And all the time the sound of ripping cloth was rolling over from Caney, the far-away rumble of wagons over cobble-stones, or softened stage hail and stage thunder around the block-house, stone fort, and town.  At first it was a desultory fire, like the popping of a bunch of fire-crackers that have to be relighted several times, and Basil and Grafton, galloping toward it, could hear the hiss of bullets that far away.  But, now and then, the fire was as steady as a Gatling-gun.  Behind them the artillery had turned on the stone fort, and Grafton saw one shot tear a hole through the wall, then another, and another.  He could see Spaniards darting from the fort and taking refuge in the encircling stone-cut trenches; and then nothing else—­for their powder was smokeless—­except the straw hats of the little devils in blue, who blazed away from their trenches around the fort and minded the shells bursting over and around them as little as though they had been bursting snowballs.  If the boy ahead noted anything, Grafton could not tell.  Basil turned his head neither to right nor left, and at the foot of the muddy hill, the black horse that he rode, without touch of spur, seemed suddenly to leave the earth and pass on out of sight with the swift silence of a shadow.  At the foot of a hill walked the first wounded man—­a Colonel limping between two soldiers.  The Colonel looked up smiling—­he had a terrible wound in the groin.

“Well,” he called cheerily, “I’m the first victim.”

Grafton wondered.  Was it possible that men were going to behave on a battlefield just as they did anywhere else—­just as naturally—­taking wounds and death and horror as a matter of course?  Beyond were more wounded—­the wounded who were able to help themselves.  Soon he saw them lying by the roadside, here and there a dead one; by and by, he struck a battalion marching to storm a block-house.  He got down, hitched his horse a few yards from the road and joined it.  He was wondering how it would feel to be under fire, when just as they were crossing another road, with a whir and whistle and buzz, a cloud of swift insects buzzed over his head.  Unconsciously imitating the soldiers near him, he bent low and walked rapidly.  Right and left of him sounded two or three low, horrible crunching noises, and right and left of him two or three blue shapes sank limply down on their faces.  A sudden sickness seized him, nauseating him like a fetid odour—­the crunching noise was the sound of a bullet crashing into a living human skull as the men bent forward.  One man, he remembered afterward, dropped with the quick grunt of an animal—­he was killed outright; another gave a gasping cry, “Oh, God”—­there was a moment of suffering consciousness for him; a third hopped aside into the bushes—­cursing angrily.  Still another, as he passed, looked up from the earth at him with a curious smile, as though he were half ashamed of something.