a barrier against the revolutionists operating in eastern Cuba.  It was restored for use in the revolution of 1895, but its blockhouses at every kilometre, and its barbed wire tangles, were entirely ineffective against Gomez and Maceo and other leaders, all of whom crossed it at their own sweet will, although not without an occasional vicious little contest.  We reached Ciego de Avila soon after noon, and had to wait there over night for a further advance.  The place is now a thriving little city, but it was then a somewhat sprawling village with a building that was called a hotel.  But we got food and drink and beds, all that is really necessary for experienced campaigners.  For the next two days, Old Man Trouble made himself our personal companion and did not lose sight of us for a single minute.

Through personal acquaintance with the railway officials, we obtained permission to travel over the line, on any and all trains, as far as it was then built, some forty miles or so toward Camaguey.  Through them, also, we arranged for saddle horses to meet us at railhead for the remainder of the journey.  There were no trains except construction trains carrying rails, ties, lumber, and other materials.  We boarded the first one out in the morning.  We had our choice of riding on any of those commodities that we might select.  There was not even a caboose.  We chose a car of lumber as the most promising.  For four or five hours we crawled through that country, roasting and broiling on that pile of planks, but the ties and the rails were even hotter.  The only way we could keep a place cool enough to sit on was by sitting on it.  I once occupied a stateroom next to the steamer’s funnel.  I have seen, day after day, the pitch bubble between the planks of a steamer’s deck in the Indian Ocean.  I have been in other places that I thought plenty hot enough, but never have I been so thoroughly cooked as were my companion and I perched on the lumber pile.  On top of that, or rather on top of us, there poured a constant rain of cinders from the locomotive puffing away a few cars ahead of us.  The road-bed was rough, and at times we had to hang on for our very lives.  We can laugh about it now, but, at the time, it was no joke.  At last we reached the end of the line, somewhere in a hot Cuban forest, but there were no horses.  We watched the operation of railway building, and took turns in anathematizing, in every language of which we had any knowledge, the abandoned ruffian who failed to appear with those horses.  Before night, we were almost ready to wish that he had died on the way.  At last he came.  Our baggage was loaded on a pack-horse; we mounted and rode gallantly on our way.  We had about thirty miles to cover by that or some other means of locomotion.  Before we had gone a mile, we developed a clear understanding of the reasons for the sale of those horses by the Government of the United States, but why the United States Army ever bought them for cavalry mounts we could not even imagine.