FullReads

“Could I draw on you for some rations?” he asked. “I’m from the Three Friends. I’m not one of their regular accredited correspondents,” he added, conscientiously, “I’m just helping them for to-day.”

“Haven’t you got a correspondent’s pass?” asked the officer. He was busily pouring square hardtack down the throat of a saddle-bag a Cuban soldier held open before him.

“No,” said Channing, turning away, “I’m just helping.”

The officer looked after him, and what he saw caused him to reach under the counter for a tin cup and a bottle of lime-juice.

“Here,” he said, “drink this. What’s the matter with you–fever? Come in here out of that sun. You can lie down on my cot, if you like.”

Channing took the tin cup and swallowed a warm mixture of boiled water and acrid lime-juice.

“Thank you,” he said, “but I must keep watch for the first news from the front.”

A man riding a Government mule appeared on the bridge of the lower trail, and came toward them at a gallop. He was followed and surrounded by a hurrying mob of volunteers, hospital stewards, and Cubans.

The Colonel vaulted the counter and ran to meet him.

“This looks like news from the front now,” he cried.

The man on the mule was from civil life. His eyes bulged from their sockets and his face was purple. The sweat ran over it and glistened on the cords of his thick neck.

“They’re driving us back!” he shrieked.

“Chaffee’s killed, an’ Roosevelt’s killed, an’ the whole army’s beaten!” He waved his arms wildly toward the glaring, inscrutable mountains. The volunteers and stevedores and Cubans heard him, open- mouthed and with panic-stricken eyes. In the pitiless sunlight he was a hideous and awful spectacle.

“They’re driving us into the sea!” he foamed.

“We’ve got to get out of here, they’re just behind me. The army’s running for its life. They’re running away!”

Channing saw the man dimly, through a cloud that came between him and the yellow sunlight. The man in the saddle swayed, the group about him swayed, like persons on the floor of a vast ball-room. Inside he burned with a mad, fierce hatred for this shrieking figure in the saddle. He raised the tin cup and hurled it so that it hit the man’s purple face.

“You lie!” Channing shouted, staggering. “You lie! You’re a damned coward. You lie!” He heard his voice repeating this in different places at greater distances. Then the cloud closed about him, shutting out the man in the saddle, and the glaring, inscrutable mountains, and the ground at his feet rose and struck him in the face.

Channing knew he was on a boat because it lifted and sank with him, and he could hear the rush of her engines. When he opened his eyes he was in the wheel-house of the Three Friends, and her captain was at the wheel, smiling down at him. Channing raised himself on his elbow.

“The despatch-rider?” he asked.

“That’s all right,” said the captain, soothingly. “Don’t you worry. He come along same time you fell, and brought you out to us. What ailed you–sunstroke?”

Channing sat up. “I guess so,” he said.

When the Three Friends reached Port Antonio, Channing sought out the pile of coffee-bags on which he slept at night and dropped upon them. Before this he had been careful to avoid the place in the daytime, so that no one might guess that it was there that he slept at night, but this day he felt that if he should drop in the gutter he would not care whether anyone saw him there or not. His limbs were hot and heavy and refused to support him, his bones burned like quicklime.

The next morning, with the fever still upon him, he hurried restlessly between the wharves and the cable-office, seeking for news. There was much of it; it was great and trying news, the situation outside of Santiago was grim and critical. The men who had climbed San Juan Hill were clinging to it like sailors shipwrecked on a reef unwilling to remain, but unable to depart. If they attacked the city Cervera promised to send it crashing about their ears. They would enter Santiago only to find it in ruins. If they abandoned the hill, 2,000 killed and wounded would have been sacrificed in vain.