Colonel Wood walked along his lines as coolly as though on
parade. Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt led his men through the brush
when the air seemed full of bullets. Captain Capron, the fifth from
father to son in the United States army, fell early in the fight, but
before he was hit by a Spanish bullet he used his revolver whenever he
saw a Spanish head.

[Illustration: Captain Allyn K. Capron.]

Everybody had confidence in their officers and in themselves. If they
were hit they fought on if the hurt was not mortal. If they could not
stand, they propped themselves against trees, and kept on firing as
the line went forward. Men fought with their arms in slings and with
bandaged heads.

Lieutenant Thomas, of Captain Capron's troop, and who was wounded
himself during that sweltering June day, tells some interesting
stories of the battle. He comes of a fighting family. His father
fought in the Civil War, his grandfather was killed in the Mexican
War, and three ancestors fell in the war of the Revolution.

"I am sorry that I did not have a chance to see more of the fighting,
but what I saw was of the warmest kind. On the 24th of June I was
with Troop L, under Captain Capron. We formed the advance guard, and
went out on a narrow trail toward Siboney. On the way we met some of
the men of the Twenty-second Infantry, who told us we were close to
the enemy, as they had heard them at work during the night. Captain
Capron, with six men, had gone on ahead of us and had come across the
body of a dead Cuban. Ten or fifteen minutes later Private Isbell saw
a Spaniard in the brush ahead of him and fired. This was the first
shot from our troop, and the Spaniard fell dead. Isbell himself was
shot seven times that day, but managed to walk back to our field
hospital, which was fully four miles in the rear.

"It has been said that we were ambushed, but this is not so. Poor
Captain Capron received his death wound early in the fight, and while
he was lying on the ground dying, he said: 'Let me see it out; I want
to see it all.' He lived an hour and fifteen minutes after the bullet
struck him, and up to the moment he fell had acted fearlessly, and had
exposed himself all the time to the enemy's fire.

"I was then next in command of the troop, and I noticed that some of
our men lay too closely together as they were deploying. I went down
the line ordering them to their proper distances, and as I passed
along, poor Hamilton Fish was lying,