An officer on horseback rode by, shouting that we were all to go back to El Verjel and camp there beside the trains for the night; that the general had said that everyone but the advance guards were to get a good night’s sleep out of the zone of fire, and that the commissary train had come up and was just behind the hospital train. Bugles sounded, and the men struggled up off the ground, catching mules, fastening their harness on amid shouting and braying and jingling, saddling horses and limbering guns. Treston got on his pony and I walked along beside him. So there was to be no night attack then. It was now almost dark. Across the ditch we fell in with the shadowy forms of a company of soldiers trotting northward, all muffling blankets and big hats and ringing spurs. They hailed me. "Hey, _compañero_, where’s your horse?" I admitted I had none. "Jump up behind me then," chimed in five or six altogether. One pulled up right beside me and I mounted with him. We jogged on through the mesquite and across a dim, lovely field. Someone began to sing and two more joined in. A round, full moon bubbled up in the clear night. "_Oiga_, how do you say ’_mula_’ in English?" asked my horseman. "G—— d—— stubborn-fathead-mule," I told him. And for days after entire strangers would stop me and ask me, with roars of laughter, how the Americans said "_mula_."... Around the ranch of El Verjel the army was encamped. We rode into a field dotted with fires, where aimless soldiers wandered around in the dark, shouting to know where the Brigada Gonzales-Ortega was, or José Rodriguez’s _gente_, or the _amitrailladoras_. Townward the artillery was unlimbering in a wide, alert half-circle, guns pointing south. To the east, the camp of Benavides’ Brigada Zaragosa, just arrived from Sacramento, made an immense glow in the sky. From the direction of the provision train a long ant-like file of men bore sacks of flour, coffee, and packages of cigarettes.... A hundred different singing choruses swelled up into the night.... It comes to my mind with particular vividness how I saw a poor poisoned horse suddenly double up and fall, thrashing; how we passed a man bent to the ground in the darkness, vomiting violently; how, after I had rolled up on the ground in my blankets, terrible cramps suddenly wrenched me, and I crawled out a way into the brush and didn’t have the strength to crawl back. In fact, until gray dawn, I "rolled very sick on the ground." *CHAPTER XI* *AN OUTPOST IN ACTION*