Part Four: Bracken

PART FOUR

BRACKEN

Cuba

Summer, 1898

1

WHEN HE WAS VERY YOUNG AND SOMEWHAT GIVEN TO HERO-WORSHIP, Bracken had been inclined to feel hard done by that there was so much peace in the world and hence so little opportunity for him to distinguish himself as an intrepid Special scoring endless scoops as he was sure his father had always done during the war between the North and South. When he happened to mention this state of mind to Cabot, he was taken severely to task and informed that any correspondent during the late hostilities who had thought only of beating the other papers to a good headline was usually guilty of giving information to the enemy and deserved to be shot like a spy.

And then Cabot’s ears got red and his oratory had suddenly run down, as he remembered with a shock of real surprise, after all these years, that the word Spy was pretty personal to himself and might be better left out of the discussion.

Now Bracken had got his own war. He viewed it with mixed feelings, where only a short time ago it would have caused him undiluted joy. He and Cabot had so far regarded the Cuban rebellion hard-headedly, without any glorifying mist of the traditional ready-made American sympathy for any life-and-death struggle anywhere for the thing called Liberty. They recognized clearly that, unlike the wars in which their family had taken part in the past, it had been agitated by expatriates, politicians, and financial interests without many altruistic spirits among them. They had beheld with disgust the cheap sensationalism of the American yellow press, and had retreated from it into a perhaps too Olympian detachment.

Bracken’s own experience in Cuba had changed that viewpoint. He had seen for himself the most sickening evidence of barbarism on both sides. He

had come back convinced that after two years of insurgent activity famine would have been imminent anyway, even without the Spanish reprisals. He resented the success with which the sponsors of the patriot cause had contrived to pin the responsibility for suffering entirely on the Spanish Army. He believed that by pouring food and supplies into the island America might nullify the starvation tactics of both sides and bring about a solution without resorting to armed intervention. There had already been fighting enough, of the sort which he considered a civilized world had now outgrown. But if Spain hindered the distribution of those supplies, or if no autonomous Cuban government proved strong enough to keep order—then America must go in with bigger guns, bigger ships, a more efficient and harder-hitting military force than anything Spain could put into the field. In any case the thing must be cleaned up. At once.

Before the paper could launch its own campaign along these lines, the Maine went down.

While the Board of Inquiry sifted evidence in the secret sessions on the revenue cutter Mangrove in Havana harbour, the insurgents continued to demonstrate their right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness by burning cane-fields and dynamiting trains within sight of the city. Cabot’s opinion that the insurrectos had blown up the Maine for the sake of the advantages they would reap from American intervention had now been voiced by other reliable sources. The chief question it raised was whether the patriot forces would have had the equipment or the technical knowledge to accomplish such a thing. Bracken bought innumerable drinks for talkative harbour rats and dock workers at Havana, his Spanish improving daily with use as he pursued his investigations into the possibility that the mine had been exploded by a plunger hidden somewhere along the shore and manipulated by one or more insurgents who had then concealed the length of wire which remained and disappeared from the scene. But so far his catch-question, sprung suddenly when the chosen witness was well fuddled and full of bonhomie—What did you do with the wire?—had met only the blank stares of innocence and non-comprehension. Somewhere, Bracken was sure, there was a man who knew what had been done with the wire. And if he said,

“We sank it,” or “It’s in so-and-so’s warehouse”—why, then, the Star was on the right track.

By the time he attended Miles’s birthday party, Bracken was convinced that no matter who had sunk the Maine, as a symptom of the unbridled terrorism and disorder in Cuba it called for drastic action. When he returned to Tampa with Cabot and Fitz the blockade of Havana had begun and the first shot had been fired—at an astonished Spanish merchantman, unaware of war, which had been promptly boarded by a prize crew and brought into Key West.

Everybody rushed down from Tampa to see her, and Fitz was introduced to the dispatch boat, which had been left in charge of the excited cub named Wendell when Bracken went to Williamsburg. The kid had cabled a very fair story about the departure of the Fleet on the night of the twenty-second

—the ships showed no lights except the Ardois signal lamps flashing red and white on the masts, and there was the scurry of launches to and from the outer anchorage seven miles off shore. He had also seen and recorded the capture of the Spaniard outside Key West. He received Cabot’s praise modestly, and would now act as second in command to Fitz, which would leave Bracken free first of all to make a voyage in a torpedo boat as an experience. Davis and Scovel had already snagged the coveted post on the flagship, where they would presumably be completely in the know and see everything.

Fitz’s boat, as she was henceforth known in the family, was a none-too-well-found little sea-going tow-boat with a bold sheer and a speed of ten knots if she was scared. She wore the name of Daisy in black letters on her grimy bow. She was a wet boat, and always flooded her galley in a blow, so that you had to subsist on hardtack and sardines. At other times her black cook broiled a very fine pompano, or made turtle soup, and there was guava jelly or some such tropic delicacy.

