tween
two comrades, or borne on litters, some white and quiet, some groaning
and blood-stained, some conscious, some dying, some using a rifle for a
support, or a stick thrust through the side of a tomato-can. Rolls,
haversacks, blouses, hardtack, bibles, strewn by the wayside, where the
soldiers had thrown them before they went into action. It was curious,
but nearly all of the wounded were dazed and drunken in appearance,
except at the brows, which were tightly drawn with pain. There was one
man, with short, thick, upright red hair, stumbling from one side of the
road to the other, with no wound apparent, and muttering:

"Oh, I don't know what happened to me. I don't know what happened to
me."

Another, hopping across the creek on one leg--the other bare and
wounded--and using his gun, muzzle down, as a vaulting-pole. Another,
with his arm in the sling, pointing out the way.

"Take this road," he said. "I don't know where that one goes, but I know
this one. I went up this one, and brought back a _souvenir_," he added,
cheerily, shaking a bloody arm.

And everywhere men were cautioning him to beware of the guerillas, who
were in the trees, adding horror to the scene--shooting wounded men on
litters, hospital men, doctors. Once, there was almost the horror of a
panic in the crowded road. Soldiers answered the guerilla fire from the
road; men came running back; bullets spattered around.

Ahead, the road was congested with soldiers. Beyond them was anchored
the balloon, over the Bloody Ford--drawing the Spanish fire to the
troops huddled beneath it. There was the death-trap.

And, climbing from an ambulance to mount his horse, a little, bent old
man, weak and trembling from fever, but with his gentle blue eyes
glinting fire--Basil's hero--ex-Confederate Jerry Carter.

"Give the Yanks hell, boys," he shouted.

* * * * *

It had been a slow, toilsome march up that narrow lane of death, and, so
far, Crittenden had merely been sprinkled with Mauser and shrapnel. His
regiment had begun to deploy to the left, down the bed of a stream. The
negro cavalry and the Rough Riders were deploying to the right. Now
broke the storm. Imagine sheet after sheet of hailstones, coated with
polished steel, and swerved when close to the earth at a sharp angle to
the line of descent, and sweeping the air horizontally with an awful
hiss--swifter in flight than a peal of thunder from sky to earth, and
hardl