Out there in the darkness, now only a little way distant, lay the sixty or seventy men of the regimental outpost, who had been sustaining the onslaught from the trenches for an hour or more. One could mark their positions from the spitting tongues of their rifles, and as the two battalions deployed, creeping up, in open order, to reinforce and relieve them, they fell back nonchalantly, wiping the sweat out of their eyes, powder-grimed, and making brief comments to their fellows; comments perhaps mingled with such sense of patronage as men coming out of their baptism of fire may have for those just going in. Then, with business-like quiet, the battalions worked forward and lay down in the trenches, which had merely been a guard-line for weeks. "Falkins," said Colonel Burford, as the two went along the regiment's length, "there's no use wasting ammunition shooting at a sky line. Those fellows over there are barely sticking their scalp locks over the trenches. They are merely peppering the night." The major nodded, then with a grin suggested: "Colonel, those boys have been under their first strain. They'll rest easier if they can shoot a few volleys--and it won't burn much powder." So, the two battalions, as a matter of indulgence, were permitted to contribute a salute of challenge, and then, as the bugler sounded "cease firing," they were ordered to dispose themselves as well as they could in the trenches and behind the rice-dykes, and rest until morning. Thus they spent their first night in the field with the unending, but comparatively harmless, roar from the north as a clangorous lullaby, and the tropic starlight in their faces, and the breeze which whispered gently across the salt marshes from the sea fanning their foreheads. When the dawn broke with tropical suddenness like the ringing up of a quick curtain, the theater of last night's drama stood revealed. With daylight came a slackening of the night-long Insurgent thunder, which slowly dropped away to desultory firing, and then to complete quiet. Off to the left of the line, where the Kentuckians had lain, stretched the broken wastes of the salt marshes, with here and there in the distance blue glimpses of the sea. But directly ahead, where all night the trenches had been barking and vomiting, the landscape was naked of visible life. The rice-fields went off for a short distance, broken only by their dykes, and farther away rose a dense screen of bamboo and woodland, a solid mass of green, from which waved a ragged top of shredded palms. As the men crouched over their hard-tack and coffee, they were thinking of the day's work, which they hoped would include passing beyond that screen and those trenches. CHAPTER XVIII