And I had to write and tell her—I, who would cheerfully have laid down my life to save her a pang—to tell her of her dear father’s death.
This occurred just as poor Colonel Vereker had arranged for my returning with him to the capital of the State, where another revolution—the sixth, I believe, since I had been in the country—had broken out, with the object, as the object of all these explosions of the mob invariably was, to depose the reigning party in power, and put the leaders of “the popular movement” for the time being, in the power of the deposed authorities.
The colonel, who had a good deal staked on the issue of the struggle, took up arms on the side of the cause he esteemed just—that to which the most respectable of the inhabitants to a man adhered—as he had taken up arms before for the party of law and order, amongst whom he was looked up to, not only as a skilled soldier and tactician, but a stalwart partisan, his very name being a tower of strength.
Alas! though, no opportunity was afforded him now to display his valour on the battlefield and lead his hosts to victory; for while we were en route for Caracas, a dastardly hound of a creole, whose blood was a mixture of the beast elements—part Spaniard, part Portuguese, part negro—well, this treacherous brute assassinated Colonel Vereker in the most cowardly fashion.
I was by and saw it all.
The vile murderer came up to my poor friend as we were resting in a posada on the road from San Félipe; and, while engaging him in an apparently friendly conversation respecting the political points of the rising, he suddenly stabbed the dear old man in the back with a long stiletto which he had hidden up his wide shirt sleeves.
Fortunately, I was there, and I had time to send a bullet through his brain from my revolver before the wretch could stir a yard from the spot; but this could not save my noble-hearted, kind, generous protector, a man who had been more than a father to me, and for whom I had the utmost affection and respect. No; the death of the scoundrel could not save him, for the wound the cowardly scoundrel had inflicted was mortal.
My dear friend and companion only survived long enough to confide his daughter to my care and give me his blessing ere he died, drawing his last breath in my arms, a smile on his face and dauntless to the end, as he pressed my hand and uttered the usual parting phrase he had learnt from his Spanish associates—“Hasta la mañaña—Good-bye till to-morrow!”
It was a long to-morrow, indeed!
After seeing the last tribute of respect paid to the colonel’s remains, the gallant fellow being buried close to the posada where he had met with his untimely end, and a cross which I carved myself placed above his lonely grave, sheltered by a noble palm that stood erect, as he had done when living, a monument of nature’s handiwork, I resumed my journey to Caracas, in order to carry out my lost friend’s last directions.