sergeant, quite overlooking the fact that his arm was
shattered.

"Oh, don't bother the surgeons about me," Roberts added, cheerfully.
"They must be very busy. I can wait."

As yet, with all these killed and wounded, we had accomplished
nothing--except to obey orders--which was to await further orders. The
observation balloon hastened the end. It came blundering down the trail,
and stopped the advance of the First and Tenth Cavalry, and was sent up
directly over the heads of our men to observe what should have been
observed a week before by scouts and reconnoitring parties. A balloon,
two miles to the rear, and high enough in the air to be out of range of
the enemy's fire may some day prove itself to be of use and value. But a
balloon on the advance line, and only fifty feet above the tops of the
trees, was merely an invitation to the enemy to kill everything beneath
it. And the enemy responded to the invitation. A Spaniard might
question if he could hit a man, or a number of men, hidden in the bushes,
but had no doubt at all as to his ability to hit a mammoth glistening
ball only six hundred yards distant, and so all the trenches fired at it
at once, and the men of the First and Tenth, packed together directly
behind it, received the full force of the bullets. The men lying
directly below it received the shrapnel which was timed to hit it, and
which at last, fortunately, did hit it. This was endured for an hour, an
hour of such hell of fire and heat, that the heat in itself, had there
been no bullets, would have been remembered for its cruelty. Men gasped
on their backs, like fishes in the bottom of a boat, their heads burning
inside and out, their limbs too heavy to move. They had been rushed here
and rushed there wet with sweat and wet with fording the streams, under a
sun that would have made moving a fan an effort, and they lay prostrate,
gasping at the hot air, with faces aflame, and their tongues sticking
out, and their eyes rolling. All through this the volleys from the
rifle-pits sputtered and rattled, and the bullets sang continuously like
the wind through the rigging in a gale, shrapnel whined and broke, and
still no order came from General Shafter.

Captain Howse, of General Sumner's staff, rode down the trail to learn
what had delayed the First and Tenth, and was hailed by Colonel Derby,
who was just descending from the shattered balloon.

"I saw men up there on those hills," Colonel Derby sh