s in
it, the driver lounging on the box and two miserable horses dozing in
the harness. I suppose it would be quite impossible to make a reader
understand how incongruous this apparition seemed to us. It was in use,
no doubt, carrying refugees from Caney back into the city and its
presence was easily accounted for. But Mr. Kipling's phantom rickshaw
could hardly have produced a greater sensation.

"A carriage!"

"Say, will you look at that!"

"Well, for God's sake!"

"Damned if it isn't a carriage!"

"Say, Jim, look at the carriage!"

"It is a carriage for a fact--well, of all the things!"

"Well, that get's me--a carriage!"

It was among the troopers of the escort that the carriage had the
greatest success. They chuckled over it as if it had some hidden,
mirthful significance. They addressed strange allusions to the lounging
driver, and when they had ridden by they turned in their saddles and
watched it out of sight at the risk of breaking their necks. They rode
the sprucer for it; they were in better spirits for it. They laughed,
they talked, they went at a faster pace, they cocked their hats, they
were gay, they were debonair. They had seen a carriage!

And now we were close up. Here was the hospital on the very outskirts,
with its plethora of Red Cross flags. It was a hospital, after all, and
not a barracks, as we had said, studying it through our field glasses
during the last week, for blanketed and beflanneled objects,
hollow-eyed, with bandaged heads, crowded silently at the grated windows
staring at us galloping past. Here was an abandoned trench, and
here--steady all, pull down to a walk--here is the barbed wire
entanglement we have heard so much about. Formidable enough, surely;
three lines of posts right across the road with barbed wire interwoven.
A rabbit could not have passed here; and back of it trenches and rifle
pits; nothing but artillery could have forced these lines. What fools to
have abandoned them--well.

We passed through the gap single file and gingerly, then forward again
at a hard gallop, clattering rough-shod over paved streets, for now at
last we were in the city of Santiago.

Soldiers without arms, refugees, the men in brown derby hats--Cubans,
negroes, dark women with black lace upon their heads, and children
absolutely naked, watched us very silently from the sidewalks and from
balconies. The houses were of adobe, painted pale blue and pink, and
roofed with rugged lichen-bl