and two Spanish gun-boats, apparently for his sole benefit, engaged in
an impromptu duel within range of his megaphone. When his horse went
lame, the column with which he had wished to advance, passed forward to
the front unmolested, while the rear guard, to which he had been forced
to join his fortune, fought its way through the stifling underbrush.

Between his news despatches, when he was not singing the praises of his
fellow-countrymen, or copying lists of their killed and wounded, he
wrote to Miss Armitage. His letters were scrawled on yellow copy paper
and consisted of repetitions of the three words, "I love you,"
rearranged, illuminated, and intensified.

Each letter began much in the same way. "The war is still going on. You
can read about it in the papers. What I want you to know is that I love
you as no man ever--" And so on for many pages.

From her only one of the letters she wrote reached him. It was picked up
in the sand at Siboney after the medical corps, in an effort to wipe
out the yellow-fever, had set fire to the post-office tent.

She had written it some weeks before from her summer home at Newport,
and in it she said: "When you went to the front, I thought no woman
could love more than I did then. But, now I know. At least I know one
girl who can. She cannot write it. She can never tell you. You must just
believe.

"Each day I hear from you, for as soon as the paper comes, I take it
down to the rocks and read your cables, and I look south across the
ocean to Cuba, and try to see you in all that fighting and heat and
fever. But I am not afraid. For each morning I wake to find I love you