Page:From Yauco to Las Marias.djvu/47

Rh time to time a weary or sick soldier would lay himself down by the roadside, to be picked up later on by an ambulance; but, as the day wore on, the intervals of rest grew longer and more frequent. We had but one opportunity to water the sweating horses of the artillery, and then it was a painful matter of buckets. We munched hard-tack for our noonday meal, and made merry over it, talking of the day when we should go home and feast on beans and beefsteak and countless other things of which the heathen wot not. We were intensely voluble or silent by turns, and invented new nicknames for each other, which were so apt, spite of being touched with bitterness, that they stuck forevermore. And never, so far as I can remember, did any one mention the "Maine" or Cuba Libre.

At last, shortly after sunset, we descended a long, steep hillside, and went into camp in the valley of the Rio Grande, just without the gates of a small town, uninteresting in character, and Sabana Grande by name. We had marched only twelve miles, but