She was the best Bracken could do in the scramble back in February when all the newspapers at once had begun to charter all available small craft, and he maintained sourly that she was better than a Key West sponging schooner or a degenerate yacht. She had probably been a filibuster boat running arms to the insurgents before she joined the staff of the Star. It was convenient for a tow-boat to carry unknown cargo to unknown destinations—she could always show a wrecking license if questioned, and say that she was going to a rescue and mustn’t be detained. When she slipped back into port some days later with her coal bunkers empty and

nothing to show for her run it was sometimes awkward for her captain, who in the Daisy’s case was a battered Swede, subject to opportune attacks of deafness on top of knowing very little English.

Whatever her past, the Daisy was now respectable, and was always spoken of without the article. “Take Daisy down to the flagship today,”

Bracken would say, during the lull while the Fleet lay ten miles off Havana with nothing much to do but chase blockade runners and wonder where Cervera had got to. Or—“Daisy and I thought we’d tail the Hearst gang today,” Fitz would remark, and Bracken would jibe at the company they kept.

Fitz was now wearing the correspondent’s regulation blue flannel shirt, khaki breeches and leggings, and wide slouch hat, with the yellow silk handkerchief which was the Star’s badge knotted loosely round his throat.

His life with Daisy was not monotonous. It was their job to keep in touch with the blockading Fleet, remaining at sea for several days at a time till something happened to write about, and then racing for Key West in any kind of weather to reach the cable office.

Unable to exist for long without some form of music, Fitz had acquired a raffish Spanish guitar on which he accompanied himself with melodious effect during the long idle hours at sea. Young Wendell proved to have a very decent bass, and together they recalled all the songs they had ever heard, teaching each other the ones they did not both know. Wendell heard the whole score of the musical comedy and could soon sing it too, and he listened sympathetically to Fitz’s artless talk of Gwen and the surprising fact that she had chosen him, out of all the men she might have married, a pretty girl like that, and hadn’t raised a whimper when he left her in the lurch and came down to run Bracken’s boat for him.

They were known to all the Fleet by their minstrelsy and were welcomed by the other Press boats where everyone was bitterly bored, and they sang their way in and out of Key West and across the Florida Straits and back to the most spontaneous applause. Sometimes Fitz wondered if it was quite dignified, considering the Star and all, but Wendell reminded him that the Boss was not the kind to care about a thing like that so long as they didn’t overlook a story and nobody threw things at them.

Meanwhile Dewey took Manila in the far-off Philippines without a casualty. Cervera was known to have sailed eastward from Cape Verde and

was due off the Atlantic Coast or the West Indies. A state of alarm existed from New England to Hampton Roads, where the flying squadron waited under Commodore Schley.

The Army was concentrating its thousands at Tampa, which had become the centre of interest to the Press after Admiral Sampson steamed out of Key West towards Puerta Rico to look for Cervera there. Tampa had begun to resemble a mammoth county fair, with the tents of the regiments laid out in military streets in the sandy wastes all round the town, and horse dealers from all over the U.S.A. bringing in their wares for sale and parading them before prospective buyers.

It was a crazy place anyhow, a collection of sagging wooden houses built upon sand at the end of a single railway track nine miles inland from its port. Wind-driven sand had worn away the paint from the buildings, sand blew across the sidewalks and buried them, sand seeped in around the doors and windows even when they were shut, sand was in your shoes and in your food and in your eyes.

In a disastrous and half-forgotten real estate enterprise avenues had once been laid out between the scrubby palmettoes and pines festooned with dreary hanging moss, and a large hotel had been built for winter tourists.

The tourists never came. But now the Army and the correspondents and the foreign attaches in their colourful uniforms and the rich Havana refugees had come. It was the most incredible hotel, even if it had not stood fantastically in the middle of a desert—a Byzantine palace built of ornamental brick. It was topped by silvered minarets, and fret-work columns supported its vast verandahs which jutted out in front of round, decorated arches above massive brass-studded doors leading to a colossal lobby and rotunda. Rugs, chairs, stuffed round sofas, potted palms, naked statuary, all strove without success to fill the luxurious void. There were electric lights, and bathrooms, and running water. Richard Harding Davis said it was like a Turkish harem with the occupants left out.

At first, it was true, there had been no women. Everybody gave up white linen and took to flannel shirts and comfortable neckerchiefs and sometimes forgot to shave—everybody but Dick Davis. There was a cheerful conviction that the Army would be moving out within a few days—well, next week at the latest. Time passed, and everybody was still sitting round in the fleet of rocking-chairs on the miles of verandahs, drinking gallons of

iced tea and fanning themselves and greeting old colleagues they had not seen since Geronimo or Wounded Knee or Larissa or the Soudan. But now wives and daughters and sisters and aunts were sprinkled in the rocking-chairs behind the flowering vines, drinking iced tea and fanning themselves.

That was much pleasanter, but it meant the Army was not going to move just yet. Gloomily the white duck suits and dress clothes were dug out of the trunks again, and razors were used. There was dancing in the grand ballroom in the evenings, with music by a regimental band, and coloured lights were strung along the verandahs. Mr. Davis, a cigar in his teeth and a flower in his buttonhole, was heard to remark that war was certainly hell.

By mid-May General Shafter had arrived, in command of the Army. He weighed almost three hundred pounds, and wore a blue woollen uniform and a wide white sun helmet, and suffered visibly from the heat. Ten thousand men were encamped around the town, ankle-deep in dirty sand.

