it had
+granted De Boulbon. He accordingly sailed without it, announcing that,
+whether the Mexican Government asked him to do so or not, he would see
+that the women and children on the border of Mexico and Arizona were
+protected from massacre by the Indians. It will be remembered that when
+Dr. Jameson raided the Transvaal he also went to protect “women and
+children” from massacre by the Boers. Walker’s explanation of his
+expedition, in his own words, is as follows. He writes in the third
+person: “What Walker saw and heard satisfied him that a comparatively
+small body of Americans might gain a position on the Sonora frontier
+and protect the families on the border from the Indians, and such an
+act would be one of humanity whether or not sanctioned by the Mexican
+Government. The condition of the upper part of Sonora was at that time,
+and still is [he was writing eight years later, in 1860], a disgrace to
+the civilization of the continent...and the people of the United States
+were more immediately responsible before the world for the Apache
+outrages. Northern Sonora was in fact, more under the dominion of the
+Apaches than under the laws of Mexico, and the contributions of the
+Indians were collected with greater regularity and certainty than the
+dues of the tax-gatherers. The state of this region furnished the best
+defence for any American aiming to settle there without the formal
+consent of Mexico; and, although political changes would certainly have
+followed the establishment of a colony, they might be justified by the
+plea that any social organization, no matter how secured, is preferable
+to that in which individuals and families are altogether at the mercy of
+savages.”
+
+While at the time of Jameson’s raid the women and children in danger of
+massacre from the Boers were as many as there are snakes in Ireland, at
+the time of Walker’s raid the women and children were in danger from the
+Indians, who as enemies, as Walker soon discovered, were as cruel and as
+greatly to be feared as he had described them.
+
+But it was not to save women and children that Walker sought to conquer
+the State of Sonora. At the time of his expedition the great question of
+slavery was acute; and if in the States next to be admitted to the Union
+slavery was to be prohibited, the time had come, so it seemed to
+this statesman of twenty-eight years, when the South must extend her
+boundaries, and for her slaves find an outlet in fresh territory.
+Sonora already joined Arizona. By conquest her territory could easily
+be extended to meet Texas. As a matter of fact, strategically the spot
+selected by William Walker for the purpose for which he desired it was
+almost perfect. Throughout his brief career one must remember that the
+spring of all his acts was this dream of an empire where slavery would
+be recognized. His mother was a slave-holder. In Tennessee he had been
+born and bred surrounded by slaves. His youth and manhood had been spent
+in Nashville and New Orleans. He believed as honestly, as fanatically
+in the right to hold slaves as did his father in the faith of the
+Covenanters. To-day one reads his arguments in favor of slavery with the
+most curious interest. His appeal to the humanity of his reader, to his
+heart, to his sense of justice, to his fear of God, and to his belief
+in the Holy Bible not to abolish slavery, but to continue it, to this
+generation is as amusing as the topsy-turvyisms of Gilbert or Shaw. But
+to the young man himself slavery was a sacred institution, intended for
+the betterment of mankind, a God-given benefit to the black man and a
+God-given right of his white master.
+
+White brothers in the South, with perhaps less exalted motives,
+contributed funds to fit out Walker’s expedition, and in October, 1852,
+with forty-five men, he landed at Cape St. Lucas, at the extreme point
+of Lower California. Lower California, it must be remembered, in spite
+of its name, is not a part of our California, but then was, and still
+is, a part of Mexico. The fact that he was at last upon the soil of the
+enemy caused Walker to throw off all pretence; and instead of hastening
+to protect women and children, he sailed a few miles farther up the
+coast to La Paz. With his forty-five followers he raided the town, made
+the Governor a prisoner, and established a republic with himself as
+President. In a proclamation he declared the people free of the tyranny
+of Mexico. They had no desire to be free, but Walker was determined,
+and, whether they liked it or not, they woke up to find themselves an
+independent republic. A few weeks later, although he had not yet set
+foot there, Walker annexed on paper the State of Sonora, and to both
+States gave the name of the Republic of Sonora.
+
+As soon as word of this reached San Francisco, his friends busied
+themselves in his behalf, and the danger-loving and adventurous of
+all lands were enlisted as “emigrants” and shipped to him in the bark
+_Anita_.
+
+Two months later, in November, 1852, three hundred of these joined
+Walker. They were as desperate a band of scoundrels as ever robbed a
+sluice, stoned a Chinaman, or shot a “Greaser.” When they found that to
+command them there was only a boy, they plotted to blow up the
+magazine in which the powder was stored, rob the camp, and march north,
+supporting themselves by looting the ranches. Walker learned of their
+plot, tried the ringleaders by court-martial, and shot them. With a
+force as absolutely undisciplined as was his, the act required the most
+complete personal courage. That was a quality the men with him could
+fully appreciate. They saw they had as a leader one who could fight,
+and one who would punish. The majority did not want a leader who would
+punish so when Walker called upon those who would follow him to Sonora
+to show their hands, only the original forty-five and about forty of
+the later recruits remained with him. With less than one hundred men
+he started to march up the Peninsula through Lower California, and so
+around the Gulf to Sonora.
+
+From the very start the filibusters were overwhelmed with disaster. The
+Mexicans, with Indian allies, skulked on the flanks and rear. Men who
+in the almost daily encounters were killed fell into the hands of the
+Indians, and their bodies were mutilated. Stragglers and deserters were
+run to earth and tortured. Those of the filibusters who were wounded
+died from lack of medical care. The only instruments they possessed with
+which to extract the arrow-heads were probes made from ramrods filed to
+a point. Their only food was the cattle they killed on the march. The
+army was barefoot, the Cabinet in rags, the President of Sonora wore one
+boot and one shoe.
+
+Unable to proceed farther, Walker fell back upon San Vincente, where he
+had left the arms and ammunition of the deserters and a rear-guard of
+eighteen men. He found not one of these to welcome him. A dozen had
+deserted, and the Mexicans had surprised the rest, lassoing them and
+torturing them until they died. Walker now had but thirty-five men. To
+wait for further re-enforcements from San Francisco, even were he sure
+that re-enforcements would come, was impossible. He determined by forced
+marches to fight his way to the boundary line of California. Between him
+and safety were the Mexican soldiers holding the passes, and the Indians
+hiding on his flanks. When within three miles of the boundary line, at
+San Diego, Colonel Melendrez, who commanded the Mexican forces, sent in
+a flag of truce, and offered, if they would surrender, a safe-conduct to
+all of the survivors of the expedition except the chief. But the men who
+for one year had fought and starved for Walker, would not, within three
+miles of home, abandon him.
+
+Melendrez then begged the commander of the United States troops to order
+Walker to surrender. Major McKinstry, who was in command of the United
+States Army Post at San Diego, refused. For him to cross the line would
+be a violation of neutral territory. On Mexican soil he would neither
+embarrass the ex-President of Sonora nor aid him; but he saw to it that
+if the filibusters reached American soil, no Mexican or Indian should
+follow them.
+
+Accordingly, on the imaginary boundary he drew up his troop, and like
+an impartial umpire awaited the result. Hidden behind rocks and cactus,
+across the hot, glaring plain, the filibusters could see the American
+flag, and the gay, fluttering guidons of the cavalry. The sight gave
+them heart for one last desperate spurt. Melendrez also appreciated
+that for the final attack the moment had come. As he charged, Walker,
+apparently routed, fled, but concealed in the rocks behind him he had
+stationed a rear-guard of a dozen men. As Melendrez rode into this
+ambush the dozen riflemen emptied as many saddles, and the Mexicans and
+Indians stampeded. A half hour later, footsore and famished, the little
+band that had set forth to found an empire of slaves, staggered across
+the line and surrendered to the forces of the United States.
+
+Of this expedition James Jeffrey Roche says, in his “Byways of War,”
+ which is of all books published about Walker the most intensely and
+fascinatingly interesting and complete: “Years afterward the peon
+herdsman or prowling Cocupa Indian in the mountain by-paths stumbled
+over the bleaching skeleton of some nameless one whose resting-place was
+marked by no cross or cairn, but the Colts revolver resting beside
+his bones spoke his country and his occupation--the only relic of the
+would-be conquistadores of the nineteenth century.”
+
+Under parole to report to General Wood, commanding the Department of the
+Pacific, the filibusters were sent by sailing vessel to San Francisco,
+where their leader was tried for violating the neutrality laws of the
+United States, and acquitted.
+
+Walker’s first expedition had ended in failure, but for him it had been
+an opportunity of tremendous experience, as active service is the best
+of all military academies, and for the kind of warfare he was to wage,
+the best preparation. Nor was it inglorious, for his fellow survivors,
+contrary to the usual practice, instead of in bar-rooms placing the
+blame for failure upon their leader, stood ready to fight one and all
+who doubted his ability or his courage. Later, after five years, many of
+these same men, though ten to twenty years his senior, followed him to
+death, and never questioned his judgment nor his right to command.
+
+At this time in Nicaragua there was the usual revolution. On the
+south the sister republic of Costa Rica was taking sides, on the north
+Honduras was landing arms and men. There was no law, no government. A
+dozen political parties, a dozen commanding generals, and not one strong
+man.
+
+In the editorial rooms of the San Francisco _Herald_, Walker, searching
+the map for new worlds to conquer, rested his finger upon Nicaragua.
+
+In its confusion of authority he saw an opportunity to make himself
+a power, and in its tropical wealth and beauty, in the laziness and
+incompetence of its inhabitants, he beheld a greater, fairer, more kind
+Sonora. On the Pacific side from San Francisco he could re-enforce his
+army with men and arms; on the Caribbean side from New Orleans he could,
+when the moment arrived, people his empire with slaves.
