He rose very slowly, turned, and as he passed from the light, his
weakness got the better of him for the first time, because of his wounds
and sickness, and his voice broke in a half sob--the sob that is so
terrible to a woman's ears; and she saw him clinch his arms fiercely
around his breast to stifle it.
* * * * *
It was the old story that night--the story of the summer's heat and
horror and suffering--heard and seen, and keenly felt in his delirium:
the dusty, grimy days of drill on the hot sands of Tampa; the long,
long, hot wait on the transport in the harbour; the stuffy, ill-smelling
breath of the hold, when the wind was wrong; the march along the coast
and the grewsome life over and around him--buzzard and strange bird in
the air, and crab and snail and lizard and scorpion and hairy tarantula
scuttling through the tropical green rushes along the path. And the
hunger and thirst and heat and dirt and rolling sweat of the last day's
march and every detail of the day's fight; the stench of dead horse and
dead man; the shriek of shell and rattle of musketry and yell of
officer; the slow rush through the long grass, and the climb up the
hill. And always, he was tramping, tramping, tramping through long,
green, thick grass. Sometimes a kaleidoscope series of pictures would go
jumbling through his brain, as though some imp were unrolling the scroll
of his brain backward, forward, and sidewise; a whirling cloud of sand,
a driving sheet of visible bullets; a hose-pipe that shot streams of
melted steel; a forest of smokestacks; the flash of trailing
phosphorescent foam; a clear sky, full of stars--the mountains clear and
radiant through sunlit vapours; camp-fires shooting flames into the
darkness, and men and guns moving past them. Through it all he could
feel his legs moving and his feet tramping, tramping, tramping through
long green grass. Sometimes he was tramping toward the figure of a
woman, whose face looked like Judith's; and tramp as he could, he could
never get close enough through that grass to know whether it was Judith
or not. But usually it was a hill that he was tramping toward, and then
his foothold was good; and while he went slowly he got forward and he
reached the hill, and he climbed it to a queer-looking little
block-house on top, from which queer-looking little blue men were
running. And now and then one would drop and not get up again. And by
and by came his time to drop. Then he would begin all over again, or he
would go back to the coast, which he preferred to do, in spite of his
aching wound, and the long wait in the hospital and the place where poor
Reynolds was tossed into the air and into fragments by a shell; in spite
of the long walk back to Siboney, the graves of the Rough Riders and the
scuttling land-crabs; and the heat and the smells. Then he would march
back again to the trenches in his dream, as he had done in Cuba when he
got out of the hospital. There was the hill up which he had charged. It
looked like the abode of cave-dwellers--so burrowed was it with
bomb-proofs. He could hear the shouts of welcome as his comrades, and
men who had never spoken to him before, crowded about him.