But battered and tired as we were, the real fight was just on. In sweeping the Filipinos out of their trenches we had hurled them to the left on our own water-works that supplied the city and the army. If these were held by the Filipinos and our supply cut off our fight would be in vain. It is said that twenty thousand of them stood between our water and our line. Luck again was with us. The First Tennessee happened to be nearest to them and it was we who cut through, and only four hundred, a battalion, at that. In a quick bloody charge we took the works. Old Hawthorne and Satan led us as if on dress parade, a target for twenty thousand Filipino rifles, and not a bullet touched them. With cheers we followed the white hair of the old Confederate on his black horse with the north star on his head. We were holding a perilous place, for we were in the rear of the Filipino army, with our backs against the water-tanks, and foes in front and rear. But we held it for two days until help came. And the first battalion and third battalion had equally as good a record when the fighting was over. A week afterwards old Hawthorne came to my tent. He was holding a telegram from the Secretary of War. "Jack," he said, "I am a Major General, and you are the Captain of Braxton Bragg’s company. The boys of it wired petitions and elected you. They said you led them twice to victory. They want you to lead them always." Our hardest fight was at Iloilo last week. We took the city, but once out of the water we had to fight down barricaded walls, hemmed in and shot at from walls and house tops. For two hours we were busier than a bull-terrier in a den of cats. They were the best fighters we struck. They were officered, we learned, by the brave and brainy little Japs. At the Lapaz sugar mill they tried to cut off some of the Regulars. We were nearest. It was merely our luck. Any other regiment would have cut through the enemy to save their comrades. At Naglocan they made a stand and there we finished them. * * * * * That was written a month ago. I will finish and let it all go together, finding you if it can; and if not, well my heart has found yours somewhere, sweetheart; in the writing my thoughts have met, somewhere, yours. We stay and hold Iloilo, but General Hawthorne with a battalion of our boys went a month ago to Cebu to help out the Twenty-third regiment of Regulars who were hemmed up there in the mountains and fighting for their lives. Would you like to hear how close I came to death yesterday, and not on the firing line at that? It was a nasty close call I had and the horror of it still twangs on my nerves. It is that, and not knowing what the morrow may bring, that has brought me to the writing of this last love letter should either of us pass into the shadow of things.