+
+The two parties at war in Nicaragua were the Legitimists and the
+Democrats. Why they were at war it is not necessary to know. Probably
+Walker did not know; it is not likely that they themselves knew. But
+from the leader of the Democrats Walker obtained a contract to bring
+to Nicaragua three hundred Americans, who were each to receive several
+hundred acres of land, and who were described as “colonists liable to
+military duty.” This contract Walker submitted to the Attorney-General
+of the State and to General Wood, who once before had acquitted him of
+filibustering; and neither of these Federal officers saw anything
+which seemed to give them the right to interfere. But the rest of San
+Francisco was less credulous, and the “colonists” who joined Walker
+had a very distinct idea that they were not going to Nicaragua to plant
+coffee or to pick bananas.
+
+In May, 1855, just a year after Walker and his thirty-three followers
+had surrendered to the United States troops at San Diego, with fifty new
+recruits and seven veterans of the former expedition he sailed from
+San Francisco in the brig _Vesta_, and in five weeks, after a weary and
+stormy voyage, landed at Realejo. There he was met by representatives of
+the Provisional Director of the Democrats, who received the Californians
+warmly.
+
+Walker was commissioned a colonel, Achilles Kewen, who had been fighting
+under Lopez in Cuba, a lieutenant-colonel, and Timothy Crocker, who had
+served under Walker in the Sonora expedition, a major. The corps
+was organized as an independent command and was named “La Falange
+Americana.” At this time the enemy held the route to the Caribbean, and
+Walker’s first orders were to dislodge him.
+
+Accordingly, a week after landing with his fifty-seven Americans and one
+hundred and fifty native troops, Walker sailed in the _Vesta_ for Brito,
+from which port he marched upon Rivas, a city of eleven thousand people
+and garrisoned by some twelve hundred of the enemy.
+
+The first fight ended in a complete and disastrous fiasco. The native
+troops ran away, and the Americans surrounded by six hundred of the
+Legitimists’ soldiers, after defending themselves for three hours behind
+some adobe huts, charged the enemy and escaped into the jungle. Their
+loss was heavy, and among the killed were the two men upon whom Walker
+chiefly depended: Kewen and Crocker. The Legitimists placed the bodies
+of the dead and wounded who were still living on a pile of logs and
+burned them. After a painful night march, Walker, the next day, reached
+San Juan on the coast, and, finding a Costa Rican schooner in port,
+seized it for his use. At this moment, although Walker’s men were
+defeated, bleeding, and in open flight, two “gringos” picked up on
+the beach of San Juan, “the Texan Harry McLeod and the Irishman Peter
+Burns,” asked to be permitted to join him.
+
+“It was encouraging,” Walker writes, “for the soldiers to find that
+some besides themselves did not regard their fortunes as altogether
+desperate, and small as was this addition to their number it gave
+increased moral as well as material strength to the command.”
+
+Sometimes in reading history it would appear as though for success the
+first requisite must be an utter lack of humor, and inability to look
+upon what one is attempting except with absolute seriousness. With forty
+men Walker was planning to conquer and rule Nicaragua, a country with a
+population of two hundred and fifty thousand souls and as large as the
+combined area of Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Hampshire,
+and Connecticut. And yet, even seven years later, he records without
+a smile that two beach-combers gave his army “moral and material
+strength.” And it is most characteristic of the man that at the
+moment he was rejoicing over this addition to his forces, to maintain
+discipline two Americans who had set fire to the houses of the enemy
+he ordered to be shot. A weaker man would have repudiated the two
+Americans, who, in fact, were not members of the Phalanx, and trusted
+that their crimes would not be charged against him. But the success of
+Walker lay greatly in his stern discipline. He tried the men, and they
+confessed to their guilt. One got away; and, as it might appear that
+Walker had connived at his escape, to the second man was shown no
+mercy. When one reads how severe was Walker in his punishments, and
+how frequently the death penalty was invoked by him against his own
+few followers, the wonder grows that these men, as independent and as
+unaccustomed to restraint as were those who first joined him, submitted
+to his leadership. One can explain it only by the personal quality of
+Walker himself.
+
+Among these reckless, fearless outlaws, who, despising their allies,
+believed and proved that with his rifle one American could account for a
+dozen Nicaraguans, Walker was the one man who did not boast or drink or
+gamble, who did not even swear, who never looked at a woman, and who, in
+money matters, was scrupulously honest and unself-seeking. In a fight,
+his followers knew that for them he would risk being shot just as
+unconcernedly as to maintain his authority he would shoot one of them.
+
+Treachery, cowardice, looting, any indignity to women, he punished with
+death; but to the wounded, either of his own or of the enemy’s forces,
+he was as gentle as a nursing sister and the brave and able he rewarded
+with instant promotion and higher pay. In no one trait was he a
+demagogue. One can find no effort on his part to ingratiate himself with
+his men. Among the officers of his staff there were no favorites. He
+messed alone, and at all times kept to himself. He spoke little, and
+then with utter lack of self-consciousness. In the face of injustice,
+perjury, or physical danger, he was always calm, firm, dispassionate.
+But it is said that on those infrequent occasions when his anger
+asserted itself, the steady steel-gray eyes flashed so menacingly that
+those who faced them would as soon look down the barrel of his Colt.
+
+The impression one gets of him gathered from his recorded acts, from his
+own writings, from the writings of those who fought with him, is of a
+silent, student-like young man believing religiously in his “star of
+destiny”; but, in all matters that did not concern himself, possessed of
+a grim sense of fun. The sayings of his men that in his history of the
+war he records, show a distinct appreciation of the Bret Harte school of
+humor. As, for instance, when he tells how he wished to make one of them
+a drummer boy and the Californian drawled: “No, thanks, colonel; I never
+seen a picture of a battle yet that the first thing in it wasn’t a dead
+drummer boy with a busted drum.”
+
+In Walker the personal vanity which is so characteristic of the soldier
+of fortune was utterly lacking. In a land where a captain bedecks
+himself like a field-marshal, Walker wore his trousers stuffed in his
+boots, a civilian’s blue frock-coat, and the slouch hat of the period,
+with, for his only ornament, the red ribbon of the Democrats. The
+authority he wielded did not depend upon braid or buttons, and only when
+going into battle did he wear his sword. In appearance he was slightly
+built, rather below the medium height, smooth shaven, and with deep-set
+gray eyes. These eyes apparently, as they gave him his nickname, were
+his most marked feature.
+
+His followers called him, and later, when he was thirty-two years
+old, he was known all over the United States as the “Gray-Eyed Man of
+Destiny.”
+
+From the first Walker recognized that in order to establish himself in
+Nicaragua he must keep in touch with all possible recruits arriving from
+San Francisco and New York, and that to do this he must hold the line
+of transit from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific. At this time the sea
+routes to the gold-fields were three: by sailing vessel around the Cape,
+one over the Isthmus of Panama, and one, which was the shortest, across
+Nicaragua. By a charter from the Government of Nicaragua, the right to
+transport passengers across this isthmus was controlled by the Accessory
+Transit Company, of which the first Cornelius Vanderbilt was president.
+His company owned a line of ocean steamers both on the Pacific side
+and on the Atlantic side. Passengers _en route_ from New York to the
+gold-fields were landed by these latter steamers at Greytown on the west
+coast of Nicaragua, and sent by boats of light draught up the San Juan
+River to Lake Nicaragua. There they were met by larger lake steamers and
+conveyed across the lake to Virgin Bay. From that point, in carriages
+and on mule back, they were carried twelve miles overland to the port of
+San Juan del Sud on the Pacific Coast, where they boarded the company’s
+steamers to San Francisco.
+
+During the year of Walker’s occupation the number of passengers crossing
+Nicaragua was an average of about two thousand a month.
+
+It was to control this route that immediately after his first defeat
+Walker returned to San Juan del Sud, and in a smart skirmish defeated
+the enemy and secured possession of Virgin Bay, the halting place for
+the passengers going east or west. In this fight Walker was outnumbered
+five to one, but his losses were only three natives killed and a few
+Americans wounded. The Legitimists lost sixty killed and a hundred
+wounded. This proportion of losses shows how fatally effective was the
+rifle and revolver fire of the Californians. Indeed, so wonderful was it
+that when some years ago I visited the towns and cities captured by the
+filibusters, I found that the marksmanship of Walker’s Phalanx was still
+a tradition. Indeed, thanks to the filibusters, to-day in any part of
+Central America a man from the States, if in trouble, has only to show
+his gun. No native will wait for him to fire it.
+
+After the fight at Virgin Bay, Walker received from California fifty
+recruits--a very welcome addition to his force, and as he now commanded
+about one hundred and twenty Americans, three hundred Nicaraguans, under
+a friendly native, General Valle, and two brass cannon, he decided to
+again attack Rivas. Rivas is on the lake just above Virgin Bay; still
+further up is Granada, which was the head-quarters of the Legitimists.
+
+Fearing Walker’s attack upon Rivas, the Legitimist troops were hurried
+south from Granada to that city, leaving Granada but slightly protected.
+
+Through intercepted letters Walker learned of this and determined to
+strike at Granada. By night, in one of the lake steamers, he skirted the
+shore, and just before daybreak, with fires banked and all lights out,
+drew up to a point near the city. The day previous the Legitimists had
+gained a victory, and, as good luck or Walker’s “destiny” would have
+it, the night before Granada had been celebrating the event. Much joyous
+dancing and much drinking of aguardiente had buried the inhabitants in a
+drugged slumber. The garrison slept, the sentries slept, the city slept.
+But when the convent bells called for early mass, the air was shaken
+with sharp reports that to the ears of the Legitimists were unfamiliar
+and disquieting. They were not the loud explosions of their own muskets
+nor of the smooth bores of the Democrats. The sounds were sharp and
+cruel like the crack of a whip. The sentries flying from their posts
+disclosed the terrifying truth. “The Filibusteros!” they cried.
