It was hard for him to believe that he really was going to war, even now, when the long sail was near an end and the ships were running fearlessly along the big, grim coast-mountains of Cuba, with bands playing and colors to the breeze; hard to realize that he was not to land in peace and safety and, in peace and safety, go back as he came; that a little further down those gashed mountains, showing ever clearer through the mist, were men with whom the quiet officers and men around him would soon be in a death-grapple.  The thought stirred him, and he looked around at the big, strong fellows—­intelligent, orderly, obedient, good-natured, and patient; patient, restless, and sick as they were from the dreadful hencoop life they had led for so many days—­patient beyond words.  He had risen early that morning.  The rose light over the eastern water was whitening, and all over the deck his comrades lay asleep, their faces gray in the coming dawn and their attitudes suggesting ghastly premonitions—­premonitions that would come true fast enough for some of the poor fellows—­perhaps for him.  Stepping between and over the prostrate bodies, he made his way forward and leaned over the prow, with his hat in his hand and his hair blowing back from his forehead.

Already his face had suffered a change.  For more than three long weeks he had been merely a plain man among plain men.  At once when he became Private Crittenden, No. 63, Company C, —­th United States Regular Cavalry, at Tampa, he was shorn of his former estate as completely as though in the process he had been wholly merged into some other man.  The officers, at whose table he had once sat, answered his salute precisely as they answered any soldier’s.  He had seen Rivers but seldom—­but once only on the old footing, and that was on the night he went on board, when Rivers came to tell him good-by and to bitterly bemoan the luck that, as was his fear from the beginning, had put him among the ill-starred ones chosen to stay behind at Tampa and take care of the horses; as hostlers, he said, with deep disgust, adding hungrily: 

“I wish I were in your place.”

With the men, Crittenden was popular, for he did his work thoroughly, asked no favors, shirked no duties.  There were several officers’ sons among them working for commissions, and, naturally, he drifted to them, and he found them all good fellows.  Of Blackford, he was rather wary, after Rivers’s short history of him, but as he was friendly, unselfish, had a high sense of personal honour, and a peculiar reverence for women, Crittenden asked no further questions, and was sorry, when he came back to Tampa, to find him gone with the Rough Riders.  With Reynolds, he was particularly popular, and he never knew that the story of the Tampa fight had gone to all the line officers of the regiment, and that nearly every one of them knew him by sight and knew his history.  Only once from an officer, however, and steadily always