And all the time the sound of ripping cloth was rolling over from Caney,
the far-away rumble of wagons over cobble-stones, or softened stage hail
and stage thunder around the block-house, stone fort, and town. At first
it was a desultory fire, like the popping of a bunch of fire-crackers
that have to be relighted several times, and Basil and Grafton,
galloping toward it, could hear the hiss of bullets that far away. But,
now and then, the fire was as steady as a Gatling-gun. Behind them the
artillery had turned on the stone fort, and Grafton saw one shot tear a
hole through the wall, then another, and another. He could see Spaniards
darting from the fort and taking refuge in the encircling stone-cut
trenches; and then nothing else--for their powder was smokeless--except
the straw hats of the little devils in blue, who blazed away from their
trenches around the fort and minded the shells bursting over and around
them as little as though they had been bursting snowballs. If the boy
ahead noted anything, Grafton could not tell. Basil turned his head
neither to right nor left, and at the foot of the muddy hill, the black
horse that he rode, without touch of spur, seemed suddenly to leave the
earth and pass on out of sight with the swift silence of a shadow. At
the foot of a hill walked the first wounded man--a Colonel limping
between two soldiers. The Colonel looked up smiling--he had a terrible
wound in the groin.

"Well," he called cheerily, "I'm the first victim."

Grafton wondered. Was it possible that men were going to behave on a
battlefield just as they did anywhere else--just as naturally--taking
wounds and death and horror as a matter of course? Beyond were more
wounded--the wounded who were able to help themselves. Soon he saw them
lying by the roadside, here and there a dead one; by and by, he struck a
battalion marching to storm a block-house. He got down, hitched his