one could have mistaken his condition. The surgeons at work
along the stream dressed the wounds with one eye cast aloft at the trees.
It was not the Mauser bullets they feared, though they passed
continuously, but too high to do their patients further harm, but the
bullets of the sharp-shooters which struck fairly in among them,
splashing in the water and scattering the pebbles. The sounds of the two
bullets were as different as is the sharp pop of a soda-water bottle from
the buzzing of an angry wasp.

For a time it seemed as though every second man was either killed or
wounded; one came upon them lying behind the bush, under which they had
crawled with some strange idea that it would protect them, or crouched
under the bank of the stream, or lying on their stomachs and lapping up
the water with the eagerness of thirsty dogs. As to their suffering, the
wounded were magnificently silent, they neither complained nor groaned
nor cursed.

"I've got a punctured tire," was their grim answer to inquiries. White
men and colored men, veterans and recruits and volunteers, each lay
waiting for the battle to begin or to end so that he might be carried
away to safety, for the wounded were in as great danger after they were
hit as though they were in the firing line, but none questioned nor
complained.

I came across Lieutenant Roberts, of the Tenth Cavalry, lying under the
roots of a tree beside the stream with three of his colored troopers
stretched around him. He was shot through the intestines, and each of
the three men with him was shot in the arm or leg. They had been
overlooked or forgotten, and we stumbled upon them only by the accident
of losing our way. They had no knowledge as to how the battle was going
or where their comrades were or where the enemy was. At any moment, for
all they knew, the Spaniards might break through the bushes about them.
It was a most lonely picture, the young lieutenant, half naked, and wet
with his own blood, sitting upright beside the empty stream, and his
three followers crouching at his feet like three faithful watch-dogs,
each wearing his red badge of courage, with his black skin tanned to a
haggard gray, and with his eyes fixed patiently on the white lips of his
officer. When the white soldiers with me offered to carry him back to
the dressing-station, the negroes resented it stiffly. "If the
Lieutenant had been able to move, we would have carried him away long
ago," said the