"Sin ceremonia," said the Cura, "will you condescend to share my meal?"
"Thanks, very much."
The priest entered the house; the soldiers waited outside, and argued that it was an infernal shame and a piece of tyranny on the part of Prim and the rest to have ordered such a harmless, nice man to be clapped into gaol. Presently a peasant with a basket of fruit on his head came out of the house. The soldiers waited long. They waited in vain. The peasant and the priest were one and the same.
For two years Santa Cruz wandered in the mountains and in France, was "on his keeping," as they say in Munster, but was finally arrested and interned at Nantes, by the French authorities. A characteristic story was related of his arrest. He was stopped on the bridge between St. Jean de Luz and Cibour by two gendarmes.
"Your papers?" demanded one.
"My papers! Wait till I look for them," answered Santa Cruz, not in the least disconcerted.
He fumbled in his pockets, turned them inside out, tapped the lining of his clothes, searched high and low, pretending to be very much astonished that he could not discover the document; and, suddenly, while the gendarmes, thrown off their guard, were speaking to one another, made a spring sideways, and was off like a bolt from a bow, the agents of authority pounding after him in their clumsy jack-boots. The chase lasted an hour, to the intense amusement of all the idlers of the town; but a peasant, not grasping the true state of affairs, clutched the panting Santa Cruz and held him until the arrival of the gendarmes.
In 1872, when Don Carlos again made appeal to arms, Santa Cruz succeeded in evading notice, and crossing the frontier, attached himself as chaplain to the band of Recondo. The Pretendiente himself entered by the pass of Vera, but was surprised at Oroquieta, in Navarre, by General Moriones, who defeated him on the 4th of May, and withered his hopes for that time. The convention of Amorovieta followed, arms were given up by thousands, and the factions, or partidas, dispersed to their homes. Santa Cruz returned to France. After a week's interval he re-entered Spain, and joined a body of the insurgents who still ranged the hills in Guipúzcoa. One day he missed his companions in a forced march, and fell into an ambuscade.
"I am Santa Cruz," he said to the soldiers, unquailingly, "do what you will with me."
He was pinioned and led to the nearest village.