plained.

"He said I could come along as a stoker, and I guess I'll take him up, it seems

Keating said that!" exclaimed the World man. "Keating? Why, he stands to lose his own job, if he isn't careful. If it wasn't that he's just married the C. P. boys would have reported him a dozen times."

"Reported him, what for?"

"Why you know. His old complaint." "Oh, that," said Channing. "My old complaint?" he added.

"Well, yes, but Keating hasn't been sober for two weeks, and he'd have fallen down on the Guasimas story if those men hadn't pulled him through. They had to, because they're in the syndicate. He ought to go shoot himself; he's only been married three months and he's handling the biggest piece of news the country's had in thirty years, and he can't talk straight. There's a time for everything, I say," growled the World man.

"It takes it out of a man, this boat work," Channing ventured in extenuation. "It's very hard on him."

"You bet it is," agreed the World manager, with enthusiasm. "Sloshing about in those waves, seasick mostly, and wet all the time, and with a mutinous crew, and so afraid you'll miss something that you can't write what you have.got." Then he added, as an after-thought, "And our cruisers thinking you're a Spanish torpedo boat and chucking shells at you."

"No wonder Keating drinks," Channing said, gravely. "You make it seem almost necessary."

Many thousand American soldiers had lost themselves in a jungle, and had broken out of it at the foot of San Juan Hill. Not wishing to return into the jungle they took the hill. On the day they did this Channing had the good fortune to be in Siboney. The World man had carried him there and asked him to wait around the water-front while he went up to the real front, thirteen miles inland. Channing's duty was to signal the press boat when the first despatch rider rode in with word that the battle was on. The World man would have liked to ask Channing to act as his despatch rider, but he did not do so, because the despatch riders were either Jamaica negroes or newsboys

from Park Row-and he remembered that Keating had asked Channing to be his stoker.

Channing tramped through the damp, ill-smelling sand of the beach, sick with self-pity. On the other side of those glaring, inscrutable mountains, a battle, glorious, dramatic and terrible, was going forward, and he was thirteen miles away. He was at the base, with the supplies, the sick, and the skulkers.

It was cruelly hot. The heat-waves flashed over the sea until the transports in the harbor quivered like pictures on a biograph. From the refuse of company kitchens, from reeking huts, from thousands of empty cans, rose foul, enervating odors, which deadened the senses like a drug. The atmosphere steamed with a heavy, moist humidity. Channing staggered and sank down suddenly on a pile of railroad ties in front of the commissary's depot. There were some Cubans seated near him dividing their Government rations, and the sight reminded him that he had had nothing to eat. walked over to the wide door of the freight depot, where a white-haired, kindly faced and perspiring officer was, with his own hands, serving out canned beef to a line of Cubans. The officer's flannel shirt was open at the throat. The shoulder-straps of a colonel were fastened to it by safetypins. Channing smiled at him uneasily.

He

"Thank you," he said, "but I must keep watch for the first news from the front."

A man riding a Government mule appeared on the bridge of the lower trail, and came toward them at a gallop. He was followed and surrounded by a hurrying mob of volunteers, hospital stewards, and Cubans.

The Colonel vaulted the counter and ran to meet him.

said.

When the Three Friends reached Port Antonio, Channing sought out the pile of

The man on the mule was from civil life. His eyes bulged from their sockets and his face was purple. The sweat ran over it and glistened on the cords of his thick neck.

"They're driving us back!" he shrieked. "Chaffee's killed, an' Roosevelt's killed, an' the whole army's beaten !" He waved his arms wildly toward the glaring, inscrutable mountains. The volunteers and stevedore's and Cubans heard him openmouthed and with panic-stricken eyes. In the pitiless sunlight he was a hideous and awful spectacle.

They're driving us into the sea!" he foamed.

"We've got to get out of here, they're just behind me. The army's running for its life. They're running away!"

Channing saw the man dimly, through a cloud that came between him and the yellow sunlight. The man in the saddle swayed, the group about him swayed, like persons on the floor of a vast ballroom. Inside he burned with a mad, fierce hatred for this shrieking figure in the saddle. He raised the tin cup and hurled it so that it hit the man's purple face.

