e occupied. The soldiers were busy getting a shot at the
enemy--their minds, too, were occupied. It was his peculiar province to
stand up and be shot at without the satisfaction of shooting
back--studying his sensations, meanwhile, which were not particularly
pleasant, and studying the grewsome horrors about him. And it struck
him, too, that this was a ghastly business, and an unjustifiable, and
that if it pleased God to see him through he would never go to another
war except as a soldier. One consideration interested him and was
satisfactory. Nobody was shooting at him--nobody was shooting at anybody
in particular. If he were killed, or when anybody was killed, it was
merely accident, and it was thus pleasant to reflect that he was in as
much danger as anybody.

The firing was pretty hot now, and the wounded were too many to be
handled. A hospital man called out sharply:

"Give a hand here." Grafton gave a hand to help a poor fellow back to
the field hospital, in a little hollow, and when he reached the road
again that black horse and his boy rider were coming back like shadows,
through a rain of bullets, along the edge of the woods. Once the horse
plunged sidewise and shook his head angrily--a Mauser had stung him in
the neck--but the lad, pale and his eyes like stars, lifted him in a
flying leap over a barbed-wire fence and swung him into the road again.

"Damn!" said Grafton, simply.

Then rose a loud cheer from the battery on the hill, and, looking west,
he saw the war-balloon hung high above the trees and moving toward
Santiago. The advance had begun over there; there was the main
attack--the big battle. It was interesting and horrible enough where he
was, but Caney was not Santiago; and Grafton, too, mounted his horse and
galloped after Basil.

* * * * *

At head-quarters began the central lane of death that led toward San
Juan, and Basil picked his way through it at a slow walk--his excitement
gone for the moment and his heart breaking at the sight of the terrible
procession on its way to the rear. Men with arms in slings; men with
trousers torn away at the knee, and bandaged legs; men with brow, face,
mouth, or throat swathed; men with no shirts, but a broad swathe around
the chest or stomach--each bandage grotesquely pictured with human
figures printed to show how the wound should be bound, on whatever part
of the body the bullet entered. Men staggering along unaided, or be