Our thoughts were with our comrade as we served the gun, and when word came a few moments later that he was doing fairly well, we could hardly repress a cheer.
There was little time, however, for displaying emotion. We were right in the thick of the fight, and the "Yankee's" battery was being worked to the limit. It seemed as if the air fairly reeled with the noise and clamor of combat. Shells buzzed and shrieked about us, and smoke gathered in thick, stifling clouds all about the ship.
While we were laboring, stripped to the waist, and trying our utmost to disable or sink the Spanish gunboat, an incident was occurring on deck which seemed more fitted for the pages of a novel than those of a story of facts.
It was a display of daredevil courage seldom equalled in warfare.
The lad whom we familiarly termed the "Kid" was the central figure and the hero. The diary of No. 5 of the after port gun, from which this narrative is taken, says of him: "'Kid' Thompson is the ship's human mascot and all-round favorite with officers and men. His bump of respect is a depression, but his fund of ready wit and his unvarying good nature are irresistible. He is eighteen years of age, and is a 'powder monkey' on Number Sixteen, a six-pounder on the spar deck. This gun and Number Fifteen were the last to obey the order to cease firing during the bombardment of Santiago."
During the fight with the Spanish gunboat it chanced that the port battery was not engaged for a brief period, so the "Kid," with the rest of Number Sixteen crew, were at rest. To better see the shooting the "Kid" climbed upon the after wheel-house roof. The shells from the gunboat and the forts were dropping all around, fore and aft, port and starboard; they whistled through the rigging, and exploded in every direction, sending their fragments in a veritable hail of metal on all sides.
The fact that the "Yankee" had so far escaped injury aroused in the "Kid's" breast a feeling of the utmost contempt for the Spanish gunners. Coolly standing upon his feet, he assumed the pose of a baseball player, and holding a capstan bar in his hands, called out tauntingly:
"Here, you dagoes, give me a low ball, will you? Put 'em over the plate!"
As a shell would fly past with a shriek, he would strike at it, shouting at the same time:
"Put 'em over the plate, I say. Do you expect me to walk up to the fo'c's'le to get a rap at 'em? Hi, there! wake up!"