ar at North Beach fish fries.
For mine, I played the straw-hat crowd to win; and they gave me a
colonel's commission over a brigade of twenty-seven men in the left
wing and second joint of the insurgent army.

"The Colombian troops were awfully rude to us. One day when I had my
brigade in a sandy spot, with its shoes off doing a battalion drill
by squads, the Government army rushed from behind a bush at us,
acting as noisy and disagreeable as they could.

"My troops enfiladed, left-faced, and left the spot. After enticing
the enemy for three miles or so we struck a brier-patch and had to
sit down. When we were ordered to throw up our toes and surrender
we obeyed. Five of my best staff-officers fell, suffering extremely
with stone-bruised heels.

"Then and there those Colombians took your friend Barney, sir,
stripped him of the insignia of his rank, consisting of a pair
of brass knuckles and a canteen of rum, and dragged him before a
military court. The presiding general went through the usual legal
formalities that sometimes cause a case to hang on the calendar of a
South American military court as long as ten minutes. He asked me my
age, and then sentenced me to be shot.

"They woke up the court interpreter, an American named Jenks, who
was in the rum business and vice versa, and told him to translate
the verdict.

"Jenks stretched himself and took a morphine tablet.

"'You've got to back up against th' 'dobe, old man,' says he to me.
'Three weeks, I believe, you get. Haven't got a chew of fine-cut on
you, have you?'

"'Translate that again, with foot-notes and a glossary,' says I. 'I
don't know whether I'm discharged, condemned, or handed over to the
Gerry Society.'

"'Oh,' says Jenks, 'don't you understand? You're to be stood up
against a 'dobe wall and shot in two or three weeks--three, I think,
they said.'

"'Would you mind asking 'em which?' says I. 'A week don't amount to
much after you're dead, but it seems a real nice long spell while
you are alive.'

"'It's two weeks,' says the interpreter, after inquiring in Spanish
of the court. 'Shall I ask 'em again?'

"'Let be,' says I. 'Let's have a stationary verdict. If I keep on
appealing this way they'll have me shot about ten days before I was
captured. No, I haven't got any fine-cut.'

"They sends me over to the _calaboza_ with a detachment of coloured
postal-telegraph boys carrying Enfield rifles, and I am locked up in
a kind of brick bakery. The