Their water supply was deficient, and there was not enough tents and blankets in good condition. There was a plague of flies and mosquitoes.

Tarantulas and centipedes frolicked through the men’s belongings with malign impudence. Typhoid fever and typhus-malaria were beginning to appear. Supplies, unlabelled; unsorted un-assigned, lacking invoices, filled droves of box-cars stranded all over Florida. Miss Clara Barton arrived, with her Red Cross nurses. General Fitzhugh Lee was there, reminiscing about Havana. English, French, German, Austrian, Russian, and even Japanese attachés matched stories and recalled old acquaintance over their tall, sweating tumblers. And finally Johnny Malone arrived in his regiment, tanned and elated and completely sober, telling in lively detail what he was going to do to the Spaniards. Young Miles Day was still at San Antonio with the Rough Riders. There seemed to be nothing to do in the circumstances, Cabot said, but send for Eden and Virginia, who had remained at Williamsburg waiting to see what would happen. They brought with them suitcases full of frivolous presents and trunks full of beautiful summer clothes, and all the family’s love. A New York mail brought Fitz a letter from Gwen. Rehearsals were going well, and everybody said they had a hit. But if it hadn’t been for the show, he thought, she could have come to Tampa too. Well, no, there was Pa, who still had to be kept. But a Special Correspondent’s salary was big enough….

Then Cervera showed his nose at Martinique, and boats were rushed off after Admiral Sampson to hurry him out in time to intercept the Spanish Fleet before it could make port safely in Cuban waters. It was next heard of at Curaçao, where Dutch neutrality made coaling next to impossible. And then it vanished again on the blue tropical waters.

When Admiral Sampson arrived back at Key West Schley had hurried down from Hampton Roads to join him. The very next day Schley was off again towards Cienfuegos, where Cervera might head in. Fitz and Wendell were on duty with Daisy at Key West, and Bracken stayed at Tampa to sail with the Army. Daisy was to attach herself to whichever transport carried Bracken when they reached Key West, and become his only link with the cable-head at Jamaica. But the Army still could not move until Cervera was found.

He outwitted Schley, who was unduly preoccupied with his own coaling difficulties, and gained the security of Santiago harbour. By the time Sampson arrived there, fuming, Cervera was snug inside. The U.S. Navy cabled for the U.S. Army to come and take Santiago overland, and began to walk up and down off shore, daring Cervera to come out and fight, which he had no intention of doing.

On May thirtieth General Shafter got his orders from Washington to move. After all those weeks in camp the news still exploded at Tampa with the effect of a bombshell. There had been no staff-work on embarkation plans, and Port Tampa had but one pier at the end of that single railway track nine miles long. The harness was not with the artillery carriages, the small arms ammunition was not with the guns, the food was not labelled, the volunteer regiments were mostly without uniforms, equipment, weapons, tents, or blankets, and there was no transport provided for the cavalry horses. Everything promptly dissolved into profane and perspiring confusion and remained there for another solid week. Late on Monday evening, the sixth of June, a caustic War Department received what proved to be an over-optimistic telegram from General Shafter announcing that the men were being marched on board.

2

BRACKEN had laboured conscientiously at a letter to Dinah after the sailing orders came. Each one he wrote became more difficult now, because Dinah was getting older every day and every day his impatience and uncertainty grew. He had had a couple of narrow squeaks already, with Daisy, and going ashore with the troops was not going to be any outing. An attack on Santiago from the hills would hardly go unopposed The strongest Spanish garrison in Cuba was there, as well as the Fleet. One might as well face facts. There was going to be a fight for Santiago. Several fights. It was known that the Spanish couldn’t fight for sour apples, but if enough of them shut their eyes and fired into the American lines somebody was going to get killed. There were quite a lot of Spaniards ready to do that at Santiago.

DEAR DINAH—[he wrote on the third try]

Orders have come for the army to sail for Cuba, and I shall be going with it. From the time we leave here I shall have to depend on the dispatch boat for letters, but will try to send you word as often as I can.

I think that once we get started on this job it won’t be terribly long until we finish it, and then I can come back to England. Everything here is in an uproar, and I am sure Sir Gratian would be amazed and disgusted at our incompetence.

Mother and Virginia are here with my father—

How dull. How inexcusably, excrutiatingly dull his letters must be, as though they were written by a rather feeble-minded undergraduate to a half-wit child. That was what came of bottling up all your feelings, remembering Lisl, considering that Dinah was only sixteen, never forgetting that you weren’t free, always trying to sound like a favourite brother—so that if you died or lost an arm in front of Santiago there would be no scar on Dinah’s life beyond the childish grief she had shown at the parting in the spinney.

Mother and Virginia are here with my father, and they probably won’t sail for England now until we have done this job in Cuba. It is unbelievably hot here, and I often think of cool green Farthingale, and the sun coming up over our hill.

Our luck goes with me, Dinah—on its little gold chain around my neck inside my shirt—and some day I shall bring it back to you. I feel

sure that if I wear it under fire I shall be kept safe—

No, perhaps better not. Just like Alwyn or Clare to read Dinah’s letters.

