Trooper Tales — page 163: 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. I5I men were already sleeping. The cook-fire was a mass of whitened embers. The guard hummed softly and paced about among the horses. Silk Redmond, finishing a cigar, let his eyes wander high among the beautiful mys- teries of a tropical night. When we had slept an hour the sky beyond an ad- jacent group of hills reddened into a vast lurid expanse. The guard saw it, and in a few moments we all knew that there was game in the vicinity and that it was very much awake. At dawn we pushed our horses up to the hot, smoking ruins of a big hacienda. The Spanish owner said that for two nights he had heard the songs of Black Stick up in the cliffs—Black Stick, the bold and bad Porto Rican, the very worst guerrilla on the island. He did his work well that night, however. ) For ten days we searched every crag and abutment along the high walls of the Rio Grande, from Manati to Ciales. The songs of Black Stick were heard no more, a circumstance which made us understand that the out- law used his eyes. Then even the small detachment was divided. Silk Redmond and I stuck together. Black Stick was making sleepless nights for the old cavalry sergeant. And we, why we would have given up future hopes for a shot at him. Did you ever track a buck for a whole day and then watch him leap out from your very shadow and disappear, Eomicbooks:.c