Crittenden

"Take this road," he said. "I don't know where that one goes, but I know

this one. I went up this one, and brought back a souvenir," he added,

cheerily, shaking a bloody arm.

And everywhere men were cautioning him to beware of the guerillas, who

were in the trees, adding horror to the scene--shooting wounded men on

litters, hospital men, doctors. Once, there was almost the horror of a

panic in the crowded road. Soldiers answered the guerilla fire from the

road; men came running back; bullets spattered around.

Ahead, the road was congested with soldiers. Beyond them was anchored

the balloon, over the Bloody Ford--drawing the Spanish fire to the

troops huddled beneath it. There was the death-trap.

And, climbing from an ambulance to mount his horse, a little, bent old

man, weak and trembling from fever, but with his gentle blue eyes

glinting fire--Basil's hero--ex-Confederate Jerry Carter.

"Give the Yanks hell, boys," he shouted.

* * * * *

It had been a slow, toilsome march up that narrow lane of death, and, so

far, Crittenden had merely been sprinkled with Mauser and shrapnel. His

regiment had begun to deploy to the left, down the bed of a stream. The

negro cavalry and the Rough Riders were deploying to the right. Now

broke the storm. Imagine sheet after sheet of hailstones, coated with

polished steel, and swerved when close to the earth at a sharp angle to

the line of descent, and sweeping the air horizontally with an awful

hiss--swifter in flight than a peal of thunder from sky to earth, and

hardly less swift than the lightning flash that caused it.

"T-t-seu-u-u-h! T-t-seu-oo! T-t-seu-oo!"--they went like cloud after

cloud of lightning-winged insects, and passing, by God's mercy and the

Spaniard's bad marksmanship--passing high. Between two crashes, came a

sudden sputter, and some singing thing began to play up and down through

the trees, and to right and left, in a steady hum. It was a machine gun

playing for the range--like a mighty hose pipe, watering earth and trees

with a steady, spreading jet of hot lead. It was like some strange, huge

monster, unseeing and unseen, who knows where his prey is hidden and is

searching for it blindly--by feeling or by sense of smell--coming ever

nearer, showering the leaves down, patting into the soft earth ahead,

swishing to right and to left, and at last playing in a steady stream

about the prostrate soldiers.

"Swish-ee! Swish-ee! Swishee!"

"Whew!" said Abe Long.

"God!" said Reynolds.

Ah, ye scornful veterans of the great war. In ten minutes the Spaniard

let fly with his Mauser more bullets than did you fighting hard for two

long hours, and that one machine gun loosed more death stings in an hour

than did a regiment of you in two. And they were coming from

intrenchments on an all but vertical hill, from piles of unlimited

ammunition, and from soldiers who should have been as placid as the

earth under them for all the demoralization that hostile artillery fire

was causing them.