English Samaritan murdered.

The commandante could not continue.  He made a gesture indicating that I was to step into the house.

In his room he opened a huge wardrobe and took out a jacket, a tiny coat, such as might be worn by a soldier boy.  The sleeves were loaded with the gold lace and golden stars of a colonel in the Spanish army.  On the left side of this jacket or coat was a ragged hole.

“The bullet entered here,” the commandante said, sorrowfully.  “It pierced her heart.  The poor mother carried her dead back to Havana.  That is all.”

I understood.  A fatal volley had been poured into that dinner party by insurgents on the hilltops.  The house was in the center of the town, and the lamps illuminating the Spanish colors had rendered the balcony the best of targets.  These Spanish officers and an innocent young English girl, a Samaritan, were murdered.

And by whom?  By the insurgents, who were guided to the hilltops by two of the very reconcentrados whom the victims had saved that day from starvation.  One had written a note informing the insurgents of the circumstance, time, and place of the banquet.  The other had delivered the note to one of the murderers.  Father and son were equally guilty of ingratitude and treachery.  The incriminating note had been found on the dead body of the insurgent captain, carried into town by the soldier of Spain.

The sad final scene.

At sunset a squad of twenty men, armed and in charge of a first lieutenant, filed out of the barracks.  In front of the squad marched the two prisoners, their arms tied together above the elbows, behind their backs.  Behind the soldiers came perhaps a thousand of the wretched and starving.

No murmuring, no uplifting of arms, nothing but solemn silence.  In front of a wall, lining one of the blackened fields, the prisoners were made to kneel down.  A priest stood over them speaking the last consoling words.

Out of the squad of twenty soldiers, eight stepped forth and leveled their rifles at the kneeling father and son.

The eight shots sounded as one, and one of the blackest crimes of this atrocious war was expiated.

CHAPTER XXIX.

American indignation growing.

The American People Favor Cuba—­Influence of the Press—­Hatred of Weyler—­General Lee’s Reports of the Horrors of the War—­The Question of Annexation—­Spanish Soldiers Oppose American Aid for the Suffering—­Consular Reports From the Island.

The people of the United States, from the commencement of the war, have been deeply interested in the success of the Cuban cause.  The leading journals, with hardly an exception, have upheld the revolutionists, and have been largely instrumental in arousing our government to action.  The following editorial is one of many on the subject which voiced the popular feeling, and gave hope to the struggling band of patriots, both in the United States and Cuba: