"With the penetrating of the tropics come days of languor and nights of inactivity so delicious it seems profanation to move. More than one thousand men, who boarded the Massachusetts with the vigor of the North in their veins, have succumbed, one by one, to the lethargy of the soft breeze of the Bahamas. But an awakening is at hand. Pumps that have been running steadily day and night slow down and stop. Troopers had become so accustomed to the quick beating of the smaller machines that the cessation of throbs between the slower pulsations of the heavier engines is noticed instantly. A quick inquiry as to the cause brings the answer from one less well-informed: "Only the water pumps broken down." That is all, only eleven hundred parched horses awaiting the answer to the bugle call they had learned so well--"Water horses!"--which sounded at the moment of the fatal break in the pumps. Only a transport carrying ten hundred and thirty men, and no means of extinguishing a fire! Twenty minutes; one-half hour, and Captain Read, who has gone down into "the hole," asks for five Troop A men. "No hurry," so the order said. Somebody knew better, and the troopers go, hand over hand, down into the ship's hold. A few bales of hay come up and over the side of the ship, and sizzle as they strike the water. The troopers nurse a few burned fingers, and Captain Read reappears on deck, smoked, wet with perspiration, and makes his usual answer to a question, "What's the trouble?" with "Nothing at all." But five men of Troop A and Captain Read knows that a dangerous fire has been extinguished for the third time in one day with men's bare hands. "Three-quarters of an hour, and no sound from the engine-room, except the steady throb of the propeller. "'Thirty men from Troop A, thirty men from City Troop, and thirty men from Troop C!' and ninety men in three squads silently are lined around that entrance to Hades--the hole. 'Another fire,' was the quick alarm, but it was worse than that. 'Water! water! water!" the cry comes from the sunken eyes that look pleadingly at men; from harsh breathing; from parched throats; from hanging heads of eleven hundred horses and mules that had not been watered since receiving a scant quart eighteen hours before. 'Let's see,' said the United States cavalrymen, quietly, 'the pumps are hopeless, but we can draw up one bucketful every minute from the hold aft, and one every minute from the forward hatch. We ought to water all in ten hours. Form lines and water solid. The horse you skip will be dead in the morning.'