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He had done much in gaining a good foothold; the rest must be left to time and chance. A few indecisive but sanguinary engagements were fought in the neighborhood of Pesqueira, a town in the hills about one hundred miles from the seaboard. These proved that General Russo was a valiant fighter but a poor tactician and that was all.
The silence of his niece on that same topic was alarming, but the position could not be so bad if she was willing to leave for the coast without seeing him again. No secret was made of Philip's errand into the interior. The homeward-bound cavalcade would be at Pesqueira ere he returned to the finca. Carmela, of course, did not believe in a woman's complacency in such a vital matter.
Before night closed the roads again, the Pesqueira genius wrote to Dom Corria under a flag of truce, and pointed out that he served the President, not any crank who said he was President, but the honored individual in whom the people of Brazil placed their trust. Dom Corria replied in felicitous terms, and, as the newspapers say, the incident ended.
He never asked his men to do anything that he did not do himself, and they were never dubious as to his tactics, since he invariably closed with any Nationalist detachment met during the day's operations. About mid-day, then, they came upon the advance guard of a column sent off a week earlier by the expert at Pesqueira with instructions to arrive at Las Flores before sunset that very day.
"Why," he said, "seems to me 'sif we should ha' come that way. I's shorrer road to Pesqueira than by the river." "As the bird fly," said Souza. "But the roads be bad just mule tracks, while by the river the road is tolerable good." "Yet," said the lieutenant, "I think I shall go back tha' way." The fumes of the wine were mounting steadily to addle his indifferent brains.
Lieutenant Butler set out on a blustering day of March at the head of his troopers, accompanied by Cornet O.'Rourke and two sergeants, and at Pesqueira he was further reinforced by a Portuguese guide.
A shower of stones followed them as they thundered out of Tavora, and the sergeant himself had a lump as large as a duck-egg on the middle of his head when next day he reported himself at Pesqueira to Cornet O'Rourke, whom he overtook there. When eventually Sir Robert Craufurd heard the story of the affair, he was as angry as only Sir Robert could be.
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.
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