We ended our journey at Benavides. Benavides is a dot on the map. In reality, it is a board hut, yclept grocery. We had fought our way thirty-four miles. Hungrily impatient, we waited in the stone-flagged main room of the house for a much-fried supper. We ate it by the glimmer of a side lamp. Around the dirty table at which we sat, collected all the inhabitants of the house, and a dozen others who must have lived somewhere but who appeared and disappeared in a mysteriously dramatic fashion. It was a dismal meal and a poor one and we were cross. We were glad to creep onto the wire spring cots which they spread for us in a partially enclosed corner of the hut. That night we accrued some more wisdom about touring in Cuba. We undressed, for we had not yet learned our part, but that was the last time we were so foolish, except one joyous night when we put up at a regular hotel in the real city of Santa Clara. Each of us had, underneath, a wire mattress, and, on top, a starched sheet. Cold air rushed through the meshes of the woven wire, for the night was a chill one, while the starched sheet felt like the dank sides of a sepulchre. Outside, innumerable pigs grunted between the several acts of a protracted dog fight, and the chickens, which roosted in the house, fluttered from one corner of the room to another; the many fleas were still bolder. There is an intimacy about living things in Cuba which is somewhat appalling to a man who has been more or less used to picking his associates, or, at least, his family. Cats, dogs, chickens, and pigs are welcome in the household. The children sit on the floor and quarrel with each other and with the dogs. It is not infrequent to find a hut which has its household snake. There are no poisonous snakes on the Isle de Cuba, but there is a large brand which looks as if it would like to be poisonous if it knew how. Just as the family dog, in Illinois, protects the house against burglars, so the family snake in Santa Clara Province protects the house against rats—but this is not a tale of grewsome things. Each successive night had its elements of humor, but that night at Benavides we had not yet arisen to the greatness of mind and broadness of character which permitted us to enjoy the humorous phases of the evening. We rolled around on our cots to change the water marks which the wire mattress made in our skin, and tried to sleep during the brief intervals between occasions when it was necessary to awake and pull the sheets back onto us. If all of the other fellows had the same shrinkage of the soul which I experienced that night (and, out of fairness to myself, I think they did), the expedition came awfully close to needing an epitaph. Camp Solitude to Benavides—thirty-four miles. [Illustration: “_We drove under the everlasting palms and among boulders half-hidden in the luxuriant grass._” SEE PAGE 50.] [Illustration] CHAPTER III