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Nor were conditions different tonight. Billy came within a hundred yards of the

guardhouse before he discovered a sentinel. The fellow lolled upon his gun in

front of the building--an adobe structure in the rear of the barracks. The other

three sides of the guardhouse appeared to be unwatched.

Billy threw himself upon his stomach and crawled slowly forward stopping often.

The sentry seemed asleep. He did not move. Billy reached the shadow at the side

of the structure and some fifty feet from the soldier without detection. Then he

rose to his feet directly beneath a barred window.

Within Bridge paced back and forth the length of the little building. He could not

sleep. Tomorrow he was to be shot! Bridge did not wish to die. That very morning

General Villa in person had examined him. The general had been exceedingly

wroth--the sting of the theft of his funds still irritated him; but he had given

Bridge no inkling as to his fate. It had remained for a fellow-prisoner to do that.

This man, a deserter, was to be shot, so he said, with Bridge, a fact which gave

him an additional twenty-four hours of life, since, he asserted, General Villa

wished to be elsewhere than in Cuivaca when an American was executed. Thus

he could disclaim responsibility for the act.

The general was to depart in the morning. Shortly after, Bridge and the deserter

would be led out and blindfolded before a stone wall--if there was such a thing, or

a brick wall, or an adobe wall. It made little difference to the deserter, or to Bridge

either. The wall was but a trivial factor. It might go far to add romance to

whomever should read of the affair later; but in so far as Bridge and the deserter

were concerned it meant nothing. A billboard, thought Bridge, bearing the slogan:

Eventually! Why not now?" would have been equally as efficacious and far more

appropriate.

The room in which he was confined was stuffy with the odor of accumulated filth.

Two small barred windows alone gave means of ventilation. He and the deserter

were the only prisoners. The latter slept as soundly as though the morrow held

nothing more momentous in his destiny than any of the days that had preceded

it. Bridge was moved to kick the fellow into consciousness of his impending fate.

Instead he walked to the south window to fill his lungs with the free air beyond

his prison pen, and gaze sorrowfully at the star-lit sky which he should never

again behold.

In a low tone Bridge crooned a snatch of the poem that he and Billy liked best:

And you, my sweet Penelope, out there somewhere you wait for me, With buds

of roses in your hair and kisses on your mouth.

249

The Mucker