as the priest held the crucifix in front of him he spoke to his
executioners in Spanish, simply and gravely: "I die a Roman Catholic.
In making war upon you at the invitation of the people of Ruatan I
was wrong. Of your people I ask pardon. I accept my punishment with
resignation. I would like to think my death will be for the good of
society."

From a distance of twenty feet three soldiers fired at him, but,
although each shot took effect, Walker was not dead. So, a sergeant
stooped, and with a pistol killed the man who would have made him one of
an empire of slaves.

Had Walker lived four years longer to exhibit upon the great board of
the Civil War his ability as a general, he would, I believe, to-day be
ranked as one of America's greatest fighting men.

And because the people of his own day destroyed him is no reason that we
should withhold from this American, the greatest of all filibusters, the
recognition of his genius.

MAJOR BURNHAM, CHIEF OF SCOUTS

AMONG the Soldiers of Fortune whose stories have been told in this book
were men who are no longer living, men who, to the United States, are
strangers, and men who were of interest chiefly because in what they
attempted they failed.

The subject of this article is none of these. His adventures are as
remarkable as any that ever led a small boy to dig behind the barn for
buried treasure, or stalk Indians in the orchard. But entirely apart
from his adventures he obtains our interest because in what he has
attempted he has not failed, because he is one of our own people, one of
the earliest and best types of American, and because, so far from being
dead and buried, he is at this moment very much alive, and engaged in
Mexico in searching for a buried city. For exercise, he is alternately
chasing, or being chased by, Yaqui Indians.

In his home in Pasadena, Cal., where sometimes he rests quietly for
almost a week at a time, the neighbors know him as "Fred" Burnham. In
England the newspapers crowned him "The King of Scouts." Later, when he
won an official title, they called him "Major Frederick Russell Burnham,
D. S. O."

Some men are born scouts, others by training become scouts. From his
father Burnham inherited his instinct for wood-craft, and to this
instinct, which in him is as keen as in a wild deer or a mountain lion,
he has added, in the jungle and on the prairie and mountain ranges,
years of the hardest, most relentless schooling. In those year