“Well, that kind of talk kind of shook my disbelief in the infallibility of the serious Irish gentleman soldier of fortune. It certainly seemed that the patriotic grafters had gone about the thing in a business way. I looked upon O’Connor with more respect, and began to figure on what kind of uniform I might wear as Secretary of War.

“Tuesday, the day set for the revolution, came around according to schedule. O’Connor said that a signal had been agreed upon for the uprising. There was an old cannon on the beach near the national warehouse. That had been secretly loaded, and promptly at twelve o’clock was to be fired off. Immediately the revolutionists would seize their concealed arms, attack the comandante’s troops in the cuartel, and capture the custom- house and all government property and supplies.

“I was nervous all the morning. And about eleven o’clock O’Connor became infused with the excitement and martial spirit of murder. He geared his father’s sword around him, and walked up and down in the back room like a lion in the Zoo suffering from corns. I smoked a couple of dozen cigars, and decided on yellow stripes down the trouser legs of my uniform.

“At half-past eleven O’Connor asks me to take a short stroll through the streets to see if I could notice any signs of the uprising. I was back in fifteen minutes.

“ ‘Did you hear anything?’ he asks.

“ ‘I did,’ says I. ‘At first I thought it was drums. But it wasn’t; it was snoring. Everybody in town’s asleep.’

“O’Connor tears out his watch.

“ ‘Fools?’ says he. ‘They’ve set the time right at the siesta hour when everybody takes a nap. But the cannon will wake ’em up. Everything will be all right, depend upon it.’

“Just at twelve o’clock we heard the sound of a cannon—Boom!—shaking the whole town.

“O’Connor loosens his sword in its scabbard and jumps for the door. I went as far as the door and stood in it.

“People were sticking their heads out of doors and windows. But there was one grand sight that made the landscape look tame.

“General Tumbalo, the comandante, was rolling down the steps of his residential dug-out, waving a five- foot sabre in his hand. He wore his cocked and plumed hat and his dress-parade coat covered with gold braid and buttons. Sky-blue pyjamas, one rubber boot, and one red-plush slipper completed his make-up.

“The general had heard the cannon, and he puffed down the sidewalk towards the soldiers’ barracks as fast as his rudely awakened two hundred pounds could travel.

“O’Connor sees him and lets out a battle-cry and draws his father’s sword and rushes across the street and tackles the enemy.

“Right there in the street he and the general gave an exhibition of blacksmithing and butchery. Sparks flew from their blades, the general roared, and O’Connor gave the slogan of his race and proclivities.

“Then the general’s sabre broke in two; and he took to his ginger-coloured heels crying out, ‘Policios,’ at every jump. O’Connor chased him a block, imbued with the sentiment of manslaughter, and slicing buttons off the general’s coat-tails with the paternal weapon. At the corner five bare-footed policemen in cotton undershirts and straw hats climbed over O’Connor and subjugated him according to the municipal statutes.