Routledge Rides AlonePROLOGUEIN CHEER STREET, LONDON
Routledge Rides Alone
Jerry Cardinegh, dean of the British word-painters of war, was just home from China, where he had caught the Allies in the act of relieving Peking. It had been a goodly and enticing service, both to watch and to portray, calling out much of glorious color and tension and peril, and not enough slaughter to chill the world’s appreciation. Cardinegh sat by the fire in his little house in Cheer Street, London, and was ministered to by his daughter, Noreen, a heavenly dispensation which the old campaigner believed he had earned. A dinner together, just the two, truly a feast after lean months crossing the mountains of separation. Then whiskey, glasses, soda, pipes, tobacco, papers of the afternoon—all served by the dearest of hands. The gray, hard veteran lived, indeed, the maiden filling his eyes.
Twenty he had left her, and she was twenty still, but the added fraction of an inch made her look very tall, and startled him. There was a mysterious bloom under the luminous pallor of her skin; fathoms more added to the depth of her eyes, and a suggestion of volume to her voice. Nature and heritage had retouched the girlish lips in color and curve, widened the tender Irish eyes, added glow and amplitude to the red-goldhair.... There had only been two women in the world for Jerry Cardinegh, and the other was a memory—the mother.
“And who do you suppose is coming to-night, deere?” he asked. There was a silver lining of the Tyrone tongue to all that Jerry said, but it was so subtle and elusive as wholly to defy English letters, save possibly that one word “deere” which he rolled fondly for Noreen, and here and there in the structure of a sentence.
“Some of your war-men to relieve Peking again to-night? Who, father?”
“Just one. The best and weirdest of them all. He’s on the way home to the States. You met him in Tokyo five years since—after the Japanese had whipped China, and the Triple Alliance had stepped in to gobble the trophies.”
The girl stirred the fire in the grate thoughtfully for an instant, then started up in a glad, impatient way. “Routledge-san?”
“The same. Now, that’s queer—after five years—I mean, the Japanese title of address—‘Routledge-san.’”
“That’s what I used to call him, and I always think of him so. I think of him a great deal. His work in theReviewmakes me. He is one of very few whom I could welcome gladly—this first home-night with you, father.” She spoke with the old fearless candor that Cardinegh loved.
“So you think of Routledge a great deal? And why, deere?”
“He sees deeply. His work is illuminating to me. Sometimes I think of him sitting back of his work and smiling because he knows so much that he dares not setdown. I think Routledge-san loves Asia—as you, as we—love Ireland, father.”
“You could not think about a better man, Noreen,” said Cardinegh. “And so he knows a lot that he doesn’t write for theReview? Well, maybe so.... He talks quite as well as he writes—when the spell is on him. I don’t know a man who can clear a mind of all save what he’s tossing into it—like Routledge. And the words seem to twist and work their way deep like burrs—when he leans forward with an idea.”
Noreen smiled. “And why has he not been back to London in all these years?”
“You have said it—because he loves Asia.”
“But he has not been back to America?”
“Routledge is quite as much at home in London as in Philadelphia, his native city. He has worked for the American press as well as for the English. You see, he needed us because England has something doing more or less all the time in the field. In fact, since Japan took the Chinese Port Arthur in ’94, there has been plenty for one man to do in following American and British arms—Cuba, South Africa, the Philippine Archipelago, and now China again. But I have met him off and on around the world. They are good men of our tribe, Noreen, strong, brave, and wise men, but Routledge, of them all, has warped his craft deepest into my slip, so to speak. I love the lad.”
She was moving about among the shadows of the sitting-room—a touch of her hand here and there, unconscious preparation, probably, for the guest, and a queer tension in her eyes. It was nine, and a gusty winter night, when Cardinegh admitted the world-wanderer andtook his great frieze coat. Noreen watched from the far end of the hall. Routledge spoke low and laughingly, and caught the elder man by the hand and shoulder. A sense of exhilaration in full sweep dilated the veins of the girl, and with it, too, was a certain chill of dread, some nameless portent—a blend of joy, and its price in pain, all in that first glimpse. It was like the prelude of a song, or the prologue of a story, which contains an element of each emotion in the appeal of the whole....
“And this is Noreen—the little Noreen whom I once dared to call my Japanese sweetheart. Why, it’s water out of the rock to see you again, Miss Noreen!... Jerry, the years have been consummate artists here in Cheer Street while we’ve been away growing old.”
Noreen heard herself saying, “I have felt close to you a great many times, Routledge-san,—all wrapped up, as in a blanket, in those fatReviewcolumns under your name.”
“’Tis true,” said Cardinegh. “We’re all flawful imitations beside you, son.”
“I was thinking how good, how ripping good, ‘Routledge-san’ sounds again,” the guest declared. “It’s like a song of home heard from a passing ship.”
Before the fire, the two correspondents unshipped once more under the guns of the Taku forts, for the listening girl, and followed the Pei-ho, that roiled drain of a bitter land, up to the Tientsin wall.
“Routledge deserted us that day—went back to his own countrymen—the American column,” said the father.
