nd completed within an hour. Guns and wagons were unloaded on the quay,
while the animals were removed from the cars on movable runways or
ramps. As each gun or wagon reached the ground, its drivers hitched in
the horses and moved it away. Five minutes later we rode out of the
yards and down the main street of the town.

Broad steel tires on the carriages of the heavies bumped and rumbled
over the clean cobbles and the horses pranced spryly to get the kinks
out of their legs, long fatigued from vibrations of the train. Women,
old and young, lined the curbs, smiling and throwing kisses, waving
handkerchiefs and aprons and begging for souvenirs. If every request for
a button had been complied with, our battery would have reached the
front with a shocking shortage of safety pins.

Darkness came on and with it a fine rain, as we cleared the town and
halted on a level plain between soft fields of tender new wheat, which
the horses sensed and snorted to get at. In twenty minutes, Mess
Sergeant Kelly, from his high altar on the rolling kitchen, announced
that the last of hot coffee had been dispensed. Somewhere up ahead in
the darkness, battery bugle notes conveyed orders to prepare to mount.
With the rattle of equipment and the application of endearing epithets,
which horses unfortunately don't understand, we moved off at the sound
of "forward."

Off on our left, a noiseless passenger train slid silently across the
rim of the valley, blue dimmed lights in its coach windows glowing like
a row of wet sulphur matches. Far off in the north, flutters of white
light flushed the night sky and an occasional grumbling of the distant
guns gave us our first impression of the battle of battles. Every man in
our battery tingled with the thrill. This was riding frontward with the
guns--this was rolling and rumbling on through the night up toward the
glare and glamour of war. I was riding beside the captain at the head of
the column. He broke silence.

"It seems like a far cry from Honolulu with the moon playing through the
palm trees on the beach," he said quizzically, "to this place and these
scenes and events to-night, but a little thing like a flip of coin
decided it for me, and I'm blessing that coin to-night.

"A year ago January, before we came into the war, I was stationed at San
Antonio. Another officer friend of mine was stationed there and one day
he received orders to report for duty at Honolulu. He had a girl in San
Antoni