The valiant "Pills" landed on his feet in the middle of his tent, rallying his men, and was soon leading them to the attack. Bang! bang! biff! bang! rang out the loud-mouthed Colt's revolvers. A moment later the Krags began to pop to the right and left, the alarm traveling up and down the line with lightning-like rapidity. Soon six miles of grim-looking rifle muzzles were pointing toward the innocent nothing to the front, a volley occasionally resounding through the midnight air at an imaginary enemy. Dawn found "Pills" searching the field of battle for dead and wounded. He discovered numerous bullet-holes in his tent and medicine chests, made by 45-caliber balls; and, lying near the place where the gaunt, hungry-looking corps man first fired upon the enemy, he found poor "Paterno," Company E's monkey mascot, with a short and bloody tail, that member having been lost in the battle--a penalty for his nocturnal perambulations. PRIVATE TIMMONS AND THE CARABAO. Timmons was a recruit private in an infantry regiment, and, when stationed in a temperance community, was a mighty good soldier. True to his steel, he met death in the general advance from San Fernando, in August, 1899. He was one of those jolly, good natured fellows who can sit in the mud and crack jokes, and sing standing in water to his arm-pits. And what is better, he possessed the happy faculty of imparting his exuberance to his long-faced, homesick, and downcast fellow-privates. His temper was as smooth as a becalmed sea, and seldom was it that a ripple passed over the smooth surface. There was just one word in the soldier's vocabulary that would disturb him, but this word never failed to bring on a typhoon. This innocent yet magic word was "carabao," the name of the water buffalo, the beast of burden that formed the American "cracker line" in the Philippines before the introduction of the ever-faithful mule. This is how it came to have such a terror for poor Timmons: His regiment was undergoing its training on the "firing-line," and his company furnished twelve men daily for the "lunette," a kind of detached bastion about 800 yards in front of the line in the direction of the enemy. This was a lonesome detail. Just twelve men to man an isolated little fort, the enemy known to be in great numbers not more than four or five miles away. It came Timmons' turn to go on this duty for, the first time. The detail, in command of a sergeant, marched out at sundown and relieved the men who had been on the previous twenty-four hours. The old guard turned over its orders and at the same time reported having seen some armed "gugus" in the direction of the Mariquina River, which ran in front of the "lunette" about a thousand yards away, the intervening space being an open rice-field.