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720 political exiles and fugitive peons, including unavoidably many miscreants, who have, in the course of years, rather modified the trusting disposition, though not the charity, of the mountain chief. He has never ceased to protest that his quarrel with society is not of his own seeking, and his captives have often acknowledged the forbearance and even courtesy of their host; but at election-meetings, which he now and then visits in spite of all risks, he assumes a different tone, and the impassioned emphasis of his invectives has often inspired his hearers with a frenzy of aggressive enthusiasm. It is said that more than one of his opponents has abruptly left such meetings for fear of being torn into pieces by an assembly of unarmed country-folks. "I am glad that the commissioners have failed in their mission," said a correspondent of the Diario, when the government had attempted to negotiate the surrender of the bandit chief: "if that man should ever be pardoned he would promptly go into politics, and an agrarian revolt would be the immediate consequence. In an open debate no secular or spiritual agencies could for a moment hope to resist the effects of his diatribes."

Since 1884, when his strategy baffled the manœuvres of the best government troops, hundreds of sight-seers have risked the perils of the lion's den to get a glimpse at the invincible outlaw; but Bernal loathes that sort of notoriety, and in the hour of victory, while his followers flushed the intoxication of triumph with other stimulants, he has often retired to his tent and with uplifted hands prayed for deliverance from the misery of his existence. With all his reckless personal courage and Robin Hood popularity, he is, indeed, anything but atypical bandit chief, fond of midnight raids and greenwood revels. His Spanish lineage has tinged him with that national gloom which Frederic Schiller traced to the smoke-clouds of the Santo Oficio, and the dynamics of his oratorical explosions have been gathered in solitary meditations rather than in the noise of camp-fire controversies. Like the Russian exile Bestujeff, he has a poetical vein, and a printer of Mazatlan has published a collection of decimas ascribed to the Brigand of Sinaloa and eagerly circulated by his admirers, though the quasi-religious jeremiades of his lyrics are rather depressing and the classical allusions somewhat off color, as where he compares his fate to that of the "vulture chained to Caucasus."

A few years ago he disposed of all his personal property to furnish the travelling expenses of a younger brother, whom he had resolved to send abroad to save him from sharing his fate in the event of a possible disaster, and during the parting scene in the presence of his swashbucklers managed to maintain his stoicism, but passed all the next night in an agony of prayer. On the following morning he refused to leave his tent till his attendants almost forced him to break his fast; and it has been predicted that the hero of thirty campaigns will ultimately surrender to a priest. But his personal friends are confident that he is resolved to conquer an acceptable peace or to die in his boots. There has been no lack of overtures on the part of his opponents, but the trouble is that he cannot risk to trust the security of their safe-conducts for a single day. In 1885 the government dispatched a special