+Following them at a gallop came Walker and Valle and behind them the men
+of the awful Phalanx, whom already the natives had learned to fear: the
+bearded giants in red flannel shirts who at Rivas on foot had charged
+the artillery with revolvers, who at Virgin Bay when wounded had drawn
+from their boots glittering bowie knives and hurled them like arrows,
+who at all times shot with the accuracy of the hawk falling upon a
+squawking hen.
+
+There was a brief terrified stand in the Plaza, and then a complete
+rout. As was their custom, the native Democrats began at once to loot
+the city. But Walker put his sword into the first one of these he met,
+and ordered the Americans to arrest all others found stealing, and to
+return the goods already stolen. Over a hundred political prisoners in
+the cartel were released by Walker, and the ball and chain to which each
+was fastened stricken off. More than two-thirds of them at once enlisted
+under Walker’s banner.
+
+He now was in a position to dictate to the enemy his own terms of peace,
+but a fatal blunder on the part of Parker H. French, a lieutenant of
+Walker’s, postponed peace for several weeks, and led to unfortunate
+reprisals. French had made an unauthorized and unsuccessful assault
+on San Carlos at the eastern end of the lake, and the Legitimists
+retaliated at Virgin Bay by killing half a dozen peaceful passengers,
+and at San Carlos by firing at a transit steamer. For this the excuse of
+the Legitimists was, that now that Walker was using the lake steamers
+as transports it was impossible for them to know whether the boats were
+occupied by his men or neutral passengers. As he could not reach the
+guilty ones, Walker held responsible for their acts their secretary
+of state, who at the taking of Granada was among the prisoners. He was
+tried by court-martial and shot, “a victim of the new interpretation of
+the principles of constitutional government.” While this act of Walker’s
+was certainly stretching the theory of responsibility to the breaking
+point, its immediate effect was to bring about a hasty surrender and a
+meeting between the generals of the two political parties. Thus, four
+months after Walker and his fifty-seven followers landed in Nicaragua,
+a suspension of hostilities was arranged, and the side for which the
+Americans had fought was in power. Walker was made commander-in-chief
+of an army of twelve hundred men with salary of six thousand dollars a
+year. A man named Rivas was appointed temporary president.
+
+To Walker this pause in the fight was most welcome. It gave him an
+opportunity to enlist recruits and to organize his men for the better
+accomplishment of what was the real object of his going to Nicaragua. He
+now had under him a remarkable force, one of the most effective known
+to military history. For although six months had not yet passed,
+the organization he now commanded was as unlike the Phalanx of
+the fifty-eight adventurers who were driven back at Rivas, as were
+Falstaff’s followers from the regiment of picked men commanded by
+Colonel Roosevelt. Instead of the undisciplined and lawless now being
+in the majority, the ranks were filled with the pick of the California
+mining camps, with veterans of the Mexican War, with young Southerners
+of birth and spirit, and with soldiers of fortune from all of the great
+armies of Europe.
+
+In the Civil War, which so soon followed, and later in the service of
+the Khedive of Egypt, were several of Walker’s officers, and for years
+after his death there was no war in which one of the men trained by him
+in the jungles of Nicaragua did not distinguish himself. In his memoirs,
+the Englishman, General Charles Frederic Henningsen, writes that though
+he had taken part in some of the greatest battles of the Civil War he
+would pit a thousand men of Walker’s command against any five thousand
+Confederate or Union soldiers. And General Henningsen was one who spoke
+with authority. Before he joined Walker he had served in Spain under Don
+Carlos, in Hungary under Kossuth, and in Bulgaria.
+
+Of Walker’s men, a regiment of which he commanded, he writes: “I often
+have seen them march with a broken or compound fractured arm in
+splints, and using the other to fire the rifle or revolver. Those with a
+fractured thigh or wounds which rendered them incapable of removal, shot
+themselves. Such men do not turn up in the average of everyday life, nor
+do I ever expect to see their like again. All military science failed
+on a suddenly given field before such assailants, who came at a run
+to close with their revolvers and who thought little of charging a gun
+battery, pistol in hand.”
+
+Another graduate of Walker’s army was Captain Fred Townsend Ward, a
+native of Salem, Mass., who after the death of Walker organized and
+led the ever victorious army that put down the Tai-Ping rebellion,
+and performed the many feats of martial glory for which Chinese Gordon
+received the credit. In Shanghai, to the memory of the filibuster, there
+are to-day two temples in his honor.
+
+Joaquin Miller, the poet, miner, and soldier, who but recently was a
+picturesque figure on the hotel porch at Saratoga Springs, was one of
+the young Californians who was “out with Walker,” and who later in
+his career by his verse helped to preserve the name of his beloved
+commander. I. C. Jamison, living to-day in Guthrie, Oklahoma, was a
+captain under Walker. When war again came, as it did within four months,
+these were the men who made Walker President of Nicaragua.
+
+During the four months in all but title he had been president, and as
+such he was recognized and feared. It was against him, not Rivas, that
+in February, 1856, the neighboring republic of Costa Rica declared war.
+For three months this war continued with varying fortunes until the
+Costa Ricans were driven across the border.
+
+In June of the same year Rivas called a general election for president,
+announcing himself as the candidate of the Democrats. Two other
+Democrats also presented themselves, Salazar and Ferrer. The
+Legitimists, recognizing in their former enemy the real ruler of the
+country, nominated Walker. By an overwhelming majority he was elected,
+receiving 15,835 votes to 867 cast for Rivas. Salazar received 2,087;
+Ferrer, 4,447.
+
+Walker now was the legal as well as the actual ruler of the country,
+and at no time in its history, as during Walker’s administration, was
+Nicaragua governed so justly, so wisely, and so well. But in his success
+the neighboring republics saw a menace to their own independence. To the
+four other republics of Central America the five-pointed blood-red star
+on the flag of the filibusters bore a sinister motto: “Five or None.”
+ The meaning was only too unpleasantly obvious. At once, Costa Rica on
+the south, and Guatemala, Salvador, and Honduras from the north, with
+the malcontents of Nicaragua, declared war against the foreign invader.
+Again Walker was in the field with opposed to him 21,000 of the allies.
+The strength of his own force varied. On his election as president the
+backbone of his army was a magnificently trained body of veterans to the
+number of 2,000. This was later increased to 3,500, but it is doubtful
+if at any one time it ever exceeded that number. His muster and hospital
+rolls show that during his entire occupation of Nicaragua there were
+enlisted, at one time or another, under his banner 10,000 men. While in
+his service, of this number, by hostile shots or fever, 5,000 died.
+
+To describe the battles with the allies would be interminable and
+wearying. In every particular they are much alike: the long silent
+night march, the rush at daybreak, the fight to gain strategic
+positions either of the barracks, or of the Cathedral in the Plaza,
+the hand-to-hand fighting from behind barricades and adobe walls. The
+out-come of these fights sometimes varied, but the final result was
+never in doubt, and had no outside influences intervened, in time each
+republic in Central America would have come under the five-pointed star.
+
+In Costa Rica there is a marble statue showing that republic represented
+as a young woman with her foot upon the neck of Walker. Some night a
+truth-loving American will place a can of dynamite at the foot of that
+statue, and walk hurriedly away. Unaided, neither Costa Rica nor any
+other Central American republic could have driven Walker from her soil.
+His downfall came through his own people, and through an act of his
+which provoked them.
+
+When Walker was elected president he found that the Accessory Transit
+Company had not lived up to the terms of its concession with the
+Nicaraguan Government. His efforts to hold it to the terms of its
+concession led to his overthrow. By its charter the Transit Company
+agreed to pay to Nicaragua ten thousand dollars annually and ten per
+cent. of the net profits; but the company, whose history the United
+States Minister, Squire, characterized as “an infamous career of
+deception and fraud,” manipulated its books in such a fashion as to
+show that there never were any profits. Doubting this, Walker sent a
+commission to New York to investigate. The commission discovered the
+fraud and demanded in back payments two hundred and fifty thousand
+dollars. When the company refused to pay this, as security for the
+debt Walker seized its steamers, wharves, and storehouses, revoked its
+charter, and gave a new charter to two of its directors, Morgan and
+Garrison, who, in San Francisco, were working against Vanderbilt. In
+doing this, while he was legally in the right, he committed a fatal
+error. He had made a powerful enemy of Vanderbilt, and he had shut off
+his only lines of communication with the United States. For, enraged
+at the presumption of the filibuster president, Vanderbilt withdrew his
+ocean steamers, thus leaving Walker without men or ammunition, and as
+isolated as though upon a deserted island. He possessed Vanderbilt’s
+boats upon the San Juan River and Nicaragua Lake, but they were of use
+to him only locally.
+
+His position was that of a man holding the centre span of a bridge of
+which every span on either side of him has been destroyed.
+
+Vanderbilt did not rest at withdrawing his steamers, but by supporting
+the Costa Ricans with money and men, carried the war into Central
+America. From Washington he fought Walker through Secretary of State
+Marcy, who proved a willing tool.
+
+Spencer and Webster, and the other soldiers of fortune employed by
+Vanderbilt, closed the route on the Caribbean side, and the man-of-war
+_St. Marys_, commanded by Captain Davis, was ordered to San Juan on the
+Pacific side. The instructions given to Captain Davis were to aid the
+allies in forcing Walker out of Nicaragua. Walker claims that these
+orders were given to Marcy by Vanderbilt and by Marcy to Commodore
+Mervin, who was Marcy’s personal friend and who issued them to Davis.
+Davis claims that he acted only in the interest of humanity to save
+Walker in spite of himself. In any event, the result was the same.
