of men, and neither
smoked nor drank wine. His fame went on increasing, as did the number of
his followers. He effected prodigies with the means at his command. His
friends in France supplied him with two cannon, which were smuggled
across the border. He turned the foundry at Vera into a munition
factory; employed women to make uniforms for his men; and insisted that
the intervals between his expeditions should be given up to drill. He
was dreaded, respected, admired by his band; he was strong and hardy;
faced perils and privations in common with the lowest, but used no
weapon but his walking-stick The priest, the anointed of God, may not
shed blood. The affair of Endarlasa was the coping-stone of his career.
Various accounts were related of that event; it is only fair to let
Santa Cruz himself speak. This is what he told me:

At three one morning he opened fire on the guard-house occupied by the
Carabineros, at the bridge over the Bidassoa, between Vera and Irun. A
white flag was hoisted on the guard-house. He ordered the fire to cease,
and advanced to negotiate the conditions of surrender. The enemy, who
had invited him to approach, by the white flag, fired and wounded one of
his men. He issued directions to take the place, and spare nobody. The
place was taken, and nobody was spared. Twenty-seven dead bodies
littered the Vera road that morning.

"Is it true that you pardoned two?" I asked the priest.

"No, ninguno! Porque?" he answered with astonishment. "Not one. Why
should I?"

The reason I had asked was that I had been told that a couple of the
Carabineros had plunged into the Bidassoa and tried to swim to the other
side; but the Cura, on his own avowal, with Rhadamanthine justice had
commanded them to be shot as they breasted the current, and they were
shot. He was no believer in half-measures.

A lady partisan of his, who had dined with him the day before, told me
he never breathed a syllable of the attack he meditated, to her or any
of his band. An English gentleman, who visited the ground while the
corpses were still upon it, assured me that the sight was horrifying,
and, such was the panic in Irun, that he verily believed Santa Cruz
might have taken the town the same afternoon, had he appeared before it
with four men.

To pursue the story of the redoubtable Cura. The bruit of his exploits
had gone abroad, and among certain Carlists it seemed to be the opinion,
as one of them remarked to me, that "_Il