the flash of trailing phosphorescent foam; a clear sky, full of stars—­the mountains clear and radiant through sunlit vapours; camp-fires shooting flames into the darkness, and men and guns moving past them.  Through it all he could feel his legs moving and his feet tramping, tramping, tramping through long green grass.  Sometimes he was tramping toward the figure of a woman, whose face looked like Judith’s; and tramp as he could, he could never get close enough through that grass to know whether it was Judith or not.  But usually it was a hill that he was tramping toward, and then his foothold was good; and while he went slowly he got forward and he reached the hill, and he climbed it to a queer-looking little block-house on top, from which queer-looking little blue men were running.  And now and then one would drop and not get up again.  And by and by came his time to drop.  Then he would begin all over again, or he would go back to the coast, which he preferred to do, in spite of his aching wound, and the long wait in the hospital and the place where poor Reynolds was tossed into the air and into fragments by a shell; in spite of the long walk back to Siboney, the graves of the Rough Riders and the scuttling land-crabs; and the heat and the smells.  Then he would march back again to the trenches in his dream, as he had done in Cuba when he got out of the hospital.  There was the hill up which he had charged.  It looked like the abode of cave-dwellers—­so burrowed was it with bomb-proofs.  He could hear the shouts of welcome as his comrades, and men who had never spoken to him before, crowded about him.

How often he lived through that last proud little drama of his soldier life!  There was his Captain wounded, and there was the old Sergeant—­the “Governor”—­with chevrons and a flag.

“You’re a Sergeant, Crittenden,” said the Captain.

He, Crittenden, in blood and sympathy the spirit of secession—­bearer now of the Stars and Stripes!  How his heart thumped, and how his head reeled when he caught the staff and looked dumbly up to the folds; and in spite of all his self-control, the tears came, as they came again and again in his delirium.

Right at that moment there was a great bustle in camp.  And still holding that flag, Crittenden marched with his company up to the trenches.  There was the army drawn up at parade, in a great ten-mile half-circle and facing Santiago.  There were the red roofs of the town, and the batteries, which were to thunder word when the red and yellow flag of defeat went down and the victorious Stars and Stripes rose up.  There were little men in straw hats and blue clothes coming from Santiago, and swinging hammocks and tethering horses in an open field, while more little men in Panama hats were advancing on the American trenches, saluting courteously.  And there were American officers jumping across the trenches to meet them, and while they were shaking hands, on the very stroke