It was cruelly hot.  The heat-waves flashed over the sea until the transports in the harbor quivered like pictures on a biograph.  From the refuse of company kitchens, from reeking huts, from thousands of empty cans, rose foul, enervating odors, which deadened the senses like a drug.  The atmosphere steamed with a heavy, moist humidity.  Channing staggered and sank down suddenly on a pile of railroad-ties in front of the commissary’s depot.  There were some Cubans seated near him, dividing their Government rations, and the sight reminded him that he had had nothing to eat.  He walked over to the wide door of the freight-depot, where a white-haired, kindly faced, and perspiring officer was, with his own hands, serving out canned beef to a line of Cubans.  The officer’s flannel shirt was open at the throat.  The shoulder-straps of a colonel were fastened to it by safety-pins.  Channing smiled at him uneasily.

“Could I draw on you for some rations?” he asked.  “I’m from the Three Friends.  I’m not one of their regular accredited correspondents,” he added, conscientiously, “I’m just helping them for to-day.”

“Haven’t you got a correspondent’s pass?” asked the officer.  He was busily pouring square hardtack down the throat of a saddle-bag a Cuban soldier held open before him.

“No,” said Channing, turning away, “I’m just helping.”

The officer looked after him, and what he saw caused him to reach under the counter for a tin cup and a bottle of lime-juice.

“Here,” he said, “drink this.  What’s the matter with you—­fever?  Come in here out of that sun.  You can lie down on my cot, if you like.”

Channing took the tin cup and swallowed a warm mixture of boiled water and acrid lime-juice.

“Thank you,” he said, “but I must keep watch for the first news from the front.”

A man riding a Government mule appeared on the bridge of the lower trail, and came toward them at a gallop.  He was followed and surrounded by a hurrying mob of volunteers, hospital stewards, and Cubans.

The Colonel vaulted the counter and ran to meet him.

“This looks like news from the front now,” he cried.

The man on the mule was from civil life.  His eyes bulged from their sockets and his face was purple.  The sweat ran over it and glistened on the cords of his thick neck.

“They’re driving us back!” he shrieked.

“Chaffee’s killed, an’ Roosevelt’s killed, an’ the whole army’s beaten!” He waved his arms wildly toward the glaring, inscrutable mountains.  The volunteers and stevedores and Cubans heard him, open-mouthed and with panic-stricken eyes.  In the pitiless sunlight he was a hideous and awful spectacle.

“They’re driving us into the sea!” he foamed.

“We’ve got to get out of here, they’re just behind me.  The army’s running for its life.  They’re running away!”

Channing saw the man dimly, through a cloud that came between him and the yellow sunlight.  The man in the saddle swayed, the group about him swayed, like persons on the floor of a vast ball-room.  Inside he burned with a mad, fierce hatred for this shrieking figure in the saddle.  He raised the tin cup and hurled it so that it hit the man’s purple face.