The lanceros placed the body upon their crossed guns, and returned to the camp at quick march.
The general followed at a short distance from them, observing and watching every bush and thicket.
But nothing stirred; the greatest tranquillity prevailed everywhere; the pirates had disappeared, without leaving any other traces but their dead, whom they appeared to have abandoned.
The general began to hope that his enemies were really gone, and he breathed a sigh, as if relieved from an oppression of the heart.
Night came on with its habitual rapidity; all eyes were fixed upon the lanceros, who bore back their dead officer, but no one remarked a score of phantoms who glided silently over the rocks, drawing, by degrees, nearer to the camp, close to which they concealed themselves, keeping their ferocious looks fixed upon its defenders.
The general caused the body to be placed upon a bed prepared in haste, and taking a spade, he insisted upon himself digging the grave in which the young man was to be deposited. All the lanceros ranged themselves around him, leaning on their arms. The general took off his hat, and from a prayer book read with a loud voice the Service of the Dead, to which his niece and all present responded.
There was something grand and impressive in this simple ceremony, in the midst of the desert, whose thousand mysterious voices appeared likewise to modulate a prayer, in face of that sublime nature upon which the finger of God is traced in so visible a manner.
This white-headed old man, piously reading the office of the dead over the body of a young man, little more than a boy, full of life but a few hours before, having around him that young girl, and these sad, pensive soldiers, whom the same fate, perhaps, threatened soon to overtake, but who, calm and resigned, prayed with fervour for him who was no more; this noble prayer, rising in the night, accompanied by the moanings and the breezes of evening, which passed quivering through the branches of the trees, recalled the early times of Christianity, when, persecuted and forced to hide itself, it took refuge in the desert, to be nearer to God.
Nothing occurred to disturb the accomplishment of this last duty.
After every person present had once again taken a melancholy farewell of the dead, he was lowered into the grave, enveloped in his cloak; his arms were placed by his side, and the grave was filled up.