“Claro! For he who changes his face so soon can as well change his clothing. In his shoes, then.”
There was a renewed scuffle; but in a moment a cry of exultation—and the sergeant dragged a thin, soiled paper from Baca’s stocking.
“Still given to jests, capitan mio—that you walk on the mines which are to blow the rebels up at the next assault. It is a clever diagram, and Salom would have paid thee well for it, I warrant. Hola!”
For the door let in four soldiers and their petty officer; and over the arm of the latter hung the long gray-brown habit of a Franciscan friar.
“It was between the mattresses of the señor capitan Baca,” announced the sergeant. “And as for these little ones, I am their witness—for to my patrol passed first a tall fraile, and soon came running this womanling after him for her brother, who was very sick.”
“And the boy is he to whom I carried a cup of broth—and I found him well fevered,” spoke up one of the soldiers, scared at his own thick voice before the grim general.
“It is enough,” interrupted Rodil. “I give thanks to God that there are patriots yet—and eyes in them, too. These children stay with me. For the Señor Captain Baca, and for these gentlemen who ‘were with him all the time,’” he continued with grim terseness, “sunrise against the wall of San Felipe. Until then, your heads answer for theirs!”
That is all there is to tell of the habit of the fraile—except that it served for a shroud to the traitor who had masqueraded in it.
But already was the beginning of the end. The desertion of the Comandante Ponce de Leon, who had dropped over the wall and fled to the enemy, gave to the insurgents plans and information of fatal importance. Then Riera, the other comandante, turned traitor too, and delivered to the foe the castle of San Rafael.
Resistance was no longer possible, even to “the Spartan of Peru.” On the 11th of January he entered into correspondence which ended with the honorable and advantageous capitulation of Callao, January 23, 1826. Of the original 2,800 soldiers only three hundred and seventy-six remained, and a scant seven hundred citizens of all the former thousands. There was little left save glory—but of that so proud a share as was earned by no other man of either side in the war of the colonial rebellion. For that matter, history has few pages like the resistance of Spain’s last fort in America.