jets of smoke and stabs of flame that sprang from her bow, at the
figures crouched behind her gunwale, firing in volleys.

To David it came suddenly, convincingly, that in a dream he had
lived it all before, and something like raw poison stirred in
David, something leaped to his throat and choked him, something
rose in his brain and made him see scarlet. He felt rather than
saw young Carr kneeling at the box of ammunition, and holding a
shell toward him. He heard the click as the breech shut, felt the
rubber tire of the brace give against the weight of his shoulder,
down a long shining tube saw the pursuing gun-boat, saw her again
and many times disappear behind a flash of flame. A bullet gashed
his forehead, a bullet passed deftly through his forearm, but he
did not heed them. Confused with the thrashing of the engines,
with the roar of the gun he heard a strange voice shrieking
unceasingly:

"Cuba libre!" it yelled. "To hell with Spain!" and he found that
the voice was his own.

The story lost nothing in the way Carr wrote it.

"And the best of it is," he exclaimed joyfully, "it's true!"

For a Spanish gun-boat HAD been crippled and forced to run
herself aground by a tug-boat manned by Cuban patriots, and by a
single gun served by one man, and that man an American. It was
the first sea-fight of the war. Over night a Cuban navy had been
born, and into the limelight a cub reporter had projected a new
"hero," a ready-made, warranted-not-to-run, popular idol.