+Walker, his force cut down by hostile shot and fever and desertion, took
+refuge in Rivas, where he was besieged by the allied armies. There was
+no bread in the city. The men were living on horse and mule meat. There
+was no salt. The hospital was filled with wounded and those stricken
+with fever.
+
+Captain Davis, in the name of humanity, demanded Walker’s surrender to
+the United States. Walker told him he would not surrender, but that
+if the time came when he found he must fly, he would do so in his own
+little schooner of war, the _Granada_, which constituted his entire
+navy, and in her, as a free man, take his forces where he pleased. Then
+Davis informed Walker that the force Walker had sent to recapture the
+Greytown route had been defeated by the janizaries of Vanderbilt; that
+the steamers from San Francisco, on which Walker now counted to bring
+him re-enforcements, had also been taken off the line, and finally
+that it was his “unalterable and deliberate intention” to seize the
+_Granada_. On this point his orders left him no choice. The _Granada_
+was the last means of transportation still left to Walker. He had hoped
+to make a sortie and on board her to escape from the country. But with
+his ship taken from him and no longer able to sustain the siege of
+the allies, he surrendered to the forces of the United States. In the
+agreement drawn up by him and Davis, Walker provided for the care, by
+Davis, of the sick and wounded, for the protection after his departure
+of the natives who had fought with him, and for the transportation of
+himself and officers to the United States.
+
+On his arrival in New York he received a welcome such as later was
+extended to Kossuth, and, in our own day, to Admiral Dewey. The city
+was decorated with flags and arches; and banquets, fetes, and public
+meetings were everywhere held in his honor. Walker received these
+demonstrations modestly, and on every public occasion announced his
+determination to return to the country of which he was the president,
+and from which by force he had been driven. At Washington, where he
+went to present his claims, he received scant encouragement. His protest
+against Captain Davis was referred to Congress, where it was allowed to
+die.
+
+Within a month Walker organized an expedition with which to regain his
+rights in Nicaragua, and as, in his new constitution for that country,
+he had annulled the old law abolishing slavery, among the slave-holders
+of the South he found enough money and recruits to enable him to at once
+leave the United States. With one hundred and fifty men he sailed from
+New Orleans and landed at San del Norte on the Caribbean side. While he
+formed a camp on the harbor of San Juan, one of his officers, with fifty
+men, proceeded up the river and, capturing the town of Castillo Viejo
+and four of the Transit steamers, was in a fair way to obtain possession
+of the entire route. At this moment upon the scene arrived the United
+States frigate _Wabash_ and Hiram Paulding, who landed a force of three
+hundred and fifty blue-jackets with howitzers, and turned the guns of
+his frigate upon the camp of the President of Nicaragua. Captain Engel,
+who presented the terms of surrender to Walker, said to him: “General,
+I am sorry to see you here. A man like you is worthy to command better
+men.” To which Walker replied grimly: “If I had a third the number you
+have brought against me, I would show you which of us two commands the
+better men.”
+
+For the third time in his history Walker surrendered to the armed forces
+of his own country.
+
+On his arrival in the United States, in fulfilment of his parole to
+Paulding, Walker at once presented himself at Washington a prisoner
+of war. But President Buchanan, although Paulding had acted exactly as
+Davis had done, refused to support him, and in a message to Congress
+declared that that officer had committed a grave error and established
+an unsafe precedent.
+
+On the strength of this Walker demanded of the United States Government
+indemnity for his losses, and that it should furnish him and his
+followers transportation even to the very camp from which its
+representatives had torn him. This demand, as Walker foresaw, was not
+considered seriously, and with a force of about one hundred men, among
+whom were many of his veterans, he again set sail from New Orleans.
+Owing to the fact that, to prevent his return, there now were on each
+side of the Isthmus both American and British men-of-war, Walker, with
+the idea of reaching Nicaragua by land, stopped off at Honduras. In his
+war with the allies the Honduranians had been as savage in their attacks
+upon his men as even the Costa Ricans, and finding his old enemies
+now engaged in a local revolution, on landing, Walker declared for the
+weaker side and captured the important seaport of Trujillo. He no sooner
+had taken it than the British warship _Icarus_ anchored in the harbor,
+and her commanding officer, Captain Salmon, notified Walker that the
+British Government held a mortgage on the revenues of the port, and that
+to protect the interests of his Government he intended to take the town.
+Walker answered that he had made Trujillo a free port, and that Great
+Britain’s claims no longer existed.
+
+The British officer replied that if Walker surrendered himself and his
+men he would carry them as prisoners to the United States, and that if
+he did not, he would bombard the town. At this moment General Alvarez,
+with seven hundred Honduranians, from the land side surrounded Trujillo,
+and prepared to attack. Against such odds by sea and land Walker was
+helpless, and he determined to fly. That night, with seventy men,
+he left the town and proceeded down the coast toward Nicaragua. The
+_Icarus_, having taken on board Alvarez, started in pursuit. The
+President of Nicaragua was found in a little Indian fishing village, and
+Salmon sent in his shore-boats and demanded his surrender. On leaving
+Trujillo, Walker had been forced to abandon all his ammunition save
+thirty rounds a man, and all of his food supplies excepting two barrels
+of bread. On the coast of this continent there is no spot more unhealthy
+than Honduras, and when the Englishmen entered the fishing village they
+found Walker’s seventy men lying in the palm huts helpless with fever,
+and with no stomach to fight British blue-jackets with whom they had no
+quarrel. Walker inquired of Salmon if he were asking him to surrender to
+the British or to the Honduranian forces, and twice Salmon assured him,
+“distinctly and specifically,” that he was surrendering to the forces of
+her Majesty. With this understanding Walker and his men laid down their
+arms and were conveyed to the _Icarus_. But on arriving at Trujillo,
+in spite of their protests and demands for trial by a British tribunal,
+Salmon turned over his prisoners to the Honduranian general. What excuse
+for this is now given by his descendants in the Salmon family I do not
+know.
+
+Probably it is a subject they avoid, and, in history, Salmon’s version
+has never been given, which for him, perhaps, is an injustice. But the
+fact remains that he turned over his white brothers to the mercies of
+half-Indian, half-negro, savages, who were not allies of Great Britain,
+and in whose quarrels she had no interest. And Salmon did this, knowing
+there could be but one end. If he did not know it, his stupidity
+equalled what now appears to be heartless indifference. So far as to
+secure pardon for all except the leader and one faithful follower,
+Colonel Rudler of the famous Phalanx, Salmon did use his authority, and
+he offered, if Walker would ask as an American citizen, to intercede for
+him. But Walker, with a distinct sense of loyalty to the country he had
+conquered, and whose people had honored him with their votes, refused to
+accept life from the country of his birth, the country that had injured
+and repudiated him.
+
+Even in his extremity, abandoned and alone on a strip of glaring coral
+and noisome swamp land, surrounded only by his enemies, he remained true
+to his ideal.
+
+At thirty-seven life is very sweet, many things still seem possible, and
+before him, could his life be spared, Walker beheld greater conquests,
+more power, a new South controlling a Nicaragua canal, a network of
+busy railroads, great squadrons of merchant vessels, himself emperor of
+Central America. On the gunboat the gold-braided youth had but to raise
+his hand, and Walker again would be a free man. But the gold-braided one
+would render this service only on the condition that Walker would appeal
+to him as an American; it was not enough that Walker was a human being.
+The condition Walker could not grant.
+
+“The President of Nicaragua,” he said, “is a citizen of Nicaragua.”
+
+They led him out at sunrise to a level piece of sand along the beach,
+and as the priest held the crucifix in front of him he spoke to his
+executioners in Spanish, simply and gravely: “I die a Roman Catholic.
+In making war upon you at the invitation of the people of Ruatan I
+was wrong. Of your people I ask pardon. I accept my punishment with
+resignation. I would like to think my death will be for the good of
+society.”
+
+From a distance of twenty feet three soldiers fired at him, but,
+although each shot took effect, Walker was not dead. So, a sergeant
+stooped, and with a pistol killed the man who would have made him one of
+an empire of slaves.
+
+Had Walker lived four years longer to exhibit upon the great board of
+the Civil War his ability as a general, he would, I believe, to-day be
+ranked as one of America’s greatest fighting men.
+
+And because the people of his own day destroyed him is no reason that we
+should withhold from this American, the greatest of all filibusters, the
+recognition of his genius.
+
+
+
+
+MAJOR BURNHAM, CHIEF OF SCOUTS
+
+AMONG the Soldiers of Fortune whose stories have been told in this book
+were men who are no longer living, men who, to the United States, are
+strangers, and men who were of interest chiefly because in what they
+attempted they failed.
+
+The subject of this article is none of these. His adventures are as
+remarkable as any that ever led a small boy to dig behind the barn for
+buried treasure, or stalk Indians in the orchard. But entirely apart
+from his adventures he obtains our interest because in what he has
+attempted he has not failed, because he is one of our own people, one of
+the earliest and best types of American, and because, so far from being
+dead and buried, he is at this moment very much alive, and engaged in
+Mexico in searching for a buried city. For exercise, he is alternately
+chasing, or being chased by, Yaqui Indians.
+
+In his home in Pasadena, Cal., where sometimes he rests quietly for
+almost a week at a time, the neighbors know him as “Fred” Burnham. In
+England the newspapers crowned him “The King of Scouts.” Later, when he
+won an official title, they called him “Major Frederick Russell Burnham,
+D. S. O.”
