“Of course the dogs of war weren’t a complete pack without a yelp from the San Augustine Rifles, Company D, of the Fourteenth Texas Regiment.  Our company was among the first to land in Cuba and strike terror into the hearts of the foe.  I’m not going to give you a history of the war, I’m just dragging it in to fill out my story about Willie Robbins, just as the Republican party dragged it in to help out the election in 1898.

“If anybody ever had heroitis, it was that Willie Robbins.  From the minute he set foot on the soil of the tyrants of Castile he seemed to engulf danger as a cat laps up cream.  He certainly astonished every man in our company, from the captain up.  You’d have expected him to gravitate naturally to the job of an orderly to the colonel, or typewriter in the commissary—­but not any.  He created the part of the flaxen-haired boy hero who lives and gets back home with the goods, instead of dying with an important despatch in his hands at his colonel’s feet.

“Our company got into a section of Cuban scenery where one of the messiest and most unsung portions of the campaign occurred.  We were out every day capering around in the bushes, and having little skirmishes with the Spanish troops that looked more like kind of tired-out feuds than anything else.  The war was a joke to us, and of no interest to them.  We never could see it any other way than as a howling farce-comedy that the San Augustine Rifles were actually fighting to uphold the Stars and Stripes.  And the blamed little senors didn’t get enough pay to make them care whether they were patriots or traitors.  Now and then somebody would get killed.  It seemed like a waste of life to me.  I was at Coney Island when I went to New York once, and one of them down-hill skidding apparatuses they call ‘roller-coasters’ flew the track and killed a man in a brown sack-suit.  Whenever the Spaniards shot one of our men, it struck me as just about as unnecessary and regrettable as that was.

“But I’m dropping Willie Robbins out of the conversation.

“He was out for bloodshed, laurels, ambition, medals, recommendations, and all other forms of military glory.  And he didn’t seem to be afraid of any of the recognized forms of military danger, such as Spaniards, cannon-balls, canned beef, gunpowder, or nepotism.  He went forth with his pallid hair and china-blue eyes and ate up Spaniards like you would sardines a la canopy.  Wars and rumbles of wars never flustered him.  He would stand guard-duty, mosquitoes, hardtack, treat, and fire with equally perfect unanimity.  No blondes in history ever come in comparison distance of him except the Jack of Diamonds and Queen Catherine of Russia.

“I remember, one time, a little caballard of Spanish men sauntered out from behind a patch of sugar-cane and shot Bob Turner, the first sergeant of our company, while we were eating dinner.  As required by the army regulations, we fellows went through the usual tactics of falling into line, saluting the enemy, and loading and firing, kneeling.