About the time we had given up hope for the day, we found a bridge and then another, and, at last, we found the promised highway. It was worn and full of holes, but it was high, hard, and almost level. The clouds parted and the sun beamed a bright farewell, just before it dropped from sight behind the mountains. High on a neighboring crest was silhouetted against the glowing, copper-colored sky a lone block house. Below it, between a pair of spreading laurels, stood the ruins of a great mansion which had been the quarters of some luckless Spanish general who allowed the Cubans to shoot him out of house and home. A massive stone bridge, weathered by the many years throughout which it had served generation after generation, led us over the last river. We climbed the last hill. Below us spread the red roofs of Sancti Spiritus. The town received us boisterously. Each crooked street filled with noisy crowds of men, women, and children, who darted from their homes to chase after us to the hotel, even as though there was nothing else in Sancti Spiritus to think of that evening. Sancti Spiritus was innocent in automobiles, but it had heard of us. By mail had come the Santa Clara paper, telling about the Americans in the automobile which was named El Toro. In the immense bedroom of the ancient hotel, while we waited for water to be brought that we might wash, we sat on the edges of the canopied beds, looked at each other, and merely laughed. There was something ridiculous in being there. The adventure was over. We had come to the mountains. Why? Because. The story of Saturday, loitered away in this peculiar and venerable town, is another story. Dressed in odds and ends of garments picked up at the local stores, to replace the mud-covered, tattered clothes we had worn continuously for a week and a half, we strayed around its crooked streets, posed in the plaza that the wondering children might gaze upon us, and lounged in the hotel courtyard among the flowers. Across the corner from the plaza stands the oldest cathedral in Cuba, weatherbeaten, but proudly rising over the low tiled houses of the town. It represents a civilization and an art which is wasted on the reconstructed Cuban. The latter has no apparent reverence for the picturesque architecture and the quaint religious figures housed within its crumbling walls. The Supreme Being of that vicinity was Captain Wise. His headquarters were on a hill overlooking the town, and he commanded a company of United States marines, who had built comfortable quarters and spent their time going through the motions of military life, playing baseball and performing the duties of an army of pacification in charge of a lot of scrappy islanders, who, from el Señor Alcalde to el peon, were, after all, nothing but spiggoties in the eyes of an American private soldier.