“To be sure, I had forgotten. I am to be given a memory. Well?”
“Your Excellency remembers, he remembers Zacatecas?”
“Last February? Certainly I do. Miramon came, but a warning from El Chaparrito, from you, came first, and a last time I escaped. As it was, I was reported captured, and I sometimes wonder what Maximilian would have done had that report been true.”
“If I should tell you, señor?”
“Ah, that is beyond even you, since Maximilian has never had the chance to decide my fate.”
“But he did decide, señor. He got word that you were taken at Zacatecas, and at once he sent orders to Miramon as 456to your treatment. But Miramon was already defeated, already fleeing to Querétaro.”
“And the orders, the orders from Maximilian?”
“They never arrived. They were intercepted. They–yes, here they are, but before reading them, will Your Excellency promise to imagine himself in Miramon’s power?”
“I would, naturally. Come, señor, hand them over.”
It made curious reading, that weather-blotched dispatch. For Don Benito Juarez it was reading as curious as a man may ever expect to come by. In the handwriting of his prisoner, he read his own death sentence.