However, we got through them all right and cantered up the road to San Sebastian, round which the little brown forest-men were camped.
My aunt! miserable as I was, it made my blood dance to hear their shouts and to know how keen they were on my brother.
As I entered the fort across the drawbridge, General Zorilla was waiting for me, clicked his heels and saluted gravely as I dismounted. Then he took me by the arm and led me away to an upper part of the wall, where it was just broad enough for two to walk abreast, and talked all the time—in Spanish, of course—and, though I could not understand a word, I guessed quickly that he'd taken me up there, where no one else could come and try to talk to me, and where all the people, both inside and outside the fort, could see me.
I thought that probably a rumour of Gerald's having been shot by an assassin had spread, and that old Zorilla feared what the forest-men would do if they believed it.
We walked solemnly up and down for, I should think, quite twenty minutes, and then the President drove up in a carriage, drawn by six white horses, and it was time for the procession to start.
General Zorilla gave some orders, and immediately there was a stir among the little brown chaps. A great column of them, quite two thousand I should imagine by the time they took to pass beneath us, wound round the fort and began marching down into the town.
They had cleaned themselves for the occasion, looking quite spruce as they surged along that road, their officers trying to make them keep some military formation—with very little success. A few were wearing those brown boots which they'd looted, but most of them were barefooted, so made very little noise on the hard ground, but, for all their lack of uniform and discipline, their eyes were flashing under their white hats and they bore themselves very bravely. After them came another mob—men only armed with machetes—the terrible little machetos, immediately in front of the six white horses and the President's carriage. Behind it was a space of about fifty yards, where I was to go, and then came more carriages with the Provisional Government, another mob of wild machetos, two companies of sailors from the ships, and those two hundred regulars who'd helped me bring little Navarro and those guns into San Fernando. I didn't know that they had come along, and was jolly glad to see them.
They had been given the honour of dragging the two pom-poms through the city—those two pom-poms we had landed at San Fernando with the rest of the 'hydraulic machinery'—and seemed very proud of the privilege.
To me, of course, they were the most interesting part of the procession, and I wondered what they would think if they knew that it was I who had untied their arms that morning and brought them along through the forest; but every one took it for granted that I was Gerald, so it was no use wondering or pretending to be myself.
Behind them another huge column of riflemen began to defile down into the road, but by this time we had climbed down from the top of the wall, Zorilla had mounted his black horse, I had got on to mine, and we waited in the shade of the weather-beaten walls of San Sebastian, with the muzzles of their saluting guns sticking out above our heads, till the last of Gerald's army had marched past, doing their best to look like real soldiers whether they had brown boots on or not, their eyes flashing fiercely, and their shoulders well thrown back.