the pages of a huge paper filled with pictures of the war printed
in daubs of tawdry colors. His keeper was a hard-faced boy
without human pity or consideration, a very devil of obstinacy
and fiendish cruelty. To make it worse, the fiend was a person
without a collar, in a suit of soiled khaki, with a curious red
cross bound by a safety-pin to his left arm. He was intent upon
the paper in his hands; he was holding it between his eyes and
his prisoner. His vigilance had relaxed, and the moment seemed
propitious. With a sudden plunge of arms and legs, the prisoner
swept the bed sheet from him, and sprang at the wooden rail and
grasped the iron stanchion beside it. He had his knee pressed
against the top bar and his bare toes on the iron rail beneath
it. Below him the blue water waited for him. It was cool and
dark and gentle and deep. It would certainly put out the fire in
his bones, he thought; it might even shut out the glare of the
sun which scorched his eyeballs.

But as he balanced for the leap, a swift weakness and nausea
swept over him, a weight seized upon his body and limbs. He
could not lift the lower foot from the iron rail, and he swayed
dizzily and trembled. He trembled. He who had raced his men and
beaten them up the hot hill to the trenches of San Juan. But now
he was a baby in the hands of a giant, who caught him by the
wrist and with an iron arm clasped him around his waist and
pulled him down, and shouted, brutally, "Help, some of you'se,
quick; he's at it again. I can't hold him."

More giants grasped him by the arms and by the legs. One of them
took the hand that clung to the stanchion in both of his, and
pulled back the fingers one by one, saying, "Easy now,