Now the distant firing broke out again, and briskly.
"The Moro fiends are trying to rush the planter's house before help can reach him!" muttered Lieutenant Prescott to himself. "We'll spoil some of the joy of those savages when we get close enough to send them a raking volley. I hope they're lined up so that we can give them a flank fire before the scoundrels know that we're on the ground at all."
Two miles covered, then a third was left behind.
Now, a nervous or too eager commander might have hurried his men over the remaining ground, but Prescott, at West Point, had been taught the value of cool, deliberate work.
It was noticeable, however, that now the men marched along with more spirit and swing. Those who may have been secretly nervous were at least certain that soon their suspense would be over. A few minutes, and they would be engaged in something more definite than merely tramping in the direction of danger.
Suddenly Corporal Cotter halted his men, and the same gesture was visible at the head of the column behind.
"Softly," whispered Lieutenant Prescott, but his gesture carried further than did his voice. The main column closed slowly up with the "point."
"I couldn't go further, sir, without running into those fellows yonder," whispered the corporal. "I didn't know that you would want me to do it."
Cotter pointed through the rows of trees to a clearing beyond.
In the center of the clearing stood a little building—plainly the schoolhouse in which the few white children on the plantation and probably many native children of the neighborhood were taught, five days in the week, by some clear-eyed Yankee schoolma'am furnished by Uncle Sam's Government.