Breckenridge and Titus hastily put the blame upon me.
"If we get into trouble with the General for this," they shouted, "it
will be your fault. You told us Ernst was in the town with a
thousand men."
I shouted back that no one regretted the fact that he was not more
keenly than I did myself.
Titus and Breckenridge each glanced at a new, full-dress sword.
"We might as well go in," they shouted, "and take it anyway!" I
decided that Titus and Breckenridge were wasted in the Commissariat
Department.
The three correspondents looked more comfortable.
"If you officers go in," they cried, "the General can't blame us,"
and they dug their spurs into the ponies.
"Wait!" shouted Her Majesty's representative. "That's all very well
for you chaps, but what protects me if the Admiralty finds out I have
led a charge on a Spanish garrison?"
But Paget's pony refused to consider the feelings of the Lords of the
Admiralty. As successfully Paget might have tried to pull back a
row-boat from the edge of Niagara. And, moreover, Millard, in order
that Jimmy might be the first to reach Ponce with despatches, had
mounted him on the fastest pony in the bunch, and he already was far
in the lead. His sporting instincts, nursed in the pool-rooms of the
Tenderloin and at Guttenburg, had sent him three lengths to the good.
It never would do to have a newsboy tell in New York that he had
beaten the correspondents of the papers he sold in the streets; nor
to permit commissioned officers to take the dust of one who never
before had ridden on anything but a cable car. So we all raced
forward and, bunched together, swept into the main street of Coamo.
It was gratefully empty. There were no American soldiers, but, then,
neither were there any Spanish soldiers. Across the street stretched
more rifle-pits and barricades of iron pipes, but in sight there was
neither friend nor foe. On the stones of the deserted street the
galloping hoofs sounded like the advance of a whole regiment of
cavalry. Their clatter gave us a most comfortable feeling. We
almost could imagine the townspeople believing us to be the Rough
Riders themselves and fleeing before us.
And then, the empty street seemed to threaten an ambush. We thought
hastily of sunken mines, of soldiers crouching behind the barriers,
behind the houses at the next corner, of Mausers covering us from the
latticed balconies overhead. Until at last, when the silence had
become alert and menacing, a lonely man dashed into the middle of the
street, hurled a white flag in front of us, and then dived headlong
under the porch of a house. The next instant, as though at a signal,
a hundred citizens, each with a white flag in both hands, ran from
cover, waving their banners, and gasping in weak and terror-shaken
tones, "Vivan los Americanos."
We tried to pull up, but the ponies had not yet settled among
themselves which of us had won, and carried us to the extreme edge of
the town, where a precipice seemed to invite them to stop, and we
fell off into the arms of the Porto Ricans.
