is spread blankets, his hands
clasped under his head, a pipe in his teeth, feebly applauding us at
intervals and trying to pretend that we sang out of tune. The night was
fine and very still. The wonderful Cuban fireflies, that are like little
electric lights gone somehow adrift, glowed and faded in the mango and
bamboo trees, and after a while a whip-poor-will began his lamentable
little plaint somewhere in the branches of the gorgeous vermilion
Flamboyana that overhung the hacienda.

The air was heavy with smells, smells that inevitable afternoon
downpours had distilled from the vast jungle of bush and vine and
thicket all up and down the valley. In Cuba everything, the very mud and
water, has a smell. After every rain, as soon as the red-hot sun is out
again, vegetation reeks and smokes and sweats, and these smells steam
off into the air all night, thick and stupefying, like the interior of a
cathedral after high mass.

The orderly who brought the despatch should have dashed up at a gallop,
clicked his spurs, saluted and begun with "The commanding General's
compliments, sir," et cetera. Instead, he dragged a very tired horse up
the trail, knee-deep in mud, brought to, standing with a gasp of relief,
and said, as he pushed his hat back from his forehead:

"Say, is here where General McKibben is?"

We stopped singing and took our feet down from the railing of the
veranda. In the room back of us we heard the General raise on an elbow
and tell his orderly to light a candle. The orderly went inside, drawing
a paper from his pocket, and the aides followed. Through the open window
we could plainly hear what followed, and see, too, for that matter, by
twisting a bit on our chairs.

The General had mislaid his eyeglasses and so passed the despatch to one
of his aides, saying: "I'll get you to read this for me, Nolan." On one
knee, and holding the despatch to the candle-light, Nolan read it aloud.

It began tamely enough with the usual military formulas, and the first
thirty words might have been part of any one of the many despatches the
General had been receiving during the last three days. And then "to
accompany the commanding General to a point midway between the Spanish
and American lines and there to receive the surrender of General Toral.
At noon, precisely, the American flag will be raised over the Governor's
Palace in the city of Santiago. A salute of twenty-one guns will be
fired from Captain Capron's battery.