Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/372

 marines clustered about one of the Princeton's machine guns. He could make out a scattered group of Ulloa's mounted Irregulars crawling in toward Guariqui, across the undulating, flat-shadowed plain of burnt grass. He could see rows of flat houses and red-tiled roofs, and tame buzzards perched on ridge-poles, and a lonely and high-standing royal palm or two. And beyond the sun-bathed town and the burnt plain lay the gray-green hills and the lonely blue peaks of the Cordilleras.

Then the sound of cheering floated up to him, and to the east, advancing along Calle Nacional toward the Plaza, was a long line of infantry headed by a mounted band that broke into shrill and stirring music as they détoured in past the turreted barracks. He could see the gathering street crowds, the men in linen and duck, the bareheaded women in mantillas, the Princeton's midshipmen in tight-fitting tunics, pretending to ignore the heat, the marching lines of barefooted men in grotesquely soiled and ragged uniforms.

He knew that De Brigard's movement had been crushed, that the revolution was already a thing of the past. There was a smouldering province or two on the lower Pacific slope, but a week or two of gun-seizing by Arturo Boynton's mounted police would stifle all that was