e paper filled with pictures of the war
printed in daubs of tawdry colors. His keeper was a hard-faced boy
without human pity or consideration, a very devil of obstinacy and
fiendish cruelty. To make it worse, the fiend was a person without a
collar, in a suit of soiled khaki, with a curious red cross bound by a
safety-pin to his left arm. He was intent upon the paper in his hands;
he was holding it between his eyes and his prisoner. His vigilance had
relaxed, and the moment seemed propitious. With a sudden plunge of arms
and legs, the prisoner swept the bed sheet from him, and sprang at the
wooden rail and grasped the iron stanchion beside it. He had his knee
pressed against the top bar and his bare toes on the iron rail beneath
it. Below him the blue water waited for him. It was cool and dark and
gentle and deep. It would certainly put out the fire in his bones, he
thought; it might even shut out the glare of the sun which scorched his
eyeballs.

But as he balanced for the leap, a swift weakness and nausea swept over
him, a weight seized upon his body and limbs. He could not lift the
lower foot from the iron rail, and he swayed dizzily and trembled. He
trembled. He who had raced his men and beaten them up the hot hill to
the trenches of San Juan. But now he was a baby in the hands of a giant,
who caught him by the wrist and with an iron arm clasped him around his
waist and pulled him down, and shouted, brutally, "Help, some of you'se,
quick; he's at it again. I can't hold him."

More giants grasped him by the arms and by the legs. One of them took
the hand that clung to the stanchion in both of his, and pulled back the
fingers one by one, saying, "Easy now, Lieutenant--easy."

The ragged palms and the sea and block-house were swallowed up in a
black fog, and his body touched the canvas cot again with a sense of
home-coming and relief and rest. He wondered how he could have cared
to escape from it. He found it so good to be back again that for a long
time he wept quite happily, until the fiery pillow was moist and cool.

The world outside of the iron bars was like a scene in a theatre set
for some great event, but the actors were never ready. He remembered
confusedly a play he had once witnessed before that same scene. Indeed,
he believed he had played some small part in it; but he remembered it
dimly, and all trace of the men who had appeared with him in it was
gone. He had reasoned it out that they were up there b