"Did Isabella say that?"
"Yes."
"Well, tell me of your father and sister, Ruez. You know I am a hermit here."
Lorenzo Bezan had already been in prison for more than ten days, when Ruez thus visited him, and the boy had much to tell him: how General Harero had called repeatedly at the house, and Isabella had totally refused to see him; and how his father had tried to reason with General Harero about Captain Bezan, and how the general had declared that nothing but blood could wash out the stain of insubordination.
With the pass that the governor-general had given him, Ruez Gonzales came often to visit the imprisoned soldier, but as the day appointed for the trial drew near, Ruez grew more and more sad and thoughtful at each visit, for, boy though he was, he felt certain of Lorenzo Bezan's fate. He was not himself unfamiliar with military examinations, for he was born and brought up within earshot of the spot where these scenes were so often enacted by order of the military commission, and he trembled for his dearly loved friend.
At length the trial came; trial! we might with more propriety call it a farce, such being the actual character of an examination before the military commission of Havana, where but one side is heard, and condemnation is sure to follow, as was the case so lately with one of our own countrymen (Mr. Thrasher), and before him the murder by this same tribunal of fifty Americans in cold blood! Trial, indeed! Spanish courts do not try people; they condemn them to suffer—that is their business.
But let us confine ourselves to our own case; and suffice it to say, that Captain Bezan was found guilty, and at once condemned to die. His offence was rank insubordination, or mutiny, as it was designated in the charge; but in consideration of former services, and his undoubted gallantry and bravery, the sentence read to the effect, as a matter of extraordinary leniency to him, that it should be permitted for him to choose the mode of his own death-that is, between the garote and being shot by his comrades.
"Let me die like a soldier," replied the young officer, as the question was thus put to him, before the open court, as to the mode of death which he chose.
"You are condemned, then, Lorenzo Bezan," said the advocate of the court, "to be shot by the first file of your own company, upon the execution field."
This sentence was received with a murmur of disapprobation from the few spectators in the court, for the condemned was one of the most beloved men in the service. But the young officer bowed his head calmly to the sentence, though at close observer might have seen a slight quiver of his handsome lips, as he struggled for an instant with a single inward thought. What that thought was, the reader can easily guess,—it was the last link that bound him to happiness.