Another, hopping across the creek on one leg—the other bare and wounded—and using his gun, muzzle down, as a vaulting-pole. Another, with his arm in the sling, pointing out the way.
"Take this road," he said. "I don't know where that one goes, but I know this one. I went up this one, and brought back a souvenir," he added, cheerily, shaking a bloody arm.
And everywhere men were cautioning him to beware of the guerillas, who were in the trees, adding horror to the scene—shooting wounded men on litters, hospital men, doctors. Once, there was almost the horror of a panic in the crowded road. Soldiers answered the guerilla fire from the road; men came running back; bullets spattered around.
Ahead, the road was congested with soldiers. Beyond them was anchored the balloon, over the Bloody Ford—drawing the Spanish fire to the troops huddled beneath it. There was the death-trap.
And, climbing from an ambulance to mount his horse, a little, bent old man, weak and trembling from fever, but with his gentle blue eyes glinting fire—Basil's hero—ex-Confederate Jerry Carter.
"Give the Yanks hell, boys," he shouted.
It had been a slow, toilsome march up that narrow lane of death, and, so far, Crittenden had merely been sprinkled with Mauser and shrapnel. His regiment had begun to deploy to the left, down the bed of a stream. The negro cavalry and the Rough Riders were deploying to the right. Now broke the storm. Imagine sheet after sheet of hailstones, coated with polished steel, and swerved when close to the earth at a sharp angle to the line of descent, and sweeping the air horizontally with an awful hiss—swifter in flight than a peal of thunder from sky to earth, and hardly less swift than the lightning flash that caused it.
"T-t-seu-u-u-h! T-t-seu-oo! T-t-seu-oo!"—they went like cloud after cloud of lightning-winged insects, and passing, by God's mercy and the Spaniard's bad marksmanship—passing high. Between two crashes, came a sudden sputter, and some singing thing began to play up and down through the trees, and to right and left, in a steady hum. It was a machine gun playing for the range—like a mighty hose pipe, watering earth and trees with a steady, spreading jet of hot lead. It was like some strange, huge monster, unseeing and unseen, who knows where his prey is hidden and is searching for it blindly—by feeling or by sense of smell—coming ever nearer, showering the leaves down, patting into the soft earth ahead, swishing to right and to left, and at last playing in a steady stream about the prostrate soldiers.
"Swish-ee! Swish-ee! Swishee!"