Twanged just then a bow-string in the direction of San Juan hill, and
the twang seemed to be getting louder and to be coming toward the little
blue farm-house. No cannon was in sight; there was no smoke visible, and
many, with an upward look, wondered what the queer sound could be.
Suddenly there was a screeching, crackling answer in the air; the
atmosphere was rent apart as by a lightning stroke directly overhead.
The man and the horse by the blue wall dropped noiselessly to the earth.
A Rough Rider paled and limped down the hill and Blackford shook his
hand--a piece of shrapnel had fallen harmlessly on his wrist. On the
hill--Crittenden laughed as he looked--on the hill, nobody
ran--everybody tumbled. Besides the men at the guns, only two others
were left--civilians.
"You're a fool," said one.
"You're another."
"What'd you stay here for?"
"Because you did. What'd you stay for?"
"Because you did."
Then they went down together--rapidly--and just in time. Another shell
shrieked. Two artillerymen and two sergeants dropped dead at their guns,
and a corporal fell, mortally wounded. A third burst in a group of
Cubans. Several of them flew out, killed or wounded, into the air; the
rest ran shrieking for the woods. Below, those woods began to move.
Under those shells started the impatient soldiers down that narrow lane
through the jungle, and with Reynolds and Abe Long on the "point" was
Crittenden, his Krag-Jorgensen across his breast--thrilled, for all the
world, as though he were on a hunt for big game.
* * * * *
And all the time the sound of ripping cloth was rolling over from Caney,
the far-away rumble of wagons over cobble-stones, or softened stage hail
and stage thunder around the block-house, stone fort, and town. At first
it was a desultory fire, like the popping of a bunch of fire-crackers
that have to be relighted several times, and Basil and Grafton,
galloping toward it, could hear the hiss of bullets that far away. But,
now and then, the fire was as steady as a Gatling-gun. Behind them the
artillery had turned on the stone fort, and Grafton saw one shot tear a
hole through the wall, then another, and another. He could see Spaniards
darting from the fort and taking refuge in the encircling stone-cut
trenches; and then nothing else--for their powder was smokeless--except
the straw hats of the little devils in blue, who blazed away from their
trenches around the fort and minded the shells bursting over and around
them as little as though they had been bursting snowballs. If the boy
ahead noted anything, Grafton could not tell. Basil turned his head
neither to right nor left, and at the foot of the muddy hill, the black
horse that he rode, without touch of spur, seemed suddenly to leave the
earth and pass on out of sight with the swift silence of a shadow. At
the foot of a hill walked the first wounded man--a Colonel limping
between two soldiers. The Colonel looked up smiling--he had a terrible
wound in the groin.