eat or wear.

An hour later, he met a soldier, who told him there had been a fight.
Still, an hour later, rumours came thick, but so conflicting and wild
that Grafton began to hope there had been no fight at all. Proof met
him, then, in the road--a white man, on foot, with his arm in a bloody
sling. Then, on a litter, a negro trooper with a shattered leg; then
another with a bullet through his throat; and another wounded man, and
another. On horseback rode a Sergeant with a bandage around his
brow--Grafton could see him smiling broadly fifty yards ahead--and the
furrow of a Mauser bullet across his temple, and just under his skin.

"Still nutty," said Grafton to himself.

Further on was a camp of insurgents--little, thin, brown fellows,
ragged, dirty, shoeless--each with a sugar-loaf straw hat, a Remington
rifle of the pattern of 1882, or a brand new Krag-Jorgensen donated by
Uncle Sam, and the inevitable and ever ready machéte swinging in a case
of embossed leather on the left hip. Very young they were, and very old;
and wiry, quick-eyed, intelligent, for the most part and, in
countenance, vivacious and rather gentle. There was a little creek next,
and, climbing the bank of the other side, Grafton stopped short, with a
start, in the road. To the right and on a sloping bank lay eight gray
shapes, muffled from head to foot, and Grafton would have known that all
of them were in their last sleep, but one, who lay with his left knee
bent and upright, his left elbow thrust from his blanket, and his hand
on his heart. He slept like a child.

Beyond was the camp of the regulars who had taken part in the fight. On
one side stood a Colonel, who himself had aimed a Hotchkiss gun in the