Impetuous, drunk with youth,
and keeping no company with care, they form the very aristocracy
of fighting forces. They gaily undertake the maddest of
adventures; and by their examples they fire the courage of their
maturer comrades. All history is spiced with their exploits.
Jacket was one of these, and he was perhaps the truest patriot of
any soldier in Miguel Lopez's band; for liberty, to him, was not a
mere abstraction or a principle, but something real, tangible,
alive--something worthy of the highest sacrifice. In his person
all the wrongs of Cuba burned perpetually. It mattered not that he
himself had never suffered--his spirit was the spirit of his
country, pure, exalted, undefiled. He stood for what the others
fought for.
In order to expand his knowledge of English--of which, by the way,
he was inordinately proud--Jacket had volunteered to serve as
O'Reilly's striker, and the result had been a fast friendship. It
was O'Reilly who had given the boy his nickname--a name prompted
by a marked eccentricity, for although Jacket possessed the two
garments which constituted the ordinary Insurrecto uniform, he
made a practice of wearing only one. On chilly nights, or on
formal occasions, he wore both waistcoat and trousers, but at
other times he dispensed entirely with the latter, and his legs
went naked.
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