ward noon. I went out into the Plaza again. The
troops were already forming a line of cavalry that stretched along the
street immediately before the Governor's Palace, and two companies of
the Ninth Infantry and the band occupied the center where the little
park is. I went across the Plaza and stood on the terrace in front of
the main doors of the Cathedral. Directly opposite was the Governor's
Palace, the naked flagstaff on the roof over the door standing out lean
and stark against the background of green hills.

The sidewalks and streets outside the lines of soldiers were crowded
with an even mixture of civilians and disarmed Spanish soldiers. The
Spanish Club on the left was suddenly closed, but the balconies of the
San Carlos--the Cuban Club--were filled with black-bearded, voluble
gentlemen in white ducks and straw hats. Every window in the "hotel" was
occupied, each one of the little balconies of the Cafe Venus had its
gathering, while the terrace of the Cathedral was packed close. There
were perhaps five thousand in the Plaza de Armas of Santiago on that
seventeenth day of July.

At five minutes of the noon hour everything fell quiet. Captain
McKittrick and Lieutenant Miley had appeared on the roof of the Palace
by the flagstaff. Unfortunately there was not a breath of wind. The
minutes passed, two, three, four. The silence was profound, nobody
spoke. In all those five thousand people there was scarcely a movement.

Then back of us from the direction of the Cathedral's clock tower there
came a slow wheezing as of the expansion of decrepit lungs, a creaking
and jarring of springs and cog-wheels that grew rapidly louder till it
culminated abruptly in a single sonorous stroke. At once Captain
McKittrick laid his hand to the halyards of the flagstaff, a bundle of
bunting rose in the air, shapeless and without definite color. But
suddenly, wonderful enough, there came a breeze, a brisk spurt out of
the north. The bunting caught it, twisted upon itself, tumbled, writhed,
then suddenly shook itself free, and in a single long billow rolled out
into the Stars and Stripes of Old Glory.

"Pre-sent h' ar-r-r!"

That was from the square, and in answer to the order came the
Krag-Jorgensons leaping to the fists and the cavalry sabres swishing and
flashing out into the sunlight.

Then the band: "Oh, say, can you see--" while far off on the hills from
our intrenchments Capron's battery began to thunder the salute.

The mo