He tore up the page, which began with the word Farthingale, and wrote more discreetly.

—Farthingale, and the sun coming up over our hill.

The trinket we bought that day we went shopping in London goes with me as my luck. Everyone here seems to have a mascot and that is mine. My best regards to all the family and believe me, Most sincerely yours,

B.M.

Well, that would have to do. Some day he would make it all up to her.

Some day he would write her letters that said what he really felt about her….

On his way to the mail-box in the lobby he met Virginia, all in white with an apple-green sash and a fan and a lace parasol.

“I was looking for you,” she said, and tucked her hand under his arm.

“Come and have some iced tea, my tongue is hanging out.”

She had very little to say until the tall tinkling tumblers were set before them at a table in a corner of the verandah some distance from the main stream which poured incessantly in and out of the doors of the hotel. It was bakingly hot from the sun glare in the street below, and there was everywhere the smell of horse, and coffee, and cooking, and people, and—

the just plain smell which was Tampa in summer. The flies were myriad.

Virginia fanned them off the table automatically and raised the glass to her lips. Her eyes met his over the brim.

“Bracken. Do you ever think of going back to England?”

“Often,” he admitted cheerfully.

“So do I. Do you think we ever will?”

“Oh, come, Ginny, we’ve got the house! I have to see to the London office, too. Nelson is doing very well there, but it’s my baby, and I want to get back to it as soon as we settle this Cuban business.”

“Have you heard from Clare lately?”

“No. Had a letter from Dinah, though, in the last mail.”

“From Dinah! How cute. Why didn’t you tell me? What did she say?”

“Nothing much. It’s been raining. She’s read The Prisoner of Zenda again. Archie has been down for the week-end and looked perfectly splendid.” They eyed each other silently, over the tall glasses. “Mother is wondering why on earth you turned down that nice Conover boy who is so devoted to you,” Bracken said finally.

“You know why.”

“I thought maybe I did. But I didn’t say anything about that to Mother.”

“Thanks. I’ll do as much for you some day.”

“Good,” he said, and smiled at her affectionately.

“Bracken. Have you ever been terribly in love? I mean, besides Lisl? I mean so you can’t sleep at night for thinking about it, and you lie there making up long, lovely conversations where the other person always says just what you want him to and never misunderstands anything you say, and

—and—”

“Yes,” said Bracken kindly as she paused with very pink cheeks. “I’ve had it like that. And it wasn’t Lisl.”

“Did you get over it finally?”

He shook his head.

“Hm-mm.”

“Well, what do you do?”

“You wait. Like me.”

“Is it Clare?” she demanded curiously.

“Ginny, I’ll tell you a secret. I don’t care if I never see Clare again!”

Her eyes widened.

“Somebody else?”

“Somebody absolutely else.”

“Do I know her?”

“No.” A bare-faced lie. But she didn’t know Dinah. Not really. Not his Dinah.

Virginia returned to her glass, baffled.

“Suppose they marry somebody—and it isn’t you—while you’re waiting,” she suggested.

“You have to take that risk.”

“If you can get rid of Lisl before that happens are you going to propose?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Does she know?”

“Nope.”

She gazed at him with increased respect.

“You’re awfully cheerful about it,” she commented.

“Can’t afford to mope, Ginny. Nobody can afford to mope. Sursum cauda. That means Up with the tail. Not a bad family crest, do you think?”

Virginia stirred her glass, looking down.

“At that last dance we all went to in New York I let the Conover boy kiss me—just so I could pretend it was Archie.”

His brows shot up.

“I hate to sound like a brother, but was that wise?”

“No. It wasn’t. He thought we were engaged, and I had a terrible time getting out of it.”

“I should think so!” said Bracken.

“Besides, it didn’t work. He was shaking all over. Archie wouldn’t be like that.” Her wide, grave eyes reproached the beginnings of a smile on his face. “Would he?”

“Probably not,” he conceded. “But I wonder how you know that.”

“I know a lot about Archie. And I can guess the rest.”

“Well, now, Ginny, no more experiments like that, hear me?”

She wrinkled a fastidious nose.

“I’ll tell you who would be all right, though, if only I hadn’t seen Archie, and that’s Johnny Malone,” she confessed. “I like Johnny a lot, since he’s been in the Army. It’s improved him. Now why are you looking like a brother?”

“Well, here goes, I suppose it’s my duty,” he sighed. “Look, Ginny, it’s Archie you want, isn’t it. Then why don’t you let Johnny go?”

“Let him go!” cried Virginia indignantly. “Well, I like that! Johnny simply—”

“I know, I know, Johnny simply loves you to trample on him! But it’s not fair, as things are. You’ll go off to England and land Archie one of these days and then where will Johnny be? Meanwhile, if you don’t dangle him he might find somebody to be happy with.”

“What shall I do, then, tell him I’m in love with a man who has forgotten I exist?”

“How do you know he has?” Bracken objected.

She shrugged—a small, pathetic hopeless movement of her slim shoulders.

