* * * * *

At head-quarters began the central lane of death that led toward San Juan, and Basil picked his way through it at a slow walk—­his excitement gone for the moment and his heart breaking at the sight of the terrible procession on its way to the rear.  Men with arms in slings; men with trousers torn away at the knee, and bandaged legs; men with brow, face, mouth, or throat swathed; men with no shirts, but a broad swathe around the chest or stomach—­each bandage grotesquely pictured with human figures printed to show how the wound should be bound, on whatever part of the body the bullet entered.  Men staggering along unaided, or between two comrades, or borne on litters, some white and quiet, some groaning and blood-stained, some conscious, some dying, some using a rifle for a support, or a stick thrust through the side of a tomato-can.  Rolls, haversacks, blouses, hardtack, bibles, strewn by the wayside, where the soldiers had thrown them before they went into action.  It was curious, but nearly all of the wounded were dazed and drunken in appearance, except at the brows, which were tightly drawn with pain.  There was one man, with short, thick, upright red hair, stumbling from one side of the road to the other, with no wound apparent, and muttering: 

“Oh, I don’t know what happened to me.  I don’t know what happened to me.”

Another, hopping across the creek on one leg—­the other bare and wounded—­and using his gun, muzzle down, as a vaulting-pole.  Another, with his arm in the sling, pointing out the way.

“Take this road,” he said.  “I don’t know where that one goes, but I know this one.  I went up this one, and brought back a souvenir,” he added, cheerily, shaking a bloody arm.

And everywhere men were cautioning him to beware of the guerillas, who were in the trees, adding horror to the scene—­shooting wounded men on litters, hospital men, doctors.  Once, there was almost the horror of a panic in the crowded road.  Soldiers answered the guerilla fire from the road; men came running back; bullets spattered around.

Ahead, the road was congested with soldiers.  Beyond them was anchored the balloon, over the Bloody Ford—­drawing the Spanish fire to the troops huddled beneath it.  There was the death-trap.

And, climbing from an ambulance to mount his horse, a little, bent old man, weak and trembling from fever, but with his gentle blue eyes glinting fire—­Basil’s hero—­ex-Confederate Jerry Carter.

“Give the Yanks hell, boys,” he shouted.

* * * * *

It had been a slow, toilsome march up that narrow lane of death, and, so far, Crittenden had merely been sprinkled with Mauser and shrapnel.  His regiment had begun to deploy to the left, down the bed of a stream.  The negro cavalry and the Rough Riders were deploying to the right.  Now broke the storm.  Imagine sheet after sheet of hailstones, coated with polished steel, and swerved when close to the earth at a sharp angle to the line of descent, and sweeping the air horizontally with an awful hiss—­swifter in flight than a peal of thunder from sky to earth, and hardly less swift than the lightning flash that caused it.