"On the trail which leads from this street, the bosque will, at the distance of one league, contain one more memento.
"Adios, con mucho felicidad, General José Rosario."
There was no spoken word, as Falkins, turning from the message, nodded to the company commander, and the column swung forward. There was no sound as they marched through the deserted street, except the rattle of cup and canteen on haversack and the purposeful thud of their own feet on the hard-beaten earth.
And beyond the edge of the town, where a sullen-looking carabao bull, sole occupant, gazed after them, there was still grim silence as they plunged into the thick growth of the bosque and bored their way into the country, which at every mile was growing wilder and more impassable. The eight bodies they had buried, and the one which had doubtless been, by this time, buried back at the garrison, accounted for seventy-five per cent. of the detachment which had gone ahead. The three others included Lieutenant Sperry, of Jackson, and Sergeant-Major Peter Spooner, and those two had been taken alive. The column was so grim in its purpose now that it needed no more orders than blood-hounds would have required.
CHAPTER XXII
At a place where they came upon the ashes of a dead fire, Henry Falkins halted the command, and, accompanied by a lieutenant and Sergeant Newton Spooner, undertook some investigations of his own. It was Sergeant Spooner, led by an inborn instinct which became a compass in the woods, who discovered the thing they sought. He returned in grim silence to the officers, and led them to a small clearing in the bijuca tangle. There, roped upright to a tree, was a body wearing the uniform of a first lieutenant of United States Infantry. Newt Spooner had found the "memento." The dead man bore no bolo gashes, and the wound which had disabled him had been only a bullet through one shoulder. Yet, as the officers came near, they realized that he had not been dead when he was placed here. He had stood up, lashed against a slender palm bole, and died on his feet. Yet even that failed to account for the hideous twist of acute agony frozen on the dead features. No ordinary torture would have so stamped the dying visage of such a stoic. The large brown ants were crawling everywhere, but the full meaning of their presence was to pass unrealized until Newton Spooner attracted attention. He silently led them closer and pointed to an amber smear about the lips and nostrils of the dead man.
"Honey, sir," he said briefly, in a voice that rasped like a file; "wild honey. They put that stuff in his nose and mouth, sir. The ants did the rest."
The officers turned away, sickened, and after a moment Falkins ordered briefly.
"Bring a burial detail, sergeant—and, sergeant," he added, as a vicious note crept into the timbre of his utterance, "when we come up with these fellows, we take no prisoners. You understand, no prisoners!"