“He has given me no legal evidence to the contrary. I never thought I’d be like this, but I’m as bad as Phoebe is about Miles. Have you noticed the way she watches him, as though she couldn’t even make up her mind to laugh without waiting to see if Miles is amused? It’s abject! I never meant to fall in love all the way—I meant—”

“You meant to cheat, eh?” he accused her grimly. “Well, it serves you right, that’s all, and now you know. Most of us do learn sooner or later.

You’re lucky it’s not later. It’s your own fault now, if ever you have to make do with second best.”

“If he’ll have me,” she said humbly. “What do I do that’s wrong?

Edward likes me!”

“Edward has to finance the title, with all due respect to you. Maybe Archie is afraid you’ll think he’s fortune-hunting.”

“Oh, Bracken, he couldn’t be such a chump! As if I cared about the money, I’ll get Father to cut me off with a shilling!”

“Now, don’t let’s do anything hasty,” Bracken grinned. “I’ll think of something, just give me time. It it’s really Archie you want, then Archie’s number is up, and I’ll stick by you till we get him!” He reached out a hand to her across the table, and she put hers in it quickly and their fingers gripped.

“Here’s luck to you too,” she said. “And now I think you ought to go upstairs. Mother is awfully worried.”

“I will. Are they sure yet?”

“Yes. It’s the fever again.”

Cabot had gone down that morning under another attack of his old enemy malaria.

3

BY THE night of the seventh, when everyone was ordered aboard the transports, Cabot was worse and his heart was giving trouble. Bracken left the hotel at the last possible moment and found the railroad a quite

indescribable scene, and became at once, in spite of his anxiety, the complete reporter.

Word had gone round the regiments that the transports were sailing from Tampa port at daybreak the next morning for an unknown destination. How the men were to get aboard them had apparently been left to the enterprise of the men themselves or their immediate commanders. Where other armies might have collapsed into bewildered inertia or taken to fighting amongst themselves for the limited transportation, the American troops turned that night into hilarious pandemonium, with fairly successful results.

The Ninth Infantry stole a wagon train from the Sixth, which had not got itself together fast enough to protect its property. The Seventy-first New York took possession of a railway train belonging to the Thirteenth Infantry, who in their turn commandeered some cattle cars and a wood-burning locomotive, and thus beat the Twenty-first and Twenty-fourth to the pier, cheering themselves triumphantly as they pulled in.

The Rough Riders had arrived at Tampa only three days earlier. With the usual idiocy of the Florida railway management, the regiment had been dumped out of the train about eight miles from their camping site, which was a cavalry drill ground not far to the rear of the hotel. They rode through the town in rather loose troop formation, their practical, dust-coloured khaki outfits envied by the Regulars, who sweltered in canonical blue wool. It was also reported that their guns were the new Krag-Jorgenson carbines which used smokeless powder.

Miles Day was among them, in K troop—which consisted mostly of supposed dudes from the universities and eastern cities. He came round to the hotel as soon as he could and they all said how tanned he was and how he had grown, and Eden gave him all the gifts from home—Phoebe had sent him a copy of Soldiers of Fortune—and he heard with passionate interest all the latest news from Charlottes-ville and Williamsburg. In return he described the fantastic tangle at the camp, with the railroad unloading their baggage just where it pleased or where the jam made it possible, and how there had been no regular issue of food for days—the officers had had to buy the men’s food out of their own pockets, Miles said. And always his wistful, dazzled eyes had kept going back to Virginia, who was wearing pale blue mousseline de soie.

Some time before dawn on the eighth, Bracken sought out the Rough Riders at the camp behind the hotel, for Miles had insisted that it was only friendly for him to travel with them to the port and catch a ride to Cuba on the same transport. Cabot when consulted grinned enviously and said it would do no harm to ask Theodore if he might go along, but be sure to duck. Bracken found the ex-Assistant Secretary of the Navy, now a lieutenant-colonel of cavalry, charging about in search of his superior officer, Leonard Wood, who was out hunting for their train, which had not showed up. By this time several other regiments had got aboard their trains, but none of the trains had started. The lieutenant-colonel’s language with regard to the whole situation was free and picturesque. Bracken was swept cordially into his sizzling orbit and contrived not to lose sight of him. At six o’clock the Rough Riders seized some coal cars and in them, with the engine in reverse, backing, they made the journey to the pier, which was now jammed with trains, luggage, troops, and apoplectic officers, all at cross purposes. A K Troop sergeant was heard to remark that hell wouldn’t be more crowded on the Last Day than Tampa pier that morning.

The transports lay out in mid-stream and had to come alongside the pier a few at a time for loading. Bracken tagged at Roosevelt’s heels, a delighted spectator, while the Colonel ran to earth the swamped depot quartermaster and wrung from him the name of a transport which was not yet occupied.

She was the Yucatan, and she was still out at anchor, and it soon developed that two other regiments claimed her. Wood nabbed a stray launch and went out to take possession of her, while Roosevelt pelted back to the train at the far end of the quay and brought up the regiment at the double-quick in time to board the Yucatan as Wood brought her alongside the pier. The two rival regiments came up just too late, and there was some expostulation—the word was Roosevelt’s—to no purpose, for the Rough Riders were firmly embarked. But they weren’t cavalry any more. All the horses had to be left behind, except those belonging to the officers, and they were on another boat.

