that you fell back into the town as soon as they ceased firing."

[Illustration: Insurgents Firing on a Spanish Fort "One Shot for a
Hundred"]

"Ah, but I counted the cartridges my men had used," the officer
replied. "I found they had expended four hundred. By allowing ten
bullets to each man killed, I was able to learn that we had killed
forty men."

These stories show how little reason there is to speak of these
skirmishes as battles, and it also throws some light on the Spaniard's
idea of his own marksmanship. As a plain statement of fact, and without
any exaggeration, one of the chief reasons why half the insurgents in
Cuba are not dead to-day is because the Spanish soldiers cannot shoot
well enough to hit them. The Mauser rifle, which is used by all the
Spanish soldiers, with the exception of the Guardia Civile, is a most
excellent weapon for those who like clean, gentlemanly warfare, in
which the object is to wound or to kill outright, and not to "shock"
the enemy nor to tear his flesh in pieces. The weapon has hardly any
trajectory up to one thousand yards, but, in spite of its precision, it
is as useless in the hands of a guerrilla or the average Spanish
soldier as a bow and arrow would be. The fact that when the Spaniards
say "within gun fire of the forts" they mean within one hundred and
fifty yards of them shows how they estimate their own skill. Major
Grover Flint, the _Journal_ correspondent, told me of a fight that
he witnessed in which the Spaniards fired two thousand rounds at forty
insurgents only two hundred yards away, and only succeeded in wounding
three of them. Sylvester Scovel once explained this bad marksmanship to
me by pointing out that to shift the cartridge in a Mauser, it is