+
+Some men are born scouts, others by training become scouts. From his
+father Burnham inherited his instinct for wood-craft, and to this
+instinct, which in him is as keen as in a wild deer or a mountain lion,
+he has added, in the jungle and on the prairie and mountain ranges,
+years of the hardest, most relentless schooling. In those years he has
+trained himself to endure the most appalling fatigues, hunger, thirst,
+and wounds; has subdued the brain to infinite patience, has learned to
+force every nerve in his body to absolute obedience, to still even the
+beating of his heart. Indeed, than Burnham no man of my acquaintance to
+my knowledge has devoted himself to his life’s work more earnestly, more
+honestly, and with such single-mindedness of purpose. To him scouting
+is as exact a study as is the piano to Paderewski, with the result that
+to-day what the Pole is to other pianists, the American is to all other
+“trackers,” woodmen, and scouts. He reads “the face of Nature” as you
+read your morning paper. To him a movement of his horse’s ears is as
+plain a warning as the “Go SLOW” of an automobile sign; and he so saves
+from ambush an entire troop. In the glitter of a piece of quartz in the
+firelight he discovers King Solomon’s mines. Like the horned cattle, he
+can tell by the smell of it in the air the near presence of water,
+and where, glaring in the sun, you can see only a bare kopje, he
+distinguishes the muzzle of a pompom, the crown of a Boer sombrero,
+the levelled barrel of a Mauser. He is the Sherlock Holmes of all
+out-of-doors.
+
+Besides being a scout, he is soldier, hunter, mining expert, and
+explorer. Within the last ten years the educated instinct that as a
+younger man taught him to follow the trail of an Indian, or the “spoor”
+ of the Kaffir and the trek wagon, now leads him as a mining expert to
+the hiding-places of copper, silver, and gold, and, as he advises, great
+and wealthy syndicates buy or refuse tracts of land in Africa and Mexico
+as large as the State of New York. As an explorer in the last few years
+in the course of his expeditions into undiscovered lands, he has added
+to this little world many thousands of square miles.
+
+Personally, Burnham is as unlike the scout of fiction, and of the Wild
+West Show, as it is possible for a man to be. He possesses no flowing
+locks, his talk is not of “greasers,” “grizzly b’ars,” or “pesky
+redskins.” In fact, because he is more widely and more thoroughly
+informed, he is much better educated than many who have passed through
+one of the “Big Three” universities, and his English is as conventional
+as though he had been brought up on the borders of Boston Common, rather
+than on the borders of civilization.
+
+In appearance he is slight, muscular, bronzed; with a finely formed
+square jaw, and remarkable light blue eyes. These eyes apparently never
+leave yours, but in reality they see everything behind you and about
+you, above and below you. They tell of him that one day, while out with
+a patrol on the veldt, he said he had lost the trail and, dismounting,
+began moving about on his hands and knees, nosing the ground like a
+bloodhound, and pointing out a trail that led back over the way the
+force had just marched. When the commanding officer rode up, Burnham
+said:
+
+“Don’t raise your head, sit. On that kopje to the right there is a
+commando of Boers.”
+
+“When did you see them?” asked the officer.
+
+“I see them now,” Burnham answered.
+
+“But I thought you were looking for a lost trail?”
+
+“That’s what the Boers on the kopje think,” said Burnham.
+
+In his eyes, possibly, owing to the uses to which they have been
+trained, the pupils, as in the eyes of animals that see in the dark,
+are extremely small. Even in the photographs that accompany this article
+this feature of his eyes is obvious, and that he can see in the dark
+the Kaffirs of South Africa firmly believe. In manner he is quiet,
+courteous, talking slowly but well, and, while without any of that
+shyness that comes from self-consciousness, extremely modest. Indeed,
+there could be no better proof of his modesty than the difficulties I
+have encountered in gathering material for this article, which I have
+been five years in collecting. And even now, as he reads it by his
+camp-fire, I can see him squirm with embarrassment.
+
+Burnham’s father was a pioneer missionary in a frontier hamlet called
+Tivoli on the edge of the Indian reserve of Minnesota. He was a stern,
+severely religious man, born in Kentucky, but educated in New York,
+where he graduated from the Union Theological Seminary. He was
+wonderfully skilled in wood-craft. Burnham’s mother was a Miss Rebecca
+Russell of a well-known family in Iowa. She was a woman of great
+courage, which, in those days on that skirmish line of civilization,
+was a very necessary virtue; and she was possessed of a most gentle and
+sweet disposition. That was her gift to her son Fred, who was born on
+May 11, 1861.
+
+His education as a child consisted in memorizing many verses of the
+Bible, the “Three R’s,” and wood-craft. His childhood was strenuous. In
+his mother’s arms he saw the burning of the town of New Ulm, which was
+the funeral pyre for the women and children of that place when they were
+massacred by Red Cloud and his braves.
+
+On another occasion Fred’s mother fled for her life from the Indians,
+carrying the boy with her. He was a husky lad, and knowing that if she
+tried to carry him farther they both would be overtaken, she hid him
+under a shock of corn. There, the next morning, the Indians having been
+driven off, she found her son sleeping as soundly as a night watchman.
+In these Indian wars, and the Civil War which followed, of the families
+of Burnham and Russell, twenty-two of the men were killed. There is no
+question that Burnham comes of fighting stock.
+
+In 1870, when Fred was nine years old, his father moved to Los Angeles,
+Cal., where two years later he died; and for a time for both mother and
+boy there was poverty, hard and grinding. To relieve this young Burnham
+acted as a mounted messenger. Often he was in the saddle from twelve to
+fifteen hours, and even in a land where every one rode well, he gained
+local fame as a hard rider. In a few years a kind uncle offered to Mrs.
+Burnham and a younger brother a home in the East, but at the last moment
+Fred refused to go with them, and chose to make his own way. He was then
+thirteen years old, and he had determined to be a scout.
+
+At that particular age many boys have set forth determined to be scouts,
+and are generally brought home the next morning by a policeman. But
+Burnham, having turned his back on the cities, did not repent. He
+wandered over Mexico, Arizona, California. He met Indians, bandits,
+prospectors, hunters of all kinds of big game; and finally a scout who,
+under General Taylor, had served in the Mexican War. This man took a
+liking to the boy; and his influence upon him was marked and for his
+good. He was an educated man, and had carried into the wilderness a few
+books. In the cabin of this man Burnham read “The Conquest of Mexico
+and Peru” by Prescott, the lives of Hannibal and Cyrus the Great, of
+Livingstone the explorer, which first set his thoughts toward Africa,
+and many technical works on the strategy and tactics of war. He had no
+experience of military operations on a large scale, but, with the aid of
+the veteran of the Mexican War, with corn-cobs in the sand in front of
+the cabin door, he constructed forts and made trenches, redoubts,
+and traverses. In Burnham’s life this seems to have been a very happy
+period. The big game he hunted and killed he sold for a few dollars to
+the men of Nadean’s freight outfits, which in those days hauled bullion
+from Cerro Gordo for the man who is now Senator Jones of Nevada.
+
+At nineteen Burnham decided that there were things in this world he
+should know that could not be gleaned from the earth, trees, and sky;
+and with the few dollars he had saved he came East. The visit apparently
+was not a success. The atmosphere of the town in which he went to school
+was strictly Puritanical, and the townspeople much given to religious
+discussion. The son of the pioneer missionary found himself unable to
+subscribe to the formulas which to the others seemed so essential, and
+he returned to the West with the most bitter feelings, which lasted
+until he was twenty-one.
+
+“It seems strange now,” he once said to me, “but in those times
+religious questions were as much a part of our daily life as to-day are
+automobiles, the Standard Oil, and the insurance scandals, and when I
+went West I was in an unhappy, doubting frame of mind. The trouble was
+I had no moral anchors; the old ones father had given me were gone, and
+the time for acquiring new ones had not arrived.” This bitterness of
+heart, or this disappointment, or whatever the state of mind was that
+the dogmas of the New England town had inspired in the boy from the
+prairie, made him reckless. For the life he was to lead this was not a
+handicap. Even as a lad, in a land-grant war in California, he had been
+under gunfire, and for the next fifteen years he led a life of danger
+and of daring; and studied in a school of experience than which, for a
+scout, if his life be spared, there can be none better. Burnham came
+out of it a quiet, manly, gentleman. In those fifteen years he roved the
+West from the Great Divide to Mexico. He fought the Apache Indians for
+the possession of waterholes, he guarded bullion on stage-coaches, for
+days rode in pursuit of Mexican bandits and American horse thieves,
+took part in county-seat fights, in rustler wars, in cattle wars; he was
+cowboy, miner, deputy-sheriff, and in time throughout the the name of
+“Fred” Burnham became significant and familiar.
+
+During this period Burnham was true to his boyhood ideal of becoming a
+scout. It was not enough that by merely living the life around him he
+was being educated for it. He daily practised and rehearsed those things
+which some day might mean to himself and others the difference between
+life and death. To improve his sense of smell he gave up smoking, of
+which he was extremely fond, nor, for the same reason, does he to this
+day use tobacco. He accustomed himself also to go with little sleep, and
+to subsist on the least possible quantity of food. As a deputy-sheriff
+this educated faculty of not requiring sleep aided him in many important
+captures. Sometimes he would not strike the trail of the bandit or “bad
+man” until the other had several days the start of him. But the end
+was the same; for, while the murderer snatched a few hours’ rest by the
+trail, Burnham, awake and in the saddle, would be closing up the miles
+between them.
+
+That he is a good marksman goes without telling. At the age of eight his
+father gave him a rifle of his own, and at twelve, with either a “gun”
+ or a Winchester, he was an expert. He taught himself to use a weapon
+either in his left or right hand and to shoot, Indian fashion, hanging
+by one leg from his pony and using it as a cover, and to turn in the
+saddle and shoot behind him. I once asked him if he really could shoot
+to the rear with a galloping horse under him and hit a man.
+
+“Well,” he said, “maybe not to hit him, but I can come near enough to
+him to make him decide my pony’s so much faster than his that it really
+isn’t worth while to follow me.”
