Trooper Tales — page 161: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Voice in the Fourth Cell. 149 To-day they are trying to realize that Americans pay wages for labor. The last words of dying Spain were a declaration of peace. American soldiers are quartered in old Spanish garrisons, and American gunboats peer majestically into what were once Spanish cities. Senoritas are singing “After the Ball” in all Porto Rican towns. All things have been remembered. ‘ Yet detachments of Uncle Sam’s horsemen are scour- ing the hills for dark little men with bare feet and hag- gard faces—for men who have long known that war is no more, and whose wives and children are passively starv- ing in the coast cities. Do they hate the cavalrymen who are daily running them down? Yes, just as slaves of other days hated the lash. Ah, but they hate the rich Spanish planter much more, even as the slaves hated him who held the lash. Why was it that skeleton companies of Americans routed whole regiments of Spanish soldiers? Because these dark little men with bare feet and haggard faces were in the ranks. And why were they there? Because they were nothing but poor Porto Rican mongrels, and their masters, the full-blooded Castilians, drove them to it. And these same little men in those few months felt a sensation which their fathers never knew. The Ameri- can feels it, trembles under it, glories in it. It is the sensation of conquering fear. They saw that the pale-faced Castilian was not king of Eomichooks:co