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For some time I could hear Aiken and the others conversing together and caught the names of Laguerre and Garcia, but I was too sleepy to try to listen, and, as I said, Sagua did not seem to me to be the place for conspiracies and revolutions. I left it with real regret, and as though I were parting with friends of long acquaintanceship.
He tells me Graham offered Heinze twenty thousand dollars to buy off himself and the other officers and the men. But Heinze was afraid of the others, and so he planned to ask Laguerre for a native regiment, to pretend that he wanted them to work on the trenches.
Laguerre tossed back his head, like a horse that has been too tightly curbed. "They are leaving the barracks," he said. He pulled out his watch and stood looking down at it in his hand. "I will give them three minutes to get under way," he said. "Then we will start for the warehouse. When they come back again, they will find us waiting for them."
We found that the first huts were not a hundred yards distant. Laguerre accordingly ordered the men to conceal themselves and sent Miller, one of Garcia's officers, and myself to reconnoitre. The moonlight had given way to the faint gray light which comes just before dawn, and by it we could distinguish lumps of blackness which as we approached turned into the thatched huts of the villagers.
"By whose authority?" he asked. We, who knew every tone of his voice, almost felt sorry for Aiken. "By whose authority," Laguerre repeated, "did you communicate with the enemy?" "It was an idea of my own," Aiken answered simply. "I was afraid if I told you you would interfere. Oh! I'm no soldier," he said. He was replying to the look in Laguerre's face.
I used to say to myself that so long as I had the approval of Laguerre and of my own men and of my conscience I could afford not to mind what the little souls said; but as a matter of fact I did mind it, and it angered me exceedingly. Just as it hurt me at the Point to see that I was not popular, it distressed me to find that the same unpopularity had followed me into the Legion.
Before mid-day Aiken sent a list, which his spies had compiled, of sympathizers with Alvarez. He guaranteed to have them all in jail before night. But Laguerre sent for them and promised them, if they remained neutral, they should not be molested. Personally, I have always been of the opinion that most of the persons on Aiken's list of suspects were most worthy merchants, to whom he owed money.
It never seemed strange to him that great rulers should have made a friend of a stray soldier of fortune, an Irish adventurer for Laguerre's mother was Irish; his father had been Colonel Laguerre, and once Military Governor of Algiers and given him their confidence.
"This was the only place where there was any fighting, so I came here. I read that you had formed a Foreign Legion, and thought that maybe you would let me join it." General Laguerre now stared at me in genuine amazement. In his interest in the supposed spy, he had forgotten the loss of his guns. "You came from West Point," he repeated, incredulously, "all the way to Honduras to join me!"
My friend's grandfather wasted all that was left to the once brilliant house with Mlle. Laguerre, whom he first discovered, and brought into fashion before Bouret's time. Charles Edward's own father was an officer without any fortune in 1789. The Revolution came to his assistance; he had the sense to drop his title, and became plain Rusticoli. Rusticoli was one of the best colonels in the army.
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