+
+Besides perfecting himself in what he tolerantly calls “tricks” of
+horsemanship and marksmanship, he studied the signs of the trail, forest
+and prairie, as a sailing-master studies the waves and clouds. The
+knowledge he gathers from inanimate objects and dumb animals seems
+little less than miraculous. And when you ask him how he knows these
+things he always gives you a reason founded on some fact or habit of
+nature that shows him to be a naturalist, mineralogist, geologist, and
+botanist, and not merely a seventh son of a seventh son.
+
+In South Africa he would say to the officers: “There are a dozen Boers
+five miles ahead of us riding Basuto ponies at a trot, and leading five
+others. If we hurry we should be able to sight them in an hour.” At
+first the officers would smile, but not after a half-hour’s gallop, when
+they would see ahead of them a dozen Boers leading five ponies. In the
+early days of Salem, Burnham would have been burned as a witch.
+
+When twenty-three years of age he married Miss Blanche Blick, of Iowa.
+They had known each other from childhood, and her brothers-in-law have
+been Burnham’s aids and companions in every part of Africa and the West.
+Neither at the time of their marriage nor since did Mrs. Burnham “lay
+a hand on the bridle rein,” as is witnessed by the fact that for nine
+years after his marriage Burnham continued his career as sheriff, scout,
+mining prospector. And in 1893, when Burnham and his brother-in-law,
+Ingram, started for South Africa, Mrs. Burnham went with them, and
+in every part of South Africa shared her husband’s life of travel and
+danger.
+
+In making this move across the sea, Burnham’s original idea was to look
+for gold in the territory owned by the German East African Company. But
+as in Rhodesia the first Matabele uprising had broken out, he continued
+on down the coast, and volunteered for that campaign. This was the real
+beginning of his fortunes. The “war” was not unlike the Indian fighting
+of his early days, and although the country was new to him, with
+the kind of warfare then being waged between the Kaffirs under King
+Lobengula and the white settlers of the British South Africa Company,
+the chartered company of Cecil Rhodes, he was intimately familiar.
+
+It does not take big men long to recognize other big men, and Burnham’s
+remarkable work as a scout at once brought him to the notice of Rhodes
+and Dr. Jameson, who was personally conducting the campaign. The war was
+their own private war, and to them, at such a crisis in the history of
+their settlement, a man like Burnham was invaluable.
+
+The chief incident of this campaign, the fame of which rang over all
+Great Britain and her colonies, was the gallant but hopeless stand made
+by Major Alan Wilson and his patrol of thirty-four men. It was Burnham’s
+attempt to save these men that made him known from Buluwayo to Cape
+Town.
+
+King Lobengula and his warriors were halted on one bank of the Shangani
+River, and on the other Major Forbes, with a picked force of three
+hundred men, was coming up in pursuit. Although at the moment he did
+not know it, he also was being pursued by a force of Matabeles, who were
+gradually surrounding him. At nightfall Major Wilson and a patrol of
+twelve men, with Burnham and his brother-in-law, Ingram, acting as
+scouts, were ordered to make a dash into the camp of Lobengula and, if
+possible, in the confusion of their sudden attack, and under cover of a
+terrific thunder-storm that was raging, bring him back a prisoner.
+
+With the king in their hands the white men believed the rebellion would
+collapse. To the number of three thousand the Matabeles were sleeping in
+a succession of camps, through which the fourteen men rode at a gallop.
+But in the darkness it was difficult to distinguish the trek wagon of
+the king, and by the time they found his laager the Matabeles from the
+other camps through which they had ridden had given the alarm. Through
+the underbrush from every side the enemy, armed with assegai and
+elephant guns, charged toward them and spread out to cut off their
+retreat.
+
+At a distance of about seven hundred yards from the camps there was
+a giant ant-hill, and the patrol rode toward it. By the aid of the
+lightning flashes they made their way through a dripping wood and over
+soil which the rain had turned into thick black mud. When the party
+drew rein at the ant-hill it was found that of the fourteen three were
+missing. As the official scout of the patrol and the only one who could
+see in the dark, Wilson ordered Burnham back to find them. Burnham said
+he could do so only by feeling the hoof-prints in the mud and that he
+would like some one with him to lead his pony. Wilson said he would lead
+it. With his fingers Burnham followed the trail of the eleven horses to
+where, at right angles, the hoof-prints of the three others separated
+from it, and so came upon the three men. Still, with nothing but the mud
+of the jungle to guide him, he brought them back to their comrades. It
+was this feat that established his reputation among British, Boers, and
+black men in South Africa.
+
+Throughout the night the men of the patrol lay in the mud holding the
+reins of their horses. In the jungle about them, they could hear the
+enemy splashing through the mud, and the swishing sound of the branches
+as they swept back into place. It was still raining. Just before
+the dawn there came the sounds of voices and the welcome clatter of
+accoutrements. The men of the patrol, believing the column had joined
+them, sprang up rejoicing, but it was only a second patrol, under
+Captain Borrow, who had been sent forward with twenty men as
+re-enforcements. They had come in time to share in a glorious
+immortality. No sooner had these men joined than the Kaffirs began the
+attack; and the white men at once learned that they were trapped in a
+complete circle of the enemy. Hidden by the trees, the Kaffirs fired
+point-blank, and in a very little time half of Wilson’s force was
+killed or wounded. As the horses were shot down the men used them for
+breastworks. There was no other shelter. Wilson called Burnham to him
+and told him he must try and get through the lines of the enemy to
+Forbes.
+
+“Tell him to come up at once,” he said; “we are nearly finished.” He
+detailed a trooper named Gooding and Ingram to accompany Burnham.
+“One of you may get through,” he said. Gooding was but lately out from
+London, and knew nothing of scouting, so Burnham and Ingram warned him,
+whether he saw the reason for it or not, to act exactly as they did.
+The three men had barely left the others before the enemy sprang at them
+with their spears. In five minutes they were being fired at from every
+bush. Then followed a remarkable ride, in which Burnham called to his
+aid all he had learned in thirty years of border warfare. As the enemy
+rushed after them, the three doubled on their tracks, rode in triple
+loops, hid in dongas to breathe their horses; and to scatter their
+pursuers, separated, joined again, and again separated. The enemy
+followed them to the very bank of the river, where, finding the “drift”
+ covered with the swollen waters, they were forced to swim. They reached
+the other bank only to find Forbes hotly engaged with another force of
+the Matabeles.
+
+“I have been sent for re-enforcements,” Burnham said to Forbes, “but I
+believe we are the only survivors of that party.” Forbes himself was too
+hard pressed to give help to Wilson, and Burnham, his errand over, took
+his place in the column, and began firing upon the new enemy.
+
+Six weeks later the bodies of Wilson’s patrol were found lying in a
+circle. Each of them had been shot many times. A son of Lobengula, who
+witnessed their extermination, and who in Buluwayo had often heard the
+Englishmen sing their national anthem, told how the five men who were
+the last to die stood up and, swinging their hats defiantly, sang “God
+Save the Queen.” The incident will long be recorded in song and story;
+and in London was reproduced in two theatres, in each of which the
+man who played “Burnham, the American Scout,” as he rode off for
+re-enforcements, was as loudly cheered by those in the audience as by
+those on the stage.
+
+Hensman, in his “History of Rhodesia,” says: “One hardly knows which to
+most admire, the men who went on this dangerous errand, through brush
+swarming with natives, or those who remained behind battling against
+overwhelming odds.”
+
+For his help in this war the Chartered Company presented Burnham with
+the campaign medal, a gold watch engraved with words of appreciation;
+and at the suggestion of Cecil Rhodes gave him, Ingram, and the Hon.
+Maurice Clifford, jointly, a tract of land of three hundred square
+acres.
+
+After this campaign Burnham led an expedition of ten white men and
+seventy Kaffirs north of the Zambesi River to explore Barotzeland
+and other regions to the north of Mashonaland, and to establish the
+boundaries of the concession given him, Ingram, and Clifford.
+
+In order to protect Burnham on the march the Chartered Company signed
+a treaty with the native king of the country through which he wished
+to travel, by which the king gave him permission to pass freely and
+guaranteed him against attack.
+
+But Latea, the son of the king, refused to recognize the treaty and sent
+his young men in great numbers to surround Burnham’s camp. Burnham had
+been instructed to avoid a fight, and was torn between his desire to
+obey the Chartered Company and to prevent a massacre. He decided to make
+it a sacrifice either of himself or of Latea. As soon as night fell,
+with only three companions and a missionary to act as a witness of what
+occurred, he slipped through the lines of Latea’s men, and, kicking
+down the fence around the prince’s hut, suddenly appeared before him and
+covered him with his rifle.
+
+“Is it peace or war?” Burnham asked. “I have the king your father’s
+guarantee of protection, but your men surround us. I have told my people
+if they hear shots to open fire. We may all be killed, but you will be
+the first to die.”
+
+The missionary also spoke urging Latea to abide by the treaty. Burnham
+says the prince seemed much more impressed by the arguments of the
+missionary than by the fact that he still was covered by Burnham’s
+rifle. Whichever argument moved him, he called off his warriors. On
+this expedition Burnham discovered the ruins of great granite structures
+fifteen feet wide, and made entirely without mortar. They were of a
+period dating before the Phoenicians. He also sought out the ruins
+described to him by F. C. Selous, the famous hunter, and by Rider
+Haggard as King Solomon’s Mines. Much to the delight of Mr. Haggard,
+he brought back for him from the mines of his imagination real gold
+ornaments and a real gold bar.
