Now, “embolador,” although it is a word familiarly used in Bogota to designate a bootblack, has for its first meaning “one who puts balls on the tips of a bull’s horns,” a thing not easy to accomplish, requiring, as it does, the conquest of a traditionally warlike animal. Applied to this Falstaffian army of bootblacks, the irony of the term was broad enough to delight the bystanders, at the same time that it flattered the vanity of those for whom it was intended.
Distances meant little to the emboladores. No matter how far they had to travel, they vowed they would keep going until they met “los Yankees.” And, when they did meet them, they had no doubt of what would happen. Confident in their own ability to put the “usurpers” to flight, they had the sympathy of the peons surrounding them.
At this period, immediately following the proclamation of Panama’s independence, there was widespread indignation throughout Colombia against the United States. Americans were accused of starting the “revolution” which robbed the mother country of her richest possession, and the Colombian government was accordingly expected to avenge the national honor. The native authorities, lacking money and troops, did not respond to the popular demand, and it was left to the “patriots” to denounce the invading Yankees, and to fit out such volunteer expeditions as the one planned by the emboladores of the Calle de Las Montanas. Bogota, the largest city of the republic, the center of its official life, became the rallying place for political malcontents. A “Sociedad del Integridad Nacional”—a body of agitators at odds with the native government and bitterly opposed to the United States—had been formed here. This Sociedad had already organized two expeditions against the Yankees and the Panamanians. Both expeditions, made up of the dregs of the city, poorly armed, scantily clad, relying for their food on such contributions as they might pick up along the way, had left for the coast where they planned a guerilla warfare that would bring them, they believed, in triumph to the Isthmus. The third expedition was being engineered by the emboladores, whose enthusiasm and love of adventure made them excellent starters of an uprising. Even the elder peons, skeptical at first of what was going on, soon threw aside their reserve and fell into line with the bootblacks. Cheers greeted each addition to the little army, and it was not long before Pedro Cavallo, “Rey de los Emboladores,” headed an eager throng of followers numbering well into the thousands.
What to do with so strange a mob of volunteers might have puzzled a more experienced leader than Pedro. But nothing daunted him. The bigger and the more unruly his army, the greater seemed to be his confidence in himself as its commander. And his royal swagger won unbounded admiration. Grimy children, too young to join the ranks of the emboladores, scurried hither and thither among the bystanders, shrieking with delight at this staging of their favorite “Pedro the King.” Women, setting down their bundles under the projecting latticed windows of the houses, talked wonderingly of this sudden glory that had come to a youth whom they had thought skilled in nothing mightier than the blacking of boots. Solemn greybeards, proprietors of dingy little tiendas, stood in the doorways of their shops, secretly amazed, but still holding themselves grimly aloof from the noisy demonstrations of their neighbors.
“Yankees are pigs,” said one of these sellers of sweets, native tobacco and white rum, quoting gloomily the popular estimate of Americans.
“Yes,” replied another; “and pigs are easily beaten.”
“Truly, that is so,” quoth the first philosopher, struck by the turn of a new idea. “Yes, that is so. Even a woman can beat a pig, if the pig has eaten too much.”
“Yes, yes, Compadre! And Panama is too much for the hungriest pig.”
Then, out of the surging crowd of volunteers, came a stentorian voice:
“Donde vamos, Pedro el Rey?” (“Where shall we go, King Pedro?”)