I must confess that the proceedings astonished me. Animus there certainly was; the guerillas as a whole were disposed to give us short shrift; but their chief insisted on at least some parade of justice. The indictment was set forward against us: We had shot, hanged, and harried, and in fact used all the harshness of war. Had we been Chilians in the Chilian Service, this might have been pardonable; but we were aliens from across the sea; mere freebooters, fighting, not for a country, but each for his own hand; and as such we were beyond the pale of military courtesy. We had earned a punishment. Had we any word to speak why this should not be given?
Garcia looked towards us expectantly, and then set himself to roll a fresh cigarette.
I shrugged my shoulders. It seemed useless to say anything.
Methuen said: “Look here, sir! You’ve got us, there is no mistake about that. It seems to me you’ve two courses before you, and they are these: Either, you can kill us, more or less barbarously, in which case you will raise a most pestilential hunt at your heels; or, you can put us up to ransom. Now neither Calvert here, nor myself, are rich men; but if you choose to let us go with sound skins, we’re prepared to pay ten thousand Chilian dollars apiece for our passports. Now, does that strike you?”
Garcia finished rolling his cigarette, and lit it with care. He inhaled a deep breath of smoke.
“Señor,” he said (the words coming out from between his white teeth with little puffs of vapour), “you do not appear to understand. You fight as a soldier of fortune, and I am merely in arms as a patriot. I am no huckster to traffic men’s lives for money, nor am I a timorous fool to be scared into robbing a culprit of his just dues.”
“Very well, then,” said Methuen, “murder the pair of us.”
Garcia smiled unpleasantly. “You may be a very brave man,” said he, “but you are not a judicious one. To a judge less just than myself this insolence might have added something to your punishment; but as it is I shall overlook what you have said, and only impose the penalty I had determined upon before you spoke.”
He lifted his thin yellow fingers, and drew a fresh breath of smoke. Then he waved the cigarette towards the magnolia tree in the centre of the plaza. “You see that bough which juts out towards the chapel?”
“It’s made for a gallows,” said Methuen.