+
+On this same expedition, which lasted five months, Burnham endured one
+of the severest hardships of his life. Alone with ten Kaffir boys, he
+started on a week’s journey across the dried-up basin of what once had
+been a great lake. Water was carried in goat-skins on the heads of the
+bearers. The boys, finding the bags an unwieldy burden, and believing,
+with the happy optimism of their race, that Burnham’s warnings were
+needless, and that at a stream they soon could refill the bags, emptied
+the water on the ground.
+
+The tortures that followed this wanton waste were terrible. Five of
+the boys died, and after several days, when Burnham found water in
+abundance, the tongues of the others were so swollen that their jaws
+could not meet.
+
+On this trip Burnham passed through a region ravaged by the “sleeping
+sickness,” where his nostrils were never free from the stench of dead
+bodies, where in some of the villages, as he expressed it, “the hyenas
+were mangy with overeating, and the buzzards so gorged they could
+not move out of our way.” From this expedition he brought back many
+ornaments of gold manufactured before the Christian era, and made
+several valuable maps of hitherto uncharted regions. It was in
+recognition of the information gathered by him on this trip that he was
+elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
+
+He returned to Rhodesia in time to take part in the second Matabele
+rebellion. This was in 1896. By now Burnham was a very prominent
+member of the “vortrekers” and pioneers at Buluwayo, and Sir Frederick
+Carrington, who was in command of the forces, attached him to his staff.
+This second outbreak was a more serious uprising than the one of 1893,
+and as it was evident the forces of the Chartered Company could not
+handle it, imperial troops were sent to assist them. But with even their
+aid the war dragged on until it threatened to last to the rainy season,
+when the troops must have gone into winter quarters. Had they done so,
+the cost of keeping them would have fallen on the Chartered Company,
+already a sufferer in pocket from the ravages of the rinderpest and the
+expenses of the investigation which followed the Jameson raid.
+
+Accordingly, Carrington looked about for some measure by which he could
+bring the war to an immediate end.
+
+It was suggested to him by a young Colonial, named Armstrong, the
+Commissioner of the district, that this could be done by destroying
+the “god,” or high priest, Umlimo, who was the chief inspiration of the
+rebellion.
+
+This high priest had incited the rebels to a general massacre of women
+and children, and had given them confidence by promising to strike the
+white soldiers blind and to turn their bullets into water. Armstrong
+had discovered the secret hiding-place of Umlimo, and Carrington ordered
+Burnham to penetrate the enemy’s lines, find the god, capture him, and
+if that were not possible to destroy him.
+
+The adventure was a most desperate one. Umlimo was secreted in a cave
+on the top of a huge kopje. At the base of this was a village where were
+gathered two regiments, of a thousand men each, of his fighting men.
+
+For miles around this village the country was patrolled by roving bands
+of the enemy.
+
+Against a white man reaching the cave and returning, the chances were a
+hundred to one, and the difficulties of the journey are illustrated by
+the fact that Burnham and Armstrong were unable to move faster than at
+the rate of a mile an hour. In making the last mile they consumed three
+hours. When they reached the base of the kopje in which Umlimo was
+hiding, they concealed their ponies in a clump of bushes, and on hands
+and knees began the ascent.
+
+Directly below them lay the village, so close that they could smell the
+odors of cooking from the huts, and hear, rising drowsily on the hot,
+noonday air, voices of the warriors. For minutes at a time they lay as
+motionless as the granite bowlders around or squirmed and crawled over
+loose stones which a miss of hand or knee would have dislodged and sent
+clattering into the village. After an hour of this tortuous climbing
+the cave suddenly opened before them, and they beheld Umlimo.
+Burnham recognized that to take him alive from his stronghold was an
+impossibility, and that even they themselves would leave the place was
+equally doubtful. So, obeying orders, he fired, killing the man who had
+boasted he would turn the bullets of his enemies into water. The echo of
+the shot aroused the village as would a stone hurled into an ant-heap.
+In an instant the veldt below was black with running men, and as,
+concealment being no longer possible, the white men rose to fly a great
+shout of anger told them they were discovered. At the same moment two
+women, returning from a stream where they had gone for water, saw the
+ponies, and ran screaming to give the alarm. The race that followed
+lasted two hours, for so quickly did the Kaffirs spread out on every
+side that it was impossible for Burnham to gain ground in any one
+direction, and he was forced to dodge, turn, and double. At one time
+the white men were driven back to the very kopje from which the race had
+started.
+
+But in the end they evaded assegai and gunfire, and in safety reached
+Buluwayo. This exploit was one of the chief factors in bringing the war
+to a close. The Matabeles, finding their leader was only a mortal like
+themselves, and so could not, as he had promised, bring miracles to
+their aid, lost heart, and when Cecil Rhodes in person made overtures of
+peace, his terms were accepted. During the hard days of the siege, when
+rations were few and bad, Burnham’s little girl, who had been the first
+white child born in Buluwayo, died of fever and lack of proper
+food. This with other causes led him to leave Rhodesia and return to
+California. It is possible he then thought he had forever turned
+his back on South Africa, but, though he himself had departed, the
+impression he had made there remained behind him.
+
+Burnham did not rest long in California. In Alaska the hunt for gold had
+just begun, and, the old restlessness seizing him, he left Pasadena and
+her blue skies, tropical plants, and trolley-car strikes for the new raw
+land of the Klondike. With Burnham it has always been the place that is
+being made, not the place in being, that attracts. He has helped to make
+straight the ways of several great communities--Arizona, California,
+Rhodesia, Alaska, and Uganda. As he once said: “It is the constructive
+side of frontier life that most appeals to me, the building up of a
+country, where you see the persistent drive and force of the white man;
+when the place is finally settled I don’t seem to enjoy it very long.”
+
+In Alaska he did much prospecting, and, with a sled and only two dogs,
+for twenty-four days made one long fight against snow and ice, covering
+six hundred miles. In mining in Alaska he succeeded well, but against
+the country he holds a constant grudge, because it kept him out of the
+fight with Spain. When war was declared he was in the wilds and knew
+nothing of it, and though on his return to civilization he telegraphed
+Colonel Roosevelt volunteering for the Rough Riders, and at once started
+south, by the time he had reached Seattle the war was over.
+
+Several times has he spoken to me of how bitterly he regretted missing
+this chance to officially fight for his country. That he had twice
+served with English forces made him the more keen to show his loyalty to
+his own people.
+
+That he would have been given a commission in the Rough Riders seems
+evident from the opinion President Roosevelt has publicly expressed of
+him.
+
+“I know Burnham,” the President wrote in 1901. “He is a scout and a
+hunter of courage and ability, a man totally without fear, a sure shot,
+and a fighter. He is the ideal scout, and when enlisted in the military
+service of any country he is bound to be of the greatest benefit.”
+
+The truth of this Burnham was soon to prove.
+
+In 1899 he had returned to the Klondike, and in January of 1900 had been
+six months in Skagway. In that same month Lord Roberts sailed for
+Cape Town to take command of the army, and with him on his staff was
+Burnham’s former commander, Sir Frederick, now Lord, Carrington. One
+night as the ship was in the Bay of Biscay, Carrington was talking of
+Burnham and giving instances of his marvellous powers as a “tracker.”
+
+“He is the best scout we ever had in South Africa!” Carrington declared.
+
+“Then why don’t we get him back there?” said Roberts.
+
+What followed is well known.
+
+From Gibraltar a cable was sent to Skagway, offering Burnham the
+position, created especially for him, of chief of scouts of the British
+army in the field.
+
+Probably never before in the history of wars has one nation paid so
+pleasant a tribute to the abilities of a man of another nation.
+
+The sequel is interesting. The cablegram reached Skagway by the steamer
+_City of Seattle_. The purser left it at the post-office, and until two
+hours and a half before the steamer was listed to start on her return
+trip, there it lay. Then Burnham, in asking for his mail, received it.
+In two hours and a half he had his family, himself, and his belongings
+on board the steamer, and had started on his half-around-the-world
+journey from Alaska to Cape Town.
+
+A Skagway paper of January 5, 1900, published the day after Burnham
+sailed, throws a side light on his character. After telling of his hasty
+departure the day before, and of the high compliment that had been paid
+to “a prominent Skagwayan,” it adds: “Although Mr. Burnham has lived in
+Skagway since last August, and has been North for many months, he has
+said little of his past, and few have known that he is the man famous
+over the world as ‘the American scout’ of the Matabele wars.”
+
+Many a man who went to the Klondike did not, for reasons best known to
+himself, talk about his past. But it is characteristic of Burnham that,
+though he lived there two years, his associates did not know, until the
+British Government snatched him from among them, that he had not always
+been a prospector like themselves.
+
+I was on the same ship that carried Burnham the latter half of his
+journey, from Southampton to Cape Town, and every night for seventeen
+nights was one of a group of men who shot questions at him. And it was
+interesting to see a fellow-countryman one had heard praised so highly
+so completely make good. It was not as though he had a credulous
+audience of commercial tourists. Among the officers who each evening
+gathered around him were Colonel Gallilet of the Egyptian cavalry,
+Captain Frazer commanding the Scotch Gillies, Captain Mackie of Lord
+Roberts’s staff, each of whom was later killed in action; Colonel Sir
+Charles Hunter of the Royal Rifles, Major Bagot, Major Lord Dudley, and
+Captain Lord Valentia. Each of these had either held command in border
+fights in India or the Sudan or had hunted big game, and the questions
+each asked were the outcome of his own experience and observation.
+
+Not for a single evening could a faker have submitted to the midnight
+examination through which they put Burnham and not have exposed his
+ignorance. They wanted to know what difference there is in a column of
+dust raised by cavalry and by trek wagons, how to tell whether a horse
+that has passed was going at a trot or a gallop, the way to throw a
+diamond hitch, how to make a fire without at the same time making a
+target of yourself, how--why--what--and how?
+
+And what made us most admire Burnham was that when he did not know he at
+once said so.
