Chapter 4: - Page 4 of 5

One day it happened that he was in a shop turning a document over and over in the effort to get it straight when a schoolboy began to make signs to his companions and to point laughingly at the collector with his finger.  The fellow heard the laughter and saw the joke reflected in the solemn faces of the bystanders.  He lost his patience and, turning quickly, started to chase the boys, who ran away shouting ba, be, bi, bo, bu.^[1]  Blind with rage and unable to catch them, he threw his cane and struck one of the boys on the head, knocking him down.  He ran up and began to kick the fallen boy, and none of those who had been laughing had the courage to interfere.  Unfortunately, your father happened to come along just at that time.  He ran forward indignantly, caught the collector by the arm, and reprimanded him severely.  The artilleryman, who was no doubt beside himself with rage, raised his hand, but your father was too quick for him, and with the strength of a descendant of the Basques—some say that he struck him, others that he merely pushed him, but at any rate the man staggered and fell a little way off, striking his head against a stone.  Don Rafael quietly picked the wounded boy up and carried him to the town hall.  The artilleryman bled freely from the mouth and died a few moments later without recovering consciousness.

As was to be expected, the authorities intervened and arrested your father.  All his hidden enemies at once rose up and false accusations came from all sides.  He was accused of being a heretic and a filibuster.  To be a heretic is a great danger anywhere, but especially so at that time when the province was governed by an alcalde who made a great show of his piety, who with his servants used to recite his rosary in the church in a loud voice, perhaps that all might hear and pray with him.  But to be a filibuster is worse than to be a heretic and to kill three or four tax-collectors who know how to read, write, and attend to business.  Every one abandoned him, and his books and papers were seized.  He was accused of subscribing to El Correo de Ultramar, and to newspapers from Madrid, of having sent you to Germany, of having in his possession letters and a photograph of a priest who had been legally executed, and I don’t know what not.  Everything served as an accusation, even the fact that he, a descendant of Peninsulars, wore a camisa.  Had it been any one but your father, it is likely that he would soon have been set free, as there was a physician who ascribed the death of the unfortunate collector to a hemorrhage.  But his wealth, his confidence in the law, and his hatred of everything that was not legal and just, wrought his undoing.  In spite of my repugnance to asking for mercy from any one, I applied personally to the Captain-General—the predecessor of our present one—and urged upon him that there could not be anything of the filibuster about a man who took up with all the Spaniards, even the poor emigrants, and gave them food and shelter, and in whose veins yet flowed the generous blood of Spain.  It was in vain that I pledged my life and swore by my poverty and my military honor.  I succeeded only in being coldly listened to and roughly sent away with the epithet of chiflado.^[2]