This Camagueyan boy was a character.  He was perhaps sixteen, and small for his age—­a mere child, in fact.  Nevertheless, he was a seasoned veteran, and his American camp-mates had grown exceedingly fond of him.  He was a pretty, graceful youngster; his eyes were large and soft and dark; his face was as sensitive and mobile as that of a girl; and yet, despite his youth, he had won a reputation for daring and ferocity quite as notable in its way as was the renown of Leslie Branch.

There were many of these immature soldiers among the Insurrectos, and most of them were in some way distinguished for valor.  War, it seems, fattens upon the tenderest of foods, and every army has its boys—­its wondrous, well-beloved infants, whom their older comrades tease, torment, and idolize.  Impetuous, drunk with youth, and keeping no company with care, they form the very aristocracy of fighting forces.  They gaily undertake the maddest of adventures; and by their examples they fire the courage of their maturer comrades.  All history is spiced with their exploits.

Jacket was one of these, and he was perhaps the truest patriot of any soldier in Miguel Lopez’s band; for liberty, to him, was not a mere abstraction or a principle, but something real, tangible, alive—­something worthy of the highest sacrifice.  In his person all the wrongs of Cuba burned perpetually.  It mattered not that he himself had never suffered—­his spirit was the spirit of his country, pure, exalted, undefiled.  He stood for what the others fought for.

In order to expand his knowledge of English—­of which, by the way, he was inordinately proud—­Jacket had volunteered to serve as O’Reilly’s striker, and the result had been a fast friendship.  It was O’Reilly who had given the boy his nickname—­a name prompted by a marked eccentricity, for although Jacket possessed the two garments which constituted the ordinary Insurrecto uniform, he made a practice of wearing only one.  On chilly nights, or on formal occasions, he wore both waistcoat and trousers, but at other times he dispensed entirely with the latter, and his legs went naked.  They were naked now, as, with the modesty of complete unconsciousness, he squatted in the shade, puffing thoughtfully at his giant cheroot.

Once Jacket’s mind was fastened upon any subject, it remained there, and after a time he continued: 

“Yes, I bet I don’t taste good to no Spaniard.  Did I told you about that battle of Pino Bravo?  Eh?” He turned his big brown eyes upward to O’Reilly.  “Cristo!  I skill more’n a dozen men that day!”

“Oh, Jacket!” the Americans cried.  “You monstrous little liar!” commented O’Reilly.

“Si, senors,” the boy went on, complacently.  “That day I skill more’n six men.  It was this way; we came on them from behind and they don’t see us.  Phui!  We skill plenty, all right!”

“It was a hot scrimmage,” Judson attested.  “Some of Luque’s niggers, those tall, lean, hungry fellows from Santiago, managed to hack their way through a wire fence and get behind a detachment of the enemy who had made a stand under a hill.  They charged, and for a wonder they got close enough to use their machetes.  It was bloody work—­the kind you read about—­no quarter.  Somehow Jacket managed to be right in the middle of the butchery.  He’s a bravo kid, all right.  Muy malo!”