"You lie!" Channing shouted, staggering. "You lie! You're a damned coward. You lie!" He heard his voice repeating this in different places at greater distances. Then the cloud closed about him, shutting out the man in the saddle, and the glaring, inscrutable mountains, and the ground at his feet rose and struck him in the face.

Channing knew he was on a boat because it lifted and sank with him, and he could hear the rush of her engines. When

dropped upon them. Before this he had been careful to avoid the place in the daytime, so that no one might guess that it was there that he slept at night, but this day he felt that if he should drop in the gutter he would not care whether anyone saw him there or not. His limbs were hot and heavy and refused to support him, his bones burned like quicklime.

The next morning, with the fever still upon him, he hurried restlessly between the wharves and the cable office, seeking for news. There was much of it; it was great and trying news, the situation outside of Santiago was grim and critical. The men who had climbed San Juan Hill were clinging to it like sailors shipwrecked on a reef unwilling to remain, but unable to depart. If they attacked the city Cervera promised to send it crashing about their ears. They would enter Santiago only to find it in ruins. If they abandoned the hill, two thousand killed and wounded would have been sacrificed in vain.

The war critics of the press boats and of the Kingston Club saw but two courses left open. Either Sampson must force the harbor and destroy the squadron and so make it possible for the army to enter the city, or the army must be reinforced with artillery and troops in sufficient numbers to make it independent of Sampson and indifferent to Cervera.

On the night of July 2d, a thousand lies, a thousand rumors, a thousand prophecies rolled through the streets of Port Antonio, were filed at the cable office and flashed to the bulletin boards of New York City.

That morning, so they told, the batteries on Morro Castle had sunk three of Sampson's ships; the batteries on Morro Castle

had surrendered to Sampson; General Miles with 8,000 reinforcements, had sailed from Charleston; eighty guns had started from Tampa Bay, they would occupy the mountains opposite Santiago and shell the Spanish fleet; the authorities at Washington had at last consented to allow Sampson to run the forts and mines, and attack the Spanish fleet; the army had not been fed for two days, the Spaniards had cut it off from its base at Siboney; the army would eat its Fourth of July dinner in the Governor's Palace; the army was in full retreat; the army was to attack at daybreak.

When Channing turned in under the fruit-shed on the night of July 2d, there was but one press boat remaining in the harbor. That was the Consolidated Press boat, and Keating himself was on the wharf signalling for his dingy. Channing sprang to his feet and ran toward him, calling him by name. The thought that he must for another day remain so near the march of great events and yet not see and feel them for himself, was intolerable. He felt there was no sacrifice to which he would not stoop, if it would pay his passage to the coast of Cuba.

Keating watched him approach, but without sign of recognition. His eyes were heavy and bloodshot.

"Keating," Channing begged as he halted, panting, "won't you take me with you? ? I'll not be in the way, and I'll stoke or wait on table, or anything you want, if you'll only take me.”

Keating's eyes opened and closed sleepily. He removed an unlit cigar from his mouth and shook the wet end of it at Channing, as though it were an accusing finger.

"I know your game," he murmured, thickly. “You haven't got a boat and you want to steal a ride on mine-for your paper. You can't do it, you see, you can't do it."

One of the crew of the dingy climbed up the gangway of the wharf and took Keating by the elbow. He looked at him and then at Channing and winked. He was apparently accustomed to this complication. "I haven't got a paper, Keating," Channing argued, soothingly. "Who have you got to help you?" he asked. It came to him that there might be on the

boat some Philip sober, to whom he could appeal from Philip drunk.

"I haven't got anyone to help me," Keating answered, with dignity. "I don't need anyone to help me." He placed his hand heavily and familiarly on the shoul der of the deck hand. "You see that man?" he asked. "You see tha' man, do you? Well, tha' man, he's too good for me an' you. Tha' man-used to be the best reporter in New York City, an' he was too good to hustle for news, an' now he's now he can't get a good job—see ? Nobody'll have him, see? He's got to come and be a stoker."

He stamped his foot with indignation. "You come an' be a stoker," he commanded. How long you think I'm going to wait for a stoker? You stoker, come on board and be a stoker."

