its top, we found the government troops sleeping sweetly. Before their
only sentry had discovered that someone was kneeling on his chest, our
men were in possession of their batteries.

That morning when the sun rose gloriously, as from a bath, all pink
and shining and dripping with radiance, and the church bells began to
clang for early mass, and the bugles at the barracks sounded the
jaunty call of the reveille, two puffs of white smoke rose from
thecrest of El Pecachua and drifted lazily away. At the same instant a
shell sang over the roofs of Tegucigalpa, howling jeeringly, and
smashed into the pots and pans of the President's kitchen; another,
falling two miles farther to the right, burst through the white tent
of General Garcia, and the people in the streets, as they crossed
themselves in fear, knew that El Pecachua had again been taken, and
that that night a new President would sleep in the Palace.

All through the hot hours of the morning the captured guns roared and
echoed, until at last we saw Garcia's force crawling away in a crowd
of dust toward the hills, and an hour later Alvarez, with the
household troops, abandoning the Capital and hastening after him.

We were too few to follow, but we whipped them forward with our
shells.

A half-hour later a timid group of merchants and foreign consuls, led
by the Bishop and bearing a great white flag, rode out to the foot of
the rock and surrendered the city.

I am sure no government was ever established more quickly than ours.
We held our first cabinet meeting twenty minutes after we entered the