er," ordered the landlord.
"You and Pedro will shoot him from the shadow. He is our country's
enemy, and it will be in a good cause. And he may carry despatches. If
we take them the commandante at Mayaguez he will reward us."

"And the gold pieces?" demanded the one called Paul.

"We will divide them in three parts," said the landlord.

In the front of the inn, surrounded by a ghost-like group that spoke its
suspicions, Chesterton was lifting his saddle from El Capitan and
rubbing the lame foreleg. It was not a serious sprain. A week would set
it right, but for that night the pony was useless. Impatiently,
Chesterton called across the plaza, begging the landlord to make haste.
He was eager to be gone, alarmed and fearful lest even this slight delay
should cause him to miss the transport. The thought was intolerable. But
he was also acutely conscious that he was very hungry, and he was too
old a campaigner to scoff at hunger. With the hope that he could find
something to carry with him and eat as he rode forward, he entered the
inn.

The main room of the house was now in darkness, but a smaller room
adjoining it was lit by candles, and by a tiny taper floating before a
crucifix. In the light of the candles Chesterton made out a bed, a
priest bending over it, a woman kneeling beside it, and upon the bed the
little figure of a boy who tossed and moaned. As Chesterton halted and
waited hesitating, the priest strode past him, and in a voice dull and
flat with grief and weariness, ordered those at the door to bring the
landlord quickly. As one of the group leaped toward the corral, the
priest said to the others: "There is another attack. I have lost hope."

Chesterton advanced and asked if he could be of service. The priest
shook his head. The child, he said, was the only son of the landlord,
and much beloved by him, and by all the village. He was now in the third
week of typhoid fever and the period of hemorrhages. Unless they could
be checked, the boy would die, and the priest, who for many miles of
mountain and forest was also the only doctor, had exhausted his store of
simple medicines.

"Nothing can stop the hemorrhage," he protested wearily, "but the
strongest of drugs. And I have nothing!"

Chesterton bethought him of the medicine case Miss Armitage had forced
upon him. "I have given opium to the men for dysentery," he said. "Would
opium help you?"

The priest sprang at him and pushed him out of the door and t