+
+Within two nights he had us so absolutely at his mercy that we would
+have followed him anywhere; anything he chose to tell us, we would have
+accepted. We were ready to believe in flying foxes, flying squirrels,
+that wild turkeys dance quadrilles--even that you must never sleep in
+the moonlight. Had he demanded: “Do you believe in vampires?” we would
+have shouted “Yes.” To ask that a scout should on an ocean steamer prove
+his ability was certainly placing him under a severe handicap.
+
+As one of the British officers said: “It’s about as fair a game as
+though we planted the captain of this ship in the Sahara Desert, and
+told him to prove he could run a ten-thousand-ton liner.”
+
+Burnham continued with Lord Roberts to the fall of Pretoria, when he was
+invalided home.
+
+During the advance north he was a hundred times inside the Boer laagers,
+keeping Headquarters Staff daily informed of the enemy’s movements; was
+twice captured and twice escaped.
+
+He was first captured while trying to warn the British from the fatal
+drift at Thaba’nchu. When reconnoitring alone in the morning mist he
+came upon the Boers hiding on the banks of the river, toward which the
+English were even then advancing. The Boers were moving all about him,
+and cut him off from his own side. He had to choose between abandoning
+the English to the trap or signalling to them, and so exposing himself
+to capture. With the red kerchief the scouts carried for that purpose he
+wigwagged to the approaching soldiers to turn back, that the enemy were
+awaiting them. But the column, which was without an advance guard, paid
+no attention to his signals and plodded steadily on into the ambush,
+while Burnham was at once made prisoner. In the fight that followed he
+pretended to receive a wound in the knee and bound it so elaborately
+that not even a surgeon would have disturbed the carefully arranged
+bandages. Limping heavily and groaning with pain, he was placed in
+a trek wagon with the officers who really were wounded, and who, in
+consequence, were not closely guarded. Burnham told them who he was and,
+as he intended to escape, offered to take back to head-quarters their
+names or any messages they might wish to send to their people. As
+twenty yards behind the wagon in which they lay was a mounted guard, the
+officers told him escape was impossible. He proved otherwise. The trek
+wagon was drawn by sixteen oxen and driven by a Kaffir boy. Later in the
+evening, but while it still was moonlight, the boy descended from his
+seat and ran forward to belabor the first spans of oxen. This was the
+opportunity for which Burnham had been waiting.
+
+Slipping quickly over the driver’s seat, he dropped between the two
+“wheelers” to the disselboom, or tongue, of the trek wagon. From this he
+lowered himself and fell between the legs of the oxen on his back in the
+road. In an instant the body of the wagon had passed over him, and while
+the dust still hung above the trail he rolled rapidly over into the
+ditch at the side of the road and lay motionless.
+
+It was four days before he was able to re-enter the British lines,
+during which time he had been lying in the open veldt, and had subsisted
+on one biscuit and two handfuls of “mealies,” or what we call Indian
+corn.
+
+Another time when out scouting he and his Kaffir boy while on foot were
+“jumped” by a Boer commando and forced to hide in two great ant-hills.
+The Boers went into camp on every side of them, and for two days,
+unknown to themselves, held Burnham a prisoner. Only at night did he and
+the Cape boy dare to crawl out to breathe fresh air and to eat the food
+tablets they carried in their pockets. On five occasions was Burnham
+sent into the Boer lines with dynamite cartridges to blow up the
+railroad over which the enemy was receiving supplies and ammunition. One
+of these expeditions nearly ended his life.
+
+On June 2, 1901, while trying by night to blow up the line between
+Pretoria and Delagoa Bay, he was surrounded by a party of Boers and
+could save himself only by instant flight. He threw himself Indian
+fashion along the back of his pony, and had all but got away when a
+bullet caught the horse and, without even faltering in its stride, it
+crashed to the ground dead, crushing Burnham beneath it and knocking him
+senseless. He continued unconscious for twenty-four hours, and when he
+came to, both friends and foes had departed. Bent upon carrying out his
+orders, although suffering the most acute agony, he crept back to the
+railroad and destroyed it. Knowing the explosion would soon bring the
+Boers, on his hands and knees he crept to an empty kraal, where for
+two days and nights he lay insensible. At the end of that time he
+appreciated that he was sinking and that unless he found aid he would
+die.
+
+Accordingly, still on his hands and knees, he set forth toward the sound
+of distant firing. He was indifferent as to whether it came from the
+enemy or his own people, but, as it chanced, he was picked up by a
+patrol of General Dickson’s Brigade, who carried him to Pretoria. There
+the surgeons discovered that in his fall he had torn apart the muscles
+of the stomach and burst a blood-vessel. That his life was saved, so
+they informed him, was due only to the fact that for three days he had
+been without food. Had he attempted to digest the least particle of the
+“staff of life” he would have surely died. His injuries were so serious
+that he was ordered home.
+
+On leaving the army he was given such hearty thanks and generous rewards
+as no other American ever received from the British War Office. He was
+promoted to the rank of major, presented with a large sum of money, and
+from Lord Roberts received a personal letter of thanks and appreciation.
+
+In part the Field-Marshal wrote: “I doubt if any other man in the force
+could have successfully carried out the thrilling enterprises in which
+from time to time you have been engaged, demanding as they did the
+training of a lifetime, combined with exceptional courage, caution, and
+powers of endurance.” On his arrival in England he was commanded to dine
+with the Queen and spend the night at Osborne, and a few months later,
+after her death, King Edward created him a member of the Distinguished
+Service Order, and personally presented him with the South African
+medal with five bars, and the cross of the D. S. O. While recovering
+his health Burnham, with Mrs. Burnham, was “passed on” by friends he had
+made in the army from country house to country house; he was made the
+guest of honor at city banquets, with the Duke of Rutland rode after the
+Belvoir hounds, and in Scotland made mild excursions after grouse. But
+after six months of convalescence he was off again, this time to the
+hinterland of Ashanti, on the west coast of Africa, where he went in the
+interests of a syndicate to investigate a concession for working gold
+mines.
+
+With his brother-in-law, J. C. Blick, he marched and rowed twelve
+hundred miles, and explored the Volta River, at that date so little
+visited that in one day’s journey they counted eleven hippopotamuses. In
+July, 1901, he returned from Ashanti, and a few months later an unknown
+but enthusiastic admirer asked in the House of Commons if it were
+true Major Burnham had applied for the post of Instructor of Scouts at
+Aldershot. There is no such post, and Burnham had not applied for
+any other post. To the Timer he wrote: “I never have thought myself
+competent to teach Britons how to fight, or to act as an instructor
+with officers who have fought in every corner of the world. The question
+asked in Parliament was entirely without my knowledge, and I deeply
+regret that it was asked.” A few months later, with Mrs. Burnham and his
+younger son, Bruce, he journeyed to East Africa as director of the East
+African Syndicate.
+
+During his stay there the _African Review_ said of him: “Should East
+Africa ever become a possession for England to be proud of, she will owe
+much of her prosperity to the brave little band that has faced hardships
+and dangers in discovering her hidden resources. Major Burnham has
+chosen men from England, Ireland, the United States, and South Africa
+for sterling qualities, and they have justified his choice. Not the
+least like a hero is the retiring, diffident little major himself,
+though a finer man for a friend or a better man to serve under would not
+be found in the five continents.”
+
+Burnham explored a tract of land larger than Germany, penetrating a
+thousand miles through a country, never before visited by white men,
+to the borders of the Congo Basin. With him he had twenty white men and
+five hundred natives. The most interesting result of the expedition
+was the discovery of a lake forty-nine miles square, composed almost
+entirely of pure carbonate of soda, forming a snowlike crust so thick
+that on it the men could cross the lake.
+
+It is the largest, and when the railroad is built--the Uganda Railroad
+is now only eighty-eight miles distant--it will be the most valuable
+deposit of carbonate of soda ever found.
+
+A year ago, in the interests of John Hays Hammond, the distinguished
+mining engineer of South Africa and this country, Burnham went to
+Sonora, Mexico, to find a buried city and to open up mines of copper and
+silver.
+
+Besides seeking for mines, Hammond and Burnham, with Gardner Williams,
+another American who also made his fortune in South Africa, are working
+together on a scheme to import to this country at their own expense many
+species of South African deer.
+
+The South African deer is a hardy animal and can live where the American
+deer cannot, and the idea in importing him is to prevent big game in
+this country from passing away. They have asked Congress to set aside
+for these animals a portion of the forest reserve. Already Congress has
+voted toward the plan $15,000, and President Roosevelt is one of its
+most enthusiastic supporters.
+
+We cannot leave Burnham in better hands than those of Hammond and
+Gardner Williams. Than these three men the United States has not sent to
+British Africa any Americans of whom she has better reason to be proud.
+Such men abroad do for those at home untold good. They are the real
+ambassadors of their country.
+
+The last I learned of Burnham is told in the snapshot of him which
+accompanies this article, and which shows him, barefoot, in the Yaqui
+River, where he has gone, perhaps, to conceal his trail from the
+Indians. It came a month ago in a letter which said briefly that when
+the picture was snapped the expedition was “trying to cool off.” There
+his narrative ended. Promising as it does adventures still to come, it
+seems a good place in which to leave him.
+
+Meanwhile, you may think of Mrs. Burnham after a year in Mexico keeping
+the house open for her husband’s return to Pasadena, and of their first
+son, Roderick, studying woodcraft with his father, forestry with Gifford
+Pinchot, and playing right guard on the freshman team at the University
+of California.
+
+But Burnham himself we will leave “cooling off” in the Yaqui River,
+maybe, with Indians hunting for him along the banks. And we need not
+worry about him. We know they will not catch him.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg’s Real Soldiers of Fortune, by Richard Harding Davis
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