uch of blood was not balanced by the saner knowledge
that a ruptured vein was nature's own remedy for a man jarred into
insensibility. Long before Carmela reached the _finca_, San Benavides
stirred, groaned, squirmed convulsively, and raised himself on hands and
knees. He turned, and sat down, feeling his head.

"The spit-fire!" he muttered. "The she-devil! And that other! Would
that I could wring _her_ neck!"

A sputtering of rifles crackled in the valley. There was a blurred
clamor of voices. He looked at the sky, at the black summits of the
hills. He stood up, and his inseparable sword clanked on the stony
ground.

"Ah, well," he growled, "I have done with women. They have had the best
of my life. What is left I give to Brazil."

So he, too, made for Las Flores, but slowly, for he was quite exhausted,
and his limbs were stiff with the rigors of a wild day in the saddle.

Carmela went back to a household that paid scant heed to her screaming.
Dom Corria was there, bare-headed, his gorgeous uniform sword-slashed and
blood-bespattered. General Russo, too, was beating his capacious chest
and shouting:

"God's bones, let us make a fight of it!"

A sprinkling of soldiers, all dismounted cavalry or gunners, a few
disheveled officers, had accompanied De Sylva in his flight. With
reckless bravery, he and Russo had tried to rally the troops camped at
headquarters. It was a hopeless effort. Half-breeds can never produce a
military caste. They may fight valiantly in the line of battle--they
will not face the unknown, the terrible, the harpies that come at night,
borne on the hurricane wings of panic. Unhappily, De Sylva and his
bodyguard were the messengers of their own disaster. The cowardly genius
at Pesqueira had planned a surprise. He would not lead it, of course,
but in Dom Miguel Barraca he found an eager substitute. It was a coup of
the Napoleonic order; an infantry attack along the entire front of the
Liberationist position cloaked the launching against the center of a
formidable body of cavalry. The project was to thrust this lance into
the rebel position, probe it thoroughly, as a surgeon explores a gunshot
wound, and extract the offender in the guise of Dom Corria.

The scheme had proved eminently successful. The Liberationists were
crumpled up, and here was Dom Corria making his last stand.

He deserved better luck, for he was magnificent in failure. Calm as
ever, he tried to be shot o