In taking that heap of blackened ruins four thousand out of six thousand of the allies had perished; but even they were more fortunate than a Costa Rican army of invasion, which killed fifty of the filibusters, at a cost of ten thousand men slain by war and pestilence. It always worked out that the killing of one filibuster cost on the average eight of his adversaries.
Four months followed of confused fighting, in which the Americans slowly lost ground, until at last they were besieged in the town of Rivas, melting the church bells for cannon-balls, dying at their posts of starvation. The neighboring town of San Jorge was held by two thousand Costa Ricans, and these Walker attempted to dislodge. His final charge was made with fifteen men into the heart of the town. No valor could win against such odds, and the orderly retreat began on Rivas. Two hundred men lay in ambush to take Walker at a planter’s house by the wayside, and as he rode wearily at the head of his men they opened fire from cover at a range of fifteen yards. Walker reined in his horse, fired six revolver-shots into the windows, then rode on quietly erect while the storm of lead raged about him, and saddle after saddle was emptied. A week afterward the allies assaulted Rivas, but left six hundred men dead in the field, so terrific was the fire from the ramparts.
It was in these days that a British naval officer came under flag of truce from the coast to treat for Walker’s surrender.
“I presume, sir,” was the filibuster’s greeting, “that you have come to apologize for the outrage offered to my flag, and to the commander of the Nicaraguan schooner-of-war Granada.”
“If they had another schooner,” said the Englishman afterward, “I believe they would have declared war on Great Britain.”
Then the United States navy treated with this peppery little lawyer, and on the first of May, 1857, he grudgingly consented to being rescued.
During his four years’ fight for empire, Walker had enlisted three thousand five hundred Americans—and the proportion of wounds was one hundred and thirty-seven for every hundred men. A thousand fell. The allied republics had twenty-one thousand soldiers and ten thousand Indians—and lost fifteen thousand killed.
Two years later, Walker set out again with a hundred men to conquer Central America, in defiance of the British and United States squadrons, sent to catch him, and in the teeth of five armed republics. He was captured by the British, shot by Spanish Americans upon a sea beach in Honduras, and so perished, fearless to the end.
XVI
A. D. 1857 BUFFALO BILL
The Mormons are a sect of Christians with some queer ideas, for they drink no liquor, hold all their property in common, stamp out any member who dares to think or work for himself, and believe that the more wives a man has the merrier he will be. The women, so far as I met them are like fat cows, the men a slovenly lot, and not too honest, but they are hard workers and first-rate pioneers.