, dry blades of the
Spanish bayonet. I think it is not an exaggeration to say that at almost
any point on the Cuban trail between Guasimas and Siboney I could stand
still for a moment and count from fifty to one hundred of them, crawling
out of the forest and across the path. Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt told
me that nothing interfered so much at first with his sleep in the field
as the noise made by these crabs in the bushes. It is so like the noise
that would be made by a party of guerrillas or bushwhackers, stealing up
to the camp under cover of darkness, that it might well keep awake even
a man who was neither nervous nor imaginative.

Cuban land-crabs, like Cuban vultures, are haunters of battle-fields;
but they seek the dead at night, while the vultures drink the eyes and
tear off the lips of an unburied corpse in the broad light of day. On
the battle-field of Guasimas, however, while the sun was still above the
horizon, I saw, crawling over a little pile of bloody rags, or bandages,
a huge crab whose pale, waxy-yellow body suggested the idea that he had
been feeding on a yellow-fever corpse and had absorbed its color. At my
approach he backed slowly off the rags, opening and shutting his mouth
noiselessly, and waving his fore claws toward me in the air with what
seemed like impish intelligence, as if he were saying: "Go away! What
business have you here? Blood and the dead are mine."

There may be something more repulsive and uncanny than such a
performance by a huge corpse-colored land-crab; but, if so, I have never
happened to see it. It made me feel as if I should like to do as the
Russian peasant does in similar cases--spit and cross myself.

We reached Siboney about half-past five, and happening to find a boat
from the _State of Texas_ waiting at the pier, we got on board in time
for dinner, after a walk of sixteen or eighteen miles.

CHAPTER X

SIBONEY ON THE EVE OF BATTLE

During my absence at the front on Monday, the auxiliary cruiser _Yale_,
with two or three regiments of Michigan troops on board, arrived off
Siboney, and when I went on deck on Tuesday morning these reinforcements
were just beginning to go ashore in a long line of small boats, towed by
a steam-launch from one of the war-ships of the blockading fleet.

The landing of troops and supplies on the Cuban coast was the first
serious difficulty with which General Shafter had to contend. The little
cove at Siboney was wholly unshel