It smote Reynolds as he sat by the creek under the guns before San Juan, idly watching water bubble into three canteens, and it opened his lips for an oath that he was too lazy to speak; it smote Abe Long cooking coffee on the bank some ten yards away, and made him raise from the fire and draw first one long forearm and then the other across his heat-wrinkled brow; but, unheeded, it smote Crittenden—­who stood near, leaning against a palm-tree—­full in his uplifted face.  Perhaps that was the last sunrise on earth for him.  He was watching it in Cuba, but his spirit was hovering around home.  He could feel the air from the woods in front of Canewood; could hear the darkies going to work and Aunt Keziah singing in the kitchen.  He could see his mother’s shutter open, could see her a moment later, smiling at him from her door.  And Judith—­where was she, and what was she doing?  Could she be thinking of him?  The sound of his own name coming down through the hot air made him start, and, looking up toward the Rough Riders, who were gathered about a little stuccoed farm-house just behind the guns on the hill, he saw Blackford waving at him.  At the same moment hoofs beat the dirt-road behind him—­familiar hoof-beats—­and he turned to see Basil and Raincrow—­for Crittenden’s Colonel was sick with fever and Basil had Raincrow now—­on their way with a message to Chaffee at Caney.  Crittenden saluted gravely, as did Basil, though the boy turned in his saddle, and with an affectionate smile waved back at him.

Crittenden’s lips moved.

“God bless him.”

* * * * *

“Fire!”

Over on the hill, before Caney, a man with a lanyard gave a quick jerk.  There was a cap explosion at the butt of the gun and a bulging white cloud from the muzzle; the trail bounced from its shallow trench, the wheels whirled back twice on the rebound, and the shell was hissing through the air as iron hisses when a blacksmith thrusts it red-hot into cold water.  Basil could hear that awful hiss so plainly that he seemed to be following the shell with his naked eye; he could hear it above the reverberating roar of the gun up and down the coast-mountain; hear it until, six seconds later, a puff of smoke answered beyond the Spanish column where the shell burst.  Then in eight seconds—­for the shell travelled that much faster than sound—­the muffled report of its bursting struck his ears, and all that was left of the first shot that started the great little fight was the thick, sunlit smoke sweeping away from the muzzle of the gun and the little mist-cloud of the shell rising slowly upward beyond the stone fort, which seemed not to know any harm was possible or near.

* * * * *

Again Crittenden, leaning against the palm, heard his name called.  Again it was Blackford who was opening his mouth to shout some message when—­Ah!  The shout died on Blackford’s lips, and every man on the hill and in the woods, at that instant, stayed his foot and his hand—­even a man standing with a gray horse against the blue wall—­he, too, stopped to listen.  It really sounded too dull and muffled for a shell; but, a few seconds later, there was a roar against the big walls of living green behind Caney.