Before nightfall the Yucatan had pulled off and was anchored again in midstream, her khaki-clad passengers packed in like sardines. A week’s devastating anti-climax followed. Until the thirteenth of June the loaded transports swung at their anchors in the steaming discomfort of Tampa Bay,

because of a report that there were Spanish warships at large in the St.

Nicholas Channel.

She was not a lovely boat by any standards, being an ancient freighter whose unplaned, built-in bunks were likely to come apart under their occupants. Her capacity was seven hundred and fifty men, and she now carried two hundred more than that. Over her side she wore a waggish sign which read: Standing Room Only. The meat contained in the travel rations issued to the troops was not salted or corned beef, but terrible stuff called canned fresh beef—stringy and tasteless at best, nauseating in the murderous heat which turned it smelly a few minutes after it was opened.

There were no fresh vegetables, no ice, and the water was already bad. The men slept on the bare decks because the air was so stale below, and the only diversion was cards and bathing over the side. Because he was his father’s son, Bracken had the freedom of the bridge.

Their naval convoy was to pick them up at Key West where there was more delay—fourteen mouse-coloured warships accompanied by a disreputable flotilla of dispatch boats, among whom Fitz’s Daisy was not the least presentable, although her deck was piled high with extra coal in sacks. She distinguished herself, among a lot of irresponsible behaviour by the other Press boats, by running up and down the straggling lines of transports getting in everybody’s way till she found Bracken, whereupon she cuddled in against the Yucatan’s side and Fitz came up a rope, to the admiration of all beholders.

Fitz had telegraph news from Tampa. Cabot was holding his own, and it was time for the attack to abate soon. The show had opened in New York and was a success, and Gwen was well and happy and proud. Some Marines had left Key West to join Admiral Sampson’s patrol off Santiago. This last made everybody more impatient than ever, and hard things were said of the Navy for taking time to coal and provision after the precautionary run into the St. Nicholas Channel, which had netted no Spanish ships.

It was not a very impressive armada when it finally steamed eastward from Key West, towing its torpedo-boats and landing-scows and a water-schooner. Its speed was necessarily the speed of the slowest ship in the convoy, so the water-boat set the pace at a spanking five knots. Even Daisy, loaded to the gunwales with coal-bags, had no trouble to keep up. At night they ran with all the lights on and the bands playing ragtime. By day they

did the drill in the manual of arms for exercise, watched the flying-fish and the strange things that float on tropical seas, told tall stories, played poker, and were hungry. The scanty water supply tasted like a frog pond and smelled worse. Heat ailments began to appear.

On the following Sunday, when they entered the Windward Passage and encountered the breeze that lives there, everybody lost interest even in flying-fish. But the next morning there were mountains to the north of them, rising almost from the water’s edge. Everybody gathered at the rails and cheered the mountains, which were Cuba, and the convoy steamed on past small Navy picket-boats outside Guantanamo Bay where the Marines had already landed, and everybody cheered the Marines. That afternoon they knew by the sight of grey-painted warships ahead that they were off Santiago Harbour, and everybody cheered the Navy, which fired a salute to General Shafter. Then the engines stopped and the transports began to wallow idly in the seaway.

Daisy bustled over to look at the headquarters ship, which carried Shafter and his staff and all the attachés and Richard Harding Davis, and after hanging about there for a while came snuffling back to report that Admiral Sampson’s chief of staff had gone up over the side from the flagship’s launch. Soon the headquarters ship was seen pulling away towards a conference, and for two more days the transports waited on a nasty swell.

The water supply on board had diminished to almost nothing, and nobody had had a decent meal since they could remember. Everybody was bored to death and inclined to curse the Marines, who were cosily encamped on shore with room to move about and a chance to prepare their own food. Fitz unlimbered his Spanish guitar again and drifted melodiously among the transports where they lay, singing songs everybody knew and could join in on, and pennies often rained down on Daisy’s deck, embarrassing her into flight.

Then orders came for a landing to be made in force at daybreak at Daiquiri, which was a small mining hamlet on the shore about eighteen miles east of Santiago and about the same distance west of Guantanamo.

Everybody perked up and forgot to be seasick and began to make plans.

Daisy already knew her part. She was to take Fitz and Bracken ashore with the troops and then stand by for Bracken’s first dispatch, ready to rush

it off to the nearest cable-head at Jamaica. By the time she returned there would be another dispatch waiting. Fitz was to act as shuttle between Bracken at the front line and Daisy at the pier. Wendell complained bitterly that he and Daisy had been given the short end of the stick and would miss all the fun.

4

BEFORE daybreak Bracken and young Miles were keeping vigil at the rail of the Yucatan, shoulder to shoulder with several dozen excited, cheerful members of the regiment. They were watching fires scattered along the shore where Daiquiri was, and which might be signal lights of the Spanish, but nobody knew.

As dawn came up and Bracken’s field-glasses became more helpful, they could see the flock of transports huddled off the indentation of the shore line which was the little mining port. The American firm which owned the iron mines behind the town had built a steel pier, and there was a small rickety wooden dock beside it. These, and the sloping white shingle of the beach were all the landing facilities there were. Out of the landing-craft provided by the Army quartermaster to get the men ashore, one lighter had broken down on the way, one had simply got lost, and a tug had deserted.

