“They are leaving the barracks,” he said. He pulled out his watch and stood looking down at it in his hand. “I will give them three minutes to get under way,” he said. “Then we will start for the warehouse. When they come back again, they will find us waiting for them.” It seemed an hour that we stood there, and during every second of that hour the rifle-fire increased in fierceness and came nearer, and seemed to make another instant of inaction a crime. The men were listening with their mouths wide apart, their heads cocked on one side, and their eyes staring. They tightened their cartridge-belts nervously, and opened and shot back the breech-bolts of their rifles. I took out my revolver, and spun the cylinder to reassure myself for the hundredth time that it was ready. But Laguerre stood quite motionless, with his eyes fixed impassively upon his watch as though he were a physician at a sick-bed. Only once did he raise his eyes. It was when the human savageness of the rifle-fire was broken by a low mechanical rattle, like the whirr of a mowing-machine as one hears it across the hay-fields. It spanked the air with sharp hot reports. “Heinze has turned the Gatlings on them,” he said. “They will be coming back soon.” He closed the lid of his watch with a click and nodded gravely at me. “You can go ahead now, Captain,” he said. His tone was the same as though he had asked me to announce dinner. IV I jumped toward the street at the double, and the men followed me crowded in a bunch. I shouted back at them to spread out, and they fell apart. As I turned into the street I heard a shout from the plaza end of it and found a dozen soldiers running forward to meet us. When they saw the troops swing around the corner, they halted and some took cover in the doorways, and others dropped on one knee in the open street, and fired carefully. I heard soft, whispering sounds stealing by my head with incredible slowness, and I knew that at last I was under fire. I no longer felt like a boy robbing an orchard, nor a burglar. I was instead grandly excited and happy, and yet I was quite calm too. I am sure of this, for I remember I calculated the distance between us and the warehouse, and compared it with the two hundred and twenty-yard stretch in an athletic park at home. As I ran I noted also everything on either side of me: two girls standing behind the iron bars of a window with their hands pressed to their cheeks, and a negro with a broom in his hand crouching in a doorway. Some of the men stopped running and halted to fire, but I shouted to them to come on. I was sure if we continued to charge we could frighten off the men at the end of the street, and I guessed rightly, for as we kept on they scattered and ran. I could hear shouts and screams rising from many different houses, and men and women scuttled from one side of the street to the other like frightened hens.