dug-out earthen floors covered over thickly with straw. These cozy
small shacks hid themselves behind a screen of haws among the scattered
trees which flanked an ancient fortification, abandoned many years
before, I judged, by the grass-grown looks of it. Out in front, upon
the open crest of the rise, staff officers were grouped about two
telescopes mounted on tripods. An old man--you could tell by the hunch
of his shoulders he was old--sat on a camp chair with his back to us and
his face against the barrels of one of the telescopes. With his long
dust-colored coat and the lacings of violent scarlet upon his cap and
his upturned collar he made you think of one of those big gray African
parrots that talk so fluently and bite so viciously. But when, getting
nimbly up, he turned to greet us and be introduced the resemblance
vanished.

There was nothing of the parrot about him now, Here was a man part watch
dog and part hawk. His cheeks and the flanges of his nostrils were
thickly hair-lined with those little red-and-blue veins that are to be
found in the texture of good American paper currency and in the faces of
elderly men who have lived much out-of-doors during their lives. His
jowls were heavy and pendulous like a mastiff's. His frontal bone came
down low and straight so that under the flat arch of the brow his small,
very bright agate-blue eyes looked out as from beneath half-closed
shutters. His hair was clipped close to his scalp and the shape of his
skull showed, rounded and bulgy; not the skull of a thinker, nor yet the
skull of a creator, just the skull of a natural-born fighting man. The
big, ridgy veins in the back of his neck stood out like window-cords
from a close smocking of fine wrinkles. The neck itself was tanned to a
brickdust red. A gnawed white mustache bristled on his upper lip. He
was tall without seeming to be tall and broad without appearing broad,
and he was old enough for a grandfather and spry enough for his own