They removed it, and opened the covering, to find inside a communication of the sort that scrapes the civilization from men as a coarse cloth scrapes the tender blush from a peach.
"This memento we return with compliments," ran the screed in neatly penned Spanish. "The rest will be dealt with as befits foes of the Republic. If you follow you will find at Santa Rosa another memento.
"Adios, con mucho felicidad, General José Rosario."
Major Falkins wheeled to Sergeant Newton Spooner. His face was very white and stony. "Have your company ready to hike—quick!" His words were snapped out like the cracks of a mule-whip; but Sergeant Newton Spooner had saluted and disappeared before the final syllable was uttered.
Within the hour, Mrs. Henry Falkins stood at the shell-paned window of the bungalow and saw the company swinging toward the edge of town with a step that argued coming events. At their head, guiding them into the blind trails of the bosque, went a native from the village, but he went with a rope around his shoulders, which was held by a sturdy private of the advance guard. There was no intention that he should abruptly disappear into the jungle and carry warning, instead of giving service as guide.
At noon the next day, the column had proof that thus far at least they were following the right trail. The overhead wheeling of buzzards would have guided them now, even had the native failed of loyalty.
In the gulch of a stream that ran between tall and tangled banks, the advance came upon the bodies of the two men who had comprised the "point," and who had first run into the ambuscade. What the other ten had done was plain enough. At that first outbreak, they had scattered into a second slough, running at right angles with the dipping trail. There they had lain down and taken cover among the scattered rocks, and there eight of them still lay. It was the only thing they could do, also it was what the enemy had planned they should do. Major, lieutenant, and sergeant went over the ground and read the signs. It was quite easy. They could tell the approximate order in which each had died, by counting the litter of empty cartridge-hulls about the bodies.
Then they found one pile of these spent souvenirs in a place where there was no corpse, and it was perhaps the largest pile of all. That should be the spot where Sergeant-Major Peter Spooner had come to bay for his last stand. Probably he had lost consciousness from blood-letting at the end. Otherwise, he would hardly have been taken alive.
The bodies were hurriedly buried, and the graves marked; then the column pushed on, a little grimmer and a little more silent and a little faster, toward Santa Rosa.
At dawn, the men of the 26th Volunteers filed into empty streets which echoed their marching tread. It was like a village of the dead, a place of empty houses and open doors. No one had waited to explain to the wrathful avengers. But they found, nailed conspicuously to the front of a nipa shack in the principal street, a large white sheet of paper, bearing another note of satiric directions.