They were willing to face Spanish bullets, but they were afraid of the dynamite gun. They thought it was just as dangerous at one end as at the other. It is an odd looking piece of artillery, having two tubes, or barrels, one above the other. It throws a long cartridge or shell, similar in shape, but not so large as those used on the Vesuvius, about which I have told you. One day Sergeant Borrowe volunteered to manage the gun that the rest of the men were afraid of. They let him have it, and he did splendid work with it.
Another famous gun in the fighting before Santiago was gun No. 2, of Captain Capron's battery. Captain Capron was the father of the young man who was killed in the battle of Las Guasimas. No guns did more effective work than his, unless it was Parker's Gatlings, and one shot from this No. 2 is said to have killed sixteen Spaniards at one time. After the battery returned to the United States, Lieutenant Henly, after saying that the battery was in every battle on Cuban soil except that at Las Guasimas, continued:
"We were peculiarly fortunate in escaping the bullets. The only man killed in our battery was a horse—I suppose we can count him as a man. At El Caney, we were directed to support the infantry in an attack on several blockhouses and a stone fort. We were twenty-four hundred yards away and soon got the range. The first shot was fired by Corporal Williams. Corporal Neff fired the shot that brought down the Spanish flag. We pounded a hole in the fort and the infantry went through it."
A young soldier who was wounded at San Juan told this story:
"My company got mixed up in the charge, and I pushed on with the Thirteenth Regulars. When we reached the top of the hill, some of us took shelter in a blockhouse and began firing from there at the opposite hills. There wasn't one of the enemy in sight unless you count dead ones, so we blazed away at nothing at all, for awhile. But they had us dead in range, and it was no dream the way their bullets played around us.
The Famous No. 2 Gun.
"One of the bravest things I saw in the war happened right here. An officer came up—he was a major of regulars—I don't know his regiment—and he saw that we didn't know what to aim at, and were getting a little rattled. So what did he do but quickly walk out in front of the blockhouse where the bullets were coming thickest, and proceed to study the hills with his field-glass, just as unconcerned as you please. And every now and then he would call to us who were inside, 'Men, sight at eight hundred yards and sweep the grass on the ridge of the hill'; or, again: 'Men, I can see the Spaniards over there; try a thousand-yard range and see if you can't get some of them. Fire low!' I never saw such nerve as that officer had; he'd have stirred courage in everybody."
"Didn't he get hit?" he was asked.