Crittenden

He rose very slowly, turned, and as he passed from the light, his

weakness got the better of him for the first time, because of his wounds

and sickness, and his voice broke in a half sob--the sob that is so

terrible to a woman's ears; and she saw him clinch his arms fiercely

around his breast to stifle it.

* * * * *

It was the old story that night--the story of the summer's heat and

horror and suffering--heard and seen, and keenly felt in his delirium:

the dusty, grimy days of drill on the hot sands of Tampa; the long,

long, hot wait on the transport in the harbour; the stuffy, ill-smelling

breath of the hold, when the wind was wrong; the march along the coast

and the grewsome life over and around him--buzzard and strange bird in

the air, and crab and snail and lizard and scorpion and hairy tarantula

scuttling through the tropical green rushes along the path. And the

hunger and thirst and heat and dirt and rolling sweat of the last day's

march and every detail of the day's fight; the stench of dead horse and

dead man; the shriek of shell and rattle of musketry and yell of

officer; the slow rush through the long grass, and the climb up the

hill. And always, he was tramping, tramping, tramping through long,

green, thick grass. Sometimes a kaleidoscope series of pictures would go

jumbling through his brain, as though some imp were unrolling the scroll

of his brain backward, forward, and sidewise; a whirling cloud of sand,

a driving sheet of visible bullets; a hose-pipe that shot streams of

melted steel; a forest of smokestacks; the flash of trailing

phosphorescent foam; a clear sky, full of stars--the mountains clear and

radiant through sunlit vapours; camp-fires shooting flames into the

darkness, and men and guns moving past them. Through it all he could

feel his legs moving and his feet tramping, tramping, tramping through

long green grass. Sometimes he was tramping toward the figure of a

woman, whose face looked like Judith's; and tramp as he could, he could

never get close enough through that grass to know whether it was Judith

or not. But usually it was a hill that he was tramping toward, and then

his foothold was good; and while he went slowly he got forward and he

reached the hill, and he climbed it to a queer-looking little

block-house on top, from which queer-looking little blue men were

running. And now and then one would drop and not get up again. And by

and by came his time to drop. Then he would begin all over again, or he

would go back to the coast, which he preferred to do, in spite of his

aching wound, and the long wait in the hospital and the place where poor

Reynolds was tossed into the air and into fragments by a shell; in spite

of the long walk back to Siboney, the graves of the Rough Riders and the

scuttling land-crabs; and the heat and the smells. Then he would march

back again to the trenches in his dream, as he had done in Cuba when he

got out of the hospital. There was the hill up which he had charged. It

looked like the abode of cave-dwellers--so burrowed was it with

bomb-proofs. He could hear the shouts of welcome as his comrades, and

men who had never spoken to him before, crowded about him.