instance, when he tells how he wished to make one of them
a drummer boy and the Californian drawled: "No, thanks, colonel; I never
seen a picture of a battle yet that the first thing in it wasn't a dead
drummer boy with a busted drum."

In Walker the personal vanity which is so characteristic of the soldier
of fortune was utterly lacking. In a land where a captain bedecks
himself like a field-marshal, Walker wore his trousers stuffed in his
boots, a civilian's blue frock-coat, and the slouch hat of the period,
with, for his only ornament, the red ribbon of the Democrats. The
authority he wielded did not depend upon braid or buttons, and only when
going into battle did he wear his sword. In appearance he was slightly
built, rather below the medium height, smooth shaven, and with deep-set
gray eyes. These eyes apparently, as they gave him his nickname, were
his most marked feature.

His followers called him, and later, when he was thirty-two years
old, he was known all over the United States as the "Gray-Eyed Man of
Destiny."

From the first Walker recognized that in order to establish himself in
Nicaragua he must keep in touch with all possible recruits arriving from
San Francisco and New York, and that to do this he must hold the line
of transit from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific. At this time the sea
routes to the gold-fields were three: by sailing vessel around the Cape,
one over the Isthmus of Panama, and one, which was the shortest, across
Nicaragua. By a charter from the Government of Nicaragua, the right to
transport passengers across this isthmus was controlled by the Accessory
Transit Company, of which the first Cornelius Vanderbilt was president.
His company owned a line of ocean steamers both on the Pacific side
and on the Atlantic side. Passengers _en route_ from New York to the
gold-fields were landed by these latter steamers at Greytown on the west
coast of Nicaragua, and sent by boats of light draught up the San Juan
River to Lake Nicaragua. There they were met by larger lake steamers and
conveyed across the lake to Virgin Bay. From that point, in carriages
and on mule back, they were carried twelve miles overland to the port of
San Juan del Sud on the Pacific Coast, where they boarded the company's
steamers to San Francisco.

During the year of Walker's occupation the number of passengers crossing
Nicaragua was an average of about two thousand a month.

It was to control this route that immediatel