" 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 waterfront 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.
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