The watchers at the transport rails saw the borrowed small boats assembling below them like a regatta—empty Navy steam launches and long-boats, and all the lifeboats from all the transports, bouncing on the deep blue water.

On shore there was no sign of life visible to Bracken’s glasses. The mining company’s machine shop and a string of ore-cars on the pier were ablaze. The rows of native huts thatched with palm leaves appeared to be deserted. Behind them rose the enigmatic jungle-clad Cuban mountains, with a Spanish blockhouse and flagpole crowning a nearby spur. Bracken noticed with something like awe that the men around him seemed in happy ignorance of the obvious fact that, with a little well-placed gunfire from good positions on the hillside below the blockhouse during the landing operations, the white beach beside the pier could become a shambles. The general atmosphere on board was that just before the kick-off on a football

game. Or were they all covering up, as he was, a strange crawling sensation in the mid-riff? Glancing at Miles’s eager, unclouded face beside him, Bracken began to wonder if he himself was going to prove to be—

squeamish.

Invasion of a country whose border was a line drawn on a map was comparatively simple. History was full of such things. But seaborne invasion of a hostile shore was not a venture to be so lightly undertaken.

Look at England, Bracken was thinking, gazing at Cuba from the Yucatan’s rail. For centuries twenty-four miles of water had prevented England from molestation by the continental powers. Even Napoleon had thought twice about it. Even Caesar had failed. A hundred years after that, Augustus had managed it. William the Norman had been the only other one. Landing from boats lengthened the odds to suicide if the land force was ready and competent.

There were very few precedents for this morning’s work in Cuba, Bracken thought, leaning on the rail. Very few rules to go by. But surely these open boats packed with troops in no position to return fire from the beaches and with no protection from it were against even common sense.

Where were the Spanish? Waiting. Waiting for the range to shorten, of course. Waiting till the invaders were beached and helpless.

The Navy launches towing their long strings of little empty boats were swinging in below the Iroquois, and Lawton’s brigade had begun to tumble into them—a difficult business, attended by shouts of rude laughter and blasphemous comment as the men, weighted with cartridge-belt, blanket-roll, haversack, and gun, made the tricky descent overside into the heaving open boats, which either fell away beneath them or rose so high that it doubled them up as they landed. If one of them had missed and hit the water instead, he would never have come up again. But that too seemed not to occur to anybody, to spoil the fun.

The Rough Riders were brigaded with the Regular cavalry under General Young, and both were under General Wheeler, and third on the list for disembarking. Orders had been so worded as to bar correspondents from the first landing, which had caused considerable friction on the headquarters ship where the journalists attempted to argue with the commanding officer.

Daisy came alongside the Yucatan and Bracken shook Miles’s hand and

descended to her deck by a sea-ladder, so they would be ready to follow the boats in as soon as possible.

Fitz’s grey eyes met his, candid as a child’s, but thoughtful. Wendell was in the wheel-house talking to the captain and for a minute the two cousins stood together at Daisy’s coal-blackened rail, while the tug rocked drunkenly beneath them, their field-glasses trained on the abandoned village.

“Well,” Fitz drawled at last with a sidewise glance round his glasses at Bracken’s silence, “it is sure a nice mornin’ for an ambush.”

“I’m glad you’ve thought of that too,” Bracken grinned. “I began to think maybe I was getting the creeps.”

“Creeps? I’m all over goose-pimples!” Fitz admitted frankly. “All they need is a few Gatling guns up there in the bushes. They’ll wait till we hit the beach, if they’ve got sense, and then—they’ll open up on us. Let’s you and me go home before it starts, huh?”

Bracken laughed, and felt love for the man beside him surge up through his veins where the same blood ran. He knew without even thinking about it that nothing on earth could induce Fitz to leave Diaquiri before it happened.

But because he had not been at Manassas and Yellow Tavern, Bracken had no way of knowing that the flicker of pointed light that had appeared in Fitz’s eyes under their lazy lids was the same that had lived in Sedgwick’s during the war their fathers fought, and it had been in St. John Sprague’s at Camden and Yorktown too. All the Spragues loved a fight. That was history. And this morning at Daiquiri, waiting for the Spanish guns to open up, Fitz was finally and completely a Sprague. Murrays fought grimly, savagely, cool-headed and dangerous. Spragues fought with laughter and insults and a fierce joy—equally dangerous. Their fathers could have told them. Now they would find it out for themselves.

Standing together, feet wide apart on the rolling tug Daisy, seasickness long a thing of the amateur past, they felt between them the strange, heartening, inexplicable bond which is kinship, mutual heritage, mutual memory, blood—and each knew without words that there was no man anywhere he would rather have at his side than this one, no matter what happened. Somewhere at the back of Bracken’s consciousness a last wisp or doubt dissolved and was seen no more; for who had said Fitz was different,

who said he had an odd strain, who said he was not quite one of them? Not Bracken, ever again.

