made the pioneers look like ghosts peering over the black brink of
the pits. Then the light went out, and the eyes trying in vain to
pierce the darkness saw nothing but glittering fiery red circles. The
Japanese batteries on the other side opened fire. The air-ship had
entirely disappeared, and no one knew whether the uncanny night-bird had
been friend or foe.

* * * * *

The assault on Hilgard was to be begun by the 28th and 32d Volunteers:
General MacArthur had originally planned to have the attempt made at
dawn on August 15th; but as one brigade of Wood's Division had not yet
arrived, he postponed the attack for twenty-four hours, to the sixteenth
of August, while the fifteenth was to be taken up with heavy firing on
the enemy's position, which seemed to have been somewhat weakened. As
soon, therefore, as day broke, the Americans opened fire, and all the
time that almost sixty American guns were bombarding Hilgard and sending
shell after shell over the town, and the white flakes of cotton from the
bursting shrapnels hovered over the houses and almost obscured the view
of the mountains and the shells tore up the ground, sowing iron seed in
the furrows, the 28th and 32d Volunteers lay in the trenches without
firing a single shot.

The commander of the 16th Brigade, to which the two regiments belonged,
was in the first trench during the morning, and, in company with Colonel
Katterfeld, inspected the results of the bombardment through his
telescope, which had been set up in the trench. A shrapnel had just
destroyed the top of the copper church tower, which the Japanese were
using as a lookout.

Although the American shells had already created a great deal of havoc
in Hilgard, the walls of the houses offered considerable resistance to
the hail of bullets from the shrapnels. The brigadier-general therefore
sent orders to the battery stationed behind and to the right of the
trenches to shell the houses on both sides of the street leading into
Hilgard.

"Shell the houses on both sides of the street leading into Hilgard!
Shell the houses on both sides of the street leading into
Hilgard--Shell--Hilgard," was the command which was passed along from
mouth to mouth through the trenches, until it reached the battery amid
the roar of battle.

"--Shells--we have no shells--shrapnels--the battery has no shells, only
shrapnels--" came back the answer after a while.

"No shells, I might have kno