We were crossing Cuba at its narrowest part, and from San Felipe to Cajio was only some thirty miles. After fifteen miles we came into the fertile coast belt and passed a number of deserted sugar plantations where tropic vegetation was trying to cover up the work of ruin wrought by man. Residences and sugar houses destroyed by fire were very much in evidence. To my surprise I learned that bodies of insurgents--who then held and had held for six years nearly the entire eastern province of Santiago de Cuba and Puerto Principe, and part of the extreme western province of Pinar del Rio--had only a few weeks before landed by night at the port La Playa de Batabano, fifteen miles away, and with the cry of "Free Cuba and death to the Spaniard!" had blotted out the town and then marched into the heart of the country, burning houses, killing the whites and calling upon the slaves to join them in freeing Cuba. Many did, and terrible were their excesses, and terribly did they pay for these. The Spanish soldiers and loyal Cuban volunteers closed in upon them, and at the little hamlet of San Marcos, where we halted and examined the too evident signs of the battle and massacre that followed, they made their last stand, but were no match for their well-armed and disciplined foes. After a desperate struggle they were overpowered, and every surviving soul was butchered by the infuriated soldiers. It was better so. Had they been spared it would have only been for the moment, for by official decree of the Captain-General of Cuba, indorsed by the Madrid Government, every inhabitant within the insurrectionary line, without regard to age or sex, was doomed to death without form of trial. At San Marcos we made a halt to view the scene of the fight and examined the heaps of ashes where the fires were kindled which consumed the bodies of the slain. Two or three were my countrymen. At the time it was quite the thing for venturesome Americans to go and join the rebels and help the fight for "Cuba libre." For some years every few days notices would appear in the press about some Americans having been shot for joining or attempting to join the rebels. This went on until the affair of the steamer Virginus, when her crew and passengers, to the number of 150, were shot, the steamer having been captured close to the shore and about to land men and guns. Then our Government awoke and forbade Spanish officials to shoot Americans without trial. As I stood there curiously examining the marks of the conflict, or examining some part of an unconsumed bone, I little thought that in a very few days I myself would be a fugitive, creeping through jungles and over tropic plains, seeking to join the comrades of the men on whose ashes I was then treading, to aid their fight for free Cuba.