It was good to be among these child-like American boys. We had done a little fighting ourselves, of a different kind. We had gone through districts where all Cuba said we could not go. We had accomplished the impossible and were satisfied. Mingled with our pride, however, was a new respect for these greatest of soldiers, and, like them, having done what we had come to do, we wanted to go home. There was a little bit of extra sentiment that night, with all of the Americans in the place gathered at headquarters, waiting for retreat to sound, when, under La Gloria’s shadow, at the sinking of the sun, the stars-and-stripes dropped upon the blood-red soil of new-old Cuba. Now for the anti-climax, for it is an anti-climax to load an automobile onto a flat car, in the darkness which shrouds such a town as Sancti Spiritus. It is an anti-climax to be dragged away at dawn by a wheezy engine over the wabbly, rusted tracks of a stray branch railway. It is an anti-climax to sit at a wayside station like Zaza del Medio, waiting for the daily train to Havana, that gay decoy which draws tourists to Cuba. It is an anti-climax, after one has come hundreds of miles in an automobile over land which no vehicle was ever meant to traverse, and, then, at the sight of a fussing, careening sample of a railway train, to dig deep into your pockets for the wherewithal to purchase a mere ticket. We had left on hand little of the coin of the realm—any old realm, Spanish or American. So, trying to forget who and when and where we came from, we gave up our little mite for seats in the second-class carriage. All night we sat in frozen silence by the open windows, eying in tired disgust the dirty black Cubans who shared our torture. We had not come for this, but now we realized what we had come for. We had come to make good on the roadless wastes. This railway coach was not Cuba; the Cuba we knew was over at Casa Cinco, where the pig pens have mezzanine floors and serve as hotels. We were going back to Havana. Havana was not Cuba; Cuba was at the top of the Santa Fe mountains, where the rain washes the traveler’s hopes down the hillside and leaves him staring into the dark, cold night, speculating on the whereabouts of Camajuani. Trundling along behind, on a flat car, was an automobile. It was more than an automobile, as it had an identity of its own. It was El Toro. There were no other Packards like it. It had done more than we had done, for we simply had given it a chance. We simply were engineers in traction. We had found a path. Surely the Cubans had named it right, when they called it The Bull. In the morning we would find Havana, money, new clothes, passage to the United States and the frozen north from whence we had come. What of it?