“They have not yet taken out the prisoners,” I said to my companions; “we will wait here until we see some movement showing that they are about to remove them.”
Among our arms was a single gun; the rest were machetes, darts, or knives tied to the end of staves. I nevertheless believed myself invincible.
The distant noise of musketry, which, to tell the truth, was not great or terrible, consequent on the small number of the combatants and the still smaller number of the firearms, became less at the end of a few minutes, and the few shots heard seemed to me to be already discharged within San Martin. I ordered my party to approach the foot of the slope, I myself remaining where I was so as not to lose sight of the jail; and I ran to join them, when the discharges from the entrenchments showed me that Soria had entered the Plaza and that Don Mateo was in front of it.
We mounted to the jail, before the sentinel could give the alarm and at the moment when Coderas and Soria repulsed Don Mateo in his first assault. Taken by surprise, the sentinel fled to the Plaza, and we, without thought of the imprudence of our hasty action, hurled ourselves against the prison door, and, after a few efforts, burst it in, broken into fragments.
LA BOLA.
How many then, as I, wept orphaned and cursed the bola! In that miserable village, which scarcely had enough men to till its soil, and in which the loftiness of citizenship was unknown, its victims had floods of tears and despair, instead of laurels, the reward of right. Here the father, love and support of the family, was mourned; there, a son, hope and stay of aged parents; there, again, a husband, torn from the fireside to be borne to a field of battle, which had not even tragic grandeur, but only the caricaturing ridiculousness of a low comedy.