“You lie!” Channing shouted, staggering.  “You lie!  You’re a damned coward.  You lie!” He heard his voice repeating this in different places at greater distances.  Then the cloud closed about him, shutting out the man in the saddle, and the glaring, inscrutable mountains, and the ground at his feet rose and struck him in the face.

Channing knew he was on a boat because it lifted and sank with him, and he could hear the rush of her engines.  When he opened his eyes he was in the wheel-house of the Three Friends, and her captain was at the wheel, smiling down at him.  Channing raised himself on his elbow.

“The despatch-rider?” he asked.

“That’s all right,” said the captain, soothingly.  “Don’t you worry.  He come along same time you fell, and brought you out to us.  What ailed you—­sunstroke?”

Channing sat up.  “I guess so,” he said.

When the Three Friends reached Port Antonio, Channing sought out the pile of coffee-bags on which he slept at night and dropped upon them.  Before this he had been careful to avoid the place in the daytime, so that no one might guess that it was there that he slept at night, but this day he felt that if he should drop in the gutter he would not care whether anyone saw him there or not.  His limbs were hot and heavy and refused to support him, his bones burned like quicklime.

The next morning, with the fever still upon him, he hurried restlessly between the wharves and the cable-office, seeking for news.  There was much of it; it was great and trying news, the situation outside of Santiago was grim and critical.  The men who had climbed San Juan Hill were clinging to it like sailors shipwrecked on a reef unwilling to remain, but unable to depart.  If they attacked the city Cervera promised to send it crashing about their ears.  They would enter Santiago only to find it in ruins.  If they abandoned the hill, 2,000 killed and wounded would have been sacrificed in vain.

The war-critics of the press-boats and of the Twitchell House saw but two courses left open.  Either Sampson must force the harbor and destroy the squadron, and so make it possible for the army to enter the city, or the army must be reinforced with artillery and troops in sufficient numbers to make it independent of Sampson and indifferent to Cervera.

On the night of July 2d, a thousand lies, a thousand rumors, a thousand prophecies rolled through the streets of Port Antonio, were filed at the cable-office, and flashed to the bulletin-boards of New York City.

That morning, so they told, the batteries on Morro Castle had sunk three of Sampson’s ships; the batteries on Morro Castle had surrendered to Sampson; General Miles with 8,000 reinforcements had sailed from Charleston; eighty guns had started from Tampa Bay, they would occupy the mountains opposite Santiago and shell the Spanish fleet; the authorities at Washington had at last consented to allow Sampson to run the forts and mines, and attack the Spanish fleet; the army had not been fed for two days, the Spaniards had cut it off from its base at Siboney; the army would eat its Fourth of July dinner in the Governor’s Palace; the army was in full retreat; the army was to attack at daybreak.