Channing smiled guiltily at his good fortune. He jumped into the bow of the dingy and Keating fell heavily in the stern.

The captain of the press boat helped Keating safely to a bunk in the cabin and received his instructions to proceed to Santiago Harbor. Then he joined Channing.

"Mr. Keating is feeling bad tonight. That bombardment off Morro," he explained, tactfully, "was too exciting. We always let him sleep going across, and when we get there he's fresh as a daisy. What's this he tells me of your doing stoking?"

"I thought there might be another fight to-morrow, so I said I'd come as a stoker."

experience of a man who had seen shells strike off Coney Island from the proving grounds at Sandy Hook. But Channing heard him eagerly. He begged the tugboat captain to tell him what it looked like, and as the captain told him he filled it in and saw it as it really was.

"Perhaps they'll bombard again to-morrow," he hazarded, hopefully.

"We can't tell till we see how they're placed on the station," the captain an"If there's any firing we ought to hear it about eight o'clock to-morrow morning. We'll hear 'em before we see 'em."

Channing's conscience began to tweak him. It was time, he thought, that Keating should be aroused and brought up to the reviving air of the sea, but when he reached the foot of the companion-ladder, he found that Keating was already awake and in the act of drawing the cork from a bottle. His irritation against Channing had evaporated and he greeted him with sleepy good-humor.

"Why, it's ol' Charlie Channing," he exclaimed, drowsily. Channing advanced upon him swiftly.)

Here, you've had enough of that!" he commanded. "We'll be off Morro by

breakfast-time. You don't want that."

Keating, giggling foolishly, pushed him from him and retreated with the bottle toward his berth. He lurched into it, rolled over with his face to the ship's side and began breathing heavily.

"You leave me 'lone," he murmured, from the darkness of the bunk. "You mind your own business, you leave me 'lone."

Channing returned to the bow and placed the situation before the captain. That gentleman did not hesitate. He disappeared down the companion way, and, when an instant later he returned, hurled a bottle over the ship's side.

The next morning when Channing came on deck the land was just in sight, a rampart of dark green mountains rising in heavy masses against the bright, glaring blue of the sky. He strained his eyes for the first sight of the ships, and his ears for the faintest echoes of distant firing, but there was no sound save the swift rush of the waters at the bow. The sea lay smooth and flat before him, the sun flashed upon

it; the calm and hush of early morning hung over the whole coast of Cuba.

An hour later the captain came forward and stood at his elbow.

"How's Keating ?" Channing asked. "I tried to wake him, but I couldn't."

The captain kept his binoculars to his eyes, and shut his lips grimly. "Mr. Keating's very bad," he said. "He had another bottle hidden somewhere, and all last night-" he broke off with a relieved sigh. "It's lucky for him," he added, lowering the glasses," that there'll be no fight to-day."

Channing gave a gasp of disappointment. "What do you mean?" he protested.

"Why, look for yourself," said the captain, handing him the glasses. "They're at their same old stations. There'll be no bombardment to-day. That's the Iowa nearest us, the Oregon's to starboard of her, and the next is the Indiana. That little fellow close under the land is the Gloucester."

He glanced up at the mast to see that the press boat's signal was conspicuous, they were drawing within range.

Above each super

With the naked eye Channing could see the monster, mouse-colored war-ships basking in the sun, solemn and motionless in a great crescent, with its one horn resting off the harbor mouth. They made great blots on the sparkling, glancing surface of the water. structure, their fighting tops, giant davits, funnels, and gibbet-like yards twisted into the air fantastic and incomprehensible, but the bulk below seemed to rest solidly on the bottom of the ocean, like an island of lead. The muzzles of their guns peered from the turrets as from ramparts of rock. Channing gave a sigh of admiration. "Don't tell me they move," he said. "They're not ships, they're fortresses !" On the shore there was no sign of human life nor of human habitation. Except for the Spanish flag floating over the streaked walls of Morro, and the tiny blockhouse on every mountain-top, the squadron might have been anchored off a deserted coast. The hills rose from the water's edge like a wall, their peaks green and glaring in the sun, their valleys dark with shadows. Nothing moved upon the white beach at their feet, no smoke rose