sandy, pale-eyed but well-built young officer
whom he introduced as Alferez Don Juan Pedro Walker. The newcomer
hastened to explain, in English, that he was the same John Peter Walker
of New Orleans who in 1798 aided Mr. Ellicott in surveying the Florida
line.

At this moment Malgares appeared in the doorway of the audience chamber,
and requested Pike to enter. I started to follow, but he waved me back,
with an anxious frown. This boded ill for us. To conceal my concern, I
expressed to Walker my surprise that an American should have entered the
service of Spain. He answered quickly that he was not my countryman,
since his father was English and his mother French, and he had been born
and reared in New Orleans under Spanish rule.

While he was explaining this, in rather an apologetic tone, Medina was
called away. There followed a summons to Walker to attend upon the
Governor-General, and I found myself left quite alone in the midst of
the gaping, muttering rabble. This was no throng of simple, hospitable
rustics such as I had met and liked in the North Province; but a stable
and kitchen mob, the low scullions and hostlers and lackeys of a great
man, puffed with reflected pride and saucy with second-hand arrogance.

Soon I began to overhear jeers and scurrilous flings, of which the word
"spy" was the least galling. Before long all my apprehensions as to the
Governor-General were drowned in the swelling tide of my indignation and
anger. It was unendurable to sit for what seemed an endless time before
the insolent leers and coarse raillery of this scum. The soldiers looked
on, without attempting either to join in their scoffs or to silence
them.

At last, when I was about to seize the foremost two of the rascals by
the scruff of the neck and crack their heads together, the aide-de-camp
Medina sauntered back from out in the court. I cried to him sharply in
Spanish: "Senor lieutenant! do you not know whether it is time to take
me in?"

Such at least was what I intended to say. But, in my heat, I must have
slipped on my Spanish verb. The aide, mistaking me to mean that I had
been summoned before the Governor-General, immediately ushered me into
the audience chamber.

My first glance gave me a general impression of a large apartment,
severe in its furnishings; the second took in a table at which sat Pike
and Walker and two or three others, all engaged in sorting books and
papers which I ruefully recognized as the charts