After all, it was less the actual bits of fighting that cleared into memories of permanence, than certain subtleties of the campaign:  a particular instant of one swift twilight, as in the plaza at Alphonso; a certain moment of a furious mid-day, when the sun was a python pressure, so that the scalp prickled with the congested blood in the brain, and men lifted their hats an inch or two as they rode, preserving the shade, but permitting the air to circulate; some guttural curse from a packer who could not lift his voice in the heat, nor think, but only curse, and grin in sickly fashion....

There were moments, reminders of which awoke Cairns in a sweat for many nights afterward:  One day when he was badly in need of a fresh mount, he saw just ahead of the Train—­a perfect little sorrel stallion fastened to the edge of the trail.  He dismounted to change saddles.  The Train was straggling along under an occasional fire.  Cairns found that the pony was held by a tough wire, that led into the jungle.  Such was the braiding at the throat, that only a sapper could have handled it.  The correspondent started to follow the wire into the thicket—­when Bedient caught him by the shoulder and half-lifted him from the ground.  There was strength in that slim tanned hand that had nothing to do with the ordinary force of men.  The cook smiled, but disdained explanation.  It all dawned upon Cairns a second later.  He would have followed the wire to the end in the jungle—­where the trap of knives would spring....  The bolo-men need but a moment....  It was only two or three days later that one of the packers dropped behind the Train to tighten a cinch.  No one had noticed, and Thirteen filed on.

“For Christ’s sake—­don’t!” they heard from behind.

Wheeling, they found that the man had seen the end—­as he had called out in that horrible echoing voice.  He was not more than fifty yards behind the rear packer—­and pinned to the trail.  A bolo had been hammered with a stone—­through the upper lip and the base of the brain, two or three inches into the earth....  He had been butchered besides.

At the end of a terrific ten days, Thirteen was crawling at nightfall into the large garrison at Lipa.  Men and mules had been lost in the recent gruelling service.  The trails and the miles had been long and hard; much hunger and thirst, and there was hell in the hearts of men this night.  Even Bedient was shaking with fatigue; and Cairns beside him, felt that there wasn’t the brain of a babe in his skull.  His saddle seemed filled with spikes.  His spur was gone, and for hours he had kept his half-dead, lolling-tongued pony on the way, by frequent jabbing from a broken lead-pencil....  And here was Lipa at last, the second Luzon town, and a corral for the mules.  As they passed a nipa-shack, at the outer edge, a sound of music came softly forth.  Some native was playing one of the queer Filipino mandolins.  The Train pushed on, without Cairns and Bedient.  All the famine and foulness and fever lifted from these two.  They forgot blood and pain and glaring suns.  The early stars changed to lily-gardens, vast and white and beautiful, and their eyes dulled with dreams.