As, for instance,
when he tells how he wished to make one of them a drummer boy
and the Californian drawled: "No, thanks, colonel; I never seen a
picture of a battle yet that the first thing in it wasn't a dead
drummer boy with a busted drum."
In Walker the personal vanity which is so characteristic of the
soldier of fortune was utterly lacking. In a land where a captain
bedecks himself like a field-marshal, Walker wore his trousers
stuffed in his boots, a civilian's blue frock-coat, and the slouch hat
of the period, with, for his only ornament, the red ribbon of the
Democrats. The authority he wielded did not depend upon braid or
buttons, and only when going into battle did he wear his sword. In
appearance he was slightly built, rather below the medium height,
smooth shaven, and with deep-set gray eyes. These eyes
apparently, as they gave him his nickname, were his most marked
feature.
His followers called him, and later, when he was thirty-two years
old, he was known all over the United States as the "Gray-Eyed
Man of Destiny."
From the first Walker recognized that in order to establish himself
in Nicaragua he must keep in touch with all possible recruits
arriving from San Francisco and New York, and that to do this he
must hold the line of transit from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific.
At this time the sea routes to the gold-fields were three: by sailing
vessel around the Cape, one over the Isthmus of Panama, and one,
which was the shortest, across Nicaragua.
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