So long as the cities were overcrowded with pacificos
and their streets were putrid with disease, so long did the
Spanish garrisons sicken and die, as flies perish upon poisoned
carrion.
Out on the cool, clean hills and the windy savannas where the
Insurrectos dwelt there was health. Poorly armed, ragged, gaunt,
these Insurrectos were kept moving by hunger, always moving like
cattle on a barren range. But they were healthy, for disease,
which is soft-footed and tender-bellied, could not keep up.
At the time Johnnie O'Reilly set out for Matanzas the war--a war
without battle, without victory, without defeat--had settled into
a grim contest of endurance. In the east, where the Insurrectos
were practically supreme, there was food of a sort, but beyond the
Jucaro-Moron trocha--the old one of Campos's building--the country
was sick. Immediately west of it, in that district which the
Cubans called Las Villas, the land lay dying, while the entire
provinces of Matanzas, Habana, and Pinar del Rio were practically
dead. These three were skeletons, picked bare of flesh by Weyler's
beak.
The Jucaro-Moron trocha had been greatly strengthened since
Campos's day. It followed the line of the transinsular railway.
Dotted at every quarter of a mile along the grade were little
forts connected by telephone and telegraph lines.
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