The morning wore on and the sun got hot, while the transports wallowed and the small boats bobbing beside them slowly filled with joking, swearing, seasick men, girdled with glistening cartridges, the white blanket rolls gleaming across their shoulders, and their muskets pointing any which way. Delays were caused by over-cautious captains who would not bring their precious vessels close enough in shore to facilitate loading the boats—

for the transports were all merchant ships, still owned by commercial companies who would hold their officers responsible for any damage suffered. The Navy steam launches scurried distractedly about after whole battalions marooned on distant decks and wildly apprehensive lest they be forgotten and miss the picnic ashore.

For nearly three hours the loading of the small boats went on in full view of the beach and the blockhouse and the jungle, and nothing stirred on shore. Then Lawton’s first brigade signalled that it was ready, and the launches began to marshal their long strings of open boats on tow-lines for an untangled dash to the beach. It was also the signal for the Navy bombardment to begin, and for another twenty minutes the crowded boats were held back while the big guns pounded and the village took fire and bits of beach and jungle were blown into the air. But there was no answering fire.

In a silence which was loud and ominous after the echoing voices of the guns had ceased, the bow-to-bow shoreward race began. The steel pier was too high to be used at all. The first boat touched at the wooden dock and the first men jumped for it, and the rotten planking held under them and they dragged their comrades up beside them, timing the swell as best they could.

Other boats grounded some yards out and their occupants took off their shoes and rolled up their trousers and waded in. Two infantrymen fell into the water and were drowned by their equipment. They were the only two casualties of a landing which invited holocaust. For some incredible reason of inertia or bad judgment or caution—for they were not cowards—the Spanish had withdrawn from the town to inland defences, throwing away their best chance at turning back the invasion.

Daisy went waltzing in beside the Navy boat which was landing Rough Riders—ahead of their turn because its officer knew the lieutenant-colonel.

Bracken and Fitz jumped for the dock and made land dry shod, and Daisy backed oft to await developments. Fitz stood on the white beach, gazing first at the mountains, then at the little bay, which was black with boats and men and confused, swimming animals—the only way to land four-legged transport was by opening the side hatches and pushing the unwilling beasts into the water.

“We don’t deserve this,” Fitz said solemnly. “God is sure good to Shafter. Look—natives.”

A ragged band of insurrectos was straggling in to meet the Americans.

Even a non-military eye could see at a glance that as allies they would be pretty negligible. This was the native force with which the American Army was to co-operate in driving out the Spanish rule.

“Think we’d better send back to Tampa for some reinforcements that wear shoes,” Bracken said. “The Colonel seems to be mad about something special. Let’s go and see what it is.”

The Colonel was mad because one of his horses had been drowned. The pony called Texas stood dripping faithfully beside his master while Roosevelt’s coloured body-servant recounted almost with tears the fate of the other horse. While they all stood mourning, thunderous cheers broke out from the boats, the beach, and the dock, and all the whistles on all the transports began to blow with banshee glee. The stars-and-stripes had gone up on the cupola of the Spanish blockhouse on the hill.

By the time the swift tropic nightfall struck the Diaquiri beach things had reached the usual high state of American pandemonium, and when the bright, unwinking Navy searchlights were turned on to make it possible to continue the job of unloading men all night, they illumined a most improbable scene of light-hearted inefficiency.

Shrieks of laughter greeted each awkward spill or harmless accident.

Cheers went up for all minor accomplishments. The men still awaiting their turn on the transports sang There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight, and stamped in unison to pass the dull hours of inaction. The men who had reached shore stripped and went swimming in the surf and danced naked round the bonfires on the beach, yelling like Indians from sheer exuberance, while the ragged Cuban contingent looked on in paralysed bewilderment, and the officers gave up with helpless mirth the task of curbing the rodeo-football-rally spirits of the men. The sea was full too of anxiously

swimming animals, their halters strung together and attached to rowboats, while cheery buglers on the beach tried to guide them in with the musical water-call. The little dock where supplies were coming in lacked some of its planks so that the bare girders, two feet apart, were often the only foothold.

These were awash most of the time and very slippery. Many precious articles fell through and were sometimes recovered by diving for them, but most of them stayed there. It never occurred to anybody to repair the dock, and anyway the Engineers were down the coast just then on a job for the Cuban Army—Shafter’s orders.

Several miles along the jungle trail which ran parallel to the shore to the port of Siboney, Lawton’s brigade were already pitching their dog-tents under the royal palms and beating off with some hysteria hordes of large land crabs, varying in colour from pale orchid to leprous, which scuttled fearlessly over the blanketed forms of tired, restless men who were trying to catch some sleep their first night in the field. From Siboney the trail turned inland, passing over a gap in the coast range into the rolling country around Santiago.

Lawton’s men flushed the Spanish rear guard at Siboney next day, but the enemy slipped away with a final rattle of Mausers from the jungle’s edge behind the town. Lawton had no casualties, but now the men had been under fire, and knew the sound of hostile bullets intended to kill. Its effect was not visibly sobering.

Daisy was away for Jamaica with Bracken’s story of the landing, and orders to ask Key West for news of Cabot Murray and wait for an answer.

With Siboney in American hands, the landing operations were shifted there from Daiquiri, for though it was little more than an open roadstead without even a pier, it was seven miles nearer Santiago.