"Not yet, sir. They were seized, and are in our dépôt."
"Come," said Sam to Cleary, "let's go over there and look at it. It's a half-mile walk and it will do me good."
"How are things at San Diego?" asked Sam, as they walked along together. "You've been out there, haven't you?"
"Yes. We'll have to come in. The Cubapinos have got a force together at a town farther down the river and are threatening us there. We got pretty near them and mined under a convent they were in, and blew up a lot of them, but it didn't do them much harm, for a lot of recruits came in just afterward from the mountains. That convent was born to be blown up, it seems, for some Castalian anarchists had a plot to blow it up some years ago, and came near doing it, too. We made use of their tunnels, which the monks were too lazy to have filled up. The anarchist plot was found out, and they garroted a dozen of them."
"What inhuman brutes those anarchists are!" cried Sam. "Think of their trying to blow up a whole houseful of people! I wish we could take some one of the smaller islands and put all the anarchists of the world there and let them live out their precious theories. Just think what a hell it would be! What infernal engines of hatred and destruction they would construct, if they were left to themselves—machines charged with dynamite and bristling with all sorts of explosive contrivances!"
"Something like a battle-ship," suggested Cleary.
"Don't talk nonsense!" exclaimed Sam. "Only Castalian fiends would try to destroy law and order and upset the peaceable course of society in such a way. Do you suppose that any of our people at home would do such a thing?"
"None, outside of the artillery," answered Cleary. "Well, at any rate, our blowing up of the convent didn't do much good. There was some talk of putting poison in the river to dispose of them, but of course we couldn't do that."
"Of course not," said Sam. "That would be barbarous and against all military precedents. The rules of war don't allow it."
"They're rather queer, those rules," answered his friend. "I should like my enemies to take notice that I prefer being poisoned to being blown up with bombshells. In some respects they don't pay much attention to the rules, either. They don't take prisoners much nowadays. Most of my despatches now read, 'fifty natives killed,' but they say nothing of wounded or prisoners."