Jerry wanted the story told for Noreen, and his memories challenged and animated Routledge. “Yes, I wanted to see my boys again,” he acknowledged. “Ihad one good look at them in Cuba, under Lawton, who was killed a year or so later, under my eyes, on the banks of the Maraquina River in Luzon. The Philippines was a rapid, pretty service, but a service of detachments. I was eager to see how the boys worked in numbers. The American troops are nervous, you know, a little too highly evolved to be atoms. They live for a higher game in their country—commerce and inventions. Some time the nation will rise even to a better growth than that—I mean, to the spiritual evolution.
“The boys were mostly ill in China, thin-blooded from the tropical Philippines. The column was full of fever, coughing and cursing a little. They shook in the chill damps of the nights up Tientsin way.... Poor chaps, but it was good to hear them talk, before the gray old walls of Tientsin—that night when the world was hanging to the cable-ends for the flash, ‘battle.’ I rode along the huddled column and heard Texas, Indiana, Nob Hill and the Bronx, Halsted Street and Back Bay—all from the shadows on the ground, that breathed tired oaths and shivered in the drive of the fine, chilled rain.”
Jerry took up the picture excitedly: “Do you remember when the spray of sparks shook out from behind the wall?—the party in charge of the fireworks was trying the night to see if it were dark enough. Then followed a succession of booming crashes. It was as if the plain was drawn tight as a drum-head, and they dropped comets on it.... The Chinos got the Russian range about that time, and left open sores in the snaky Slav line. And I want to know, Routledge, did you hear the high-pitched scream from the Japanese when they snatched the glory of the lead?... Ah, we’ll hear from those brown dwarfs again!”
“I think so,” said Routledge. “They ran forward like hounds, snapped at each other and gave tongue like a pack closing in for the kill. Yes, I remember, and then the fire broke out behind the wall in the native city, and the sky took on the red—the red of an Indian blanket! It shone red on the faces of the boys from the States.... Miss Noreen, you listen large-eyed as Desdemona.”
“Tell me more about your boys,” she whispered.
“The trumpet screeched ‘forward,’ and the column quickened into life,” Routledge explained, “sprang like magic into formation and swept past, panting, laughing, shouting in the rain. God, pity them! They were good boys—good boys, all. I wish they had all come back with their dreams all turned true.... They didn’t know what was ahead, except they had seen the blind gray stones of the wall through the dusk at the end of the day’s march. They didn’t know what the fight was about, but they ran to break the wall, gladly, against the rock of centuries—into fire and steel and the yellow hate from all the hells. It meant nothing to them after the wall was broken. That’s the queer, ugly part of it. The man in the ranks always gets the worst end—and so pitifully often doesn’t even have a sentiment to enthuse over. He’s apt to fall in a fight against as good friends as he has anywhere on this spinning planet, and what meaning has the change of national boundaries to his mother?” Routledge was thoughtful for a moment....
“It seems hard to use grown-ups like that—men, white men, with spines at right-angles from the snake’s, and a touch of eternity in their insides somewhere. Poordevils, getting the worst of it—that’s always the way!... I watched the tail of the column swaying by—watched the last fragments blotted up in the rain and the night. Already, in a red mist on the Tientsin Wall the dance of death had begun.”
Noreen’s eyes were filled with mysteries and mistiness. As in his work, Routledge now suggested to her volumes unsaid. Her heart sensed the great wealth of the man. She felt an inner expansion. Pity was almost a passion in his face; and there was hate, too—hate for the manipulations of the rulers of the earth, which drove forward that poor column cursing and coughing in the rain. She saw it all—as if she had been at his side that night—the fire-lit field running with the reddest blood of earth. And across the world she seemed to see the faces of the maids and mothers of these boys—faces straining toward them, all white with tragedy. And more, she seemed to see for an instant the Face of the high God, averted from His images, because they were obsessed in that profane hour by the insane devils of war.... The profile of Routledge fascinated her. He had spoken lightly—as he was accustomed to speak before men to whom war was a career—but the aroused girl saw in his eyes, tightly drawn against the lamp-light, a mystic’s rebellion against the inhumanity of material power. About his eyes and graven entire upon the tropically embrowned face was a look impossible to the men her life had known.
“I was tangled up in a reserve of Russian infantry afterward,” Routledge concluded. “Jerry, you’ve heard the Russians sing?”
“Aye, at Plevna and before, son.”
“It’s a thing worth living long to hear—wild and mournful as a Siberian winter.... This reserve roared its song as it bored into Tientsin—a song of snow-bound hills and ice-bound hearts—poormuzhiks! And a British battery, tons of charging steel and brass, thundered the bass!”
So between them, the two correspondents covered the story of that one fight in the night—on the way to lift the lid from the legations at Peking. A messenger from theWitnessoffice at this point brought certain cable copies for Cardinegh to comment upon for an editorial paragraph or two. He went into his study.
“Routledge-san, do you mind if I ask you to talk more?”
Noreen edged her chair closer like a little girl anticipating a story.
“Such listening as yours,” he laughed, “would make a Napoleon disclose his plans for the next morning’s battle. It would bring out the best of any man’s tales. Ask me anything that I know and it is yours.”
“Always when the other correspondents come here to Cheer Street—and nearly all of them call to see father—I have made them all tell me about the bravest deed—the bravest man—they have ever seen or known in all their services. I think I know them all but yours.”
“And what do you think my bravest man will be like, you collector of heroisms?”
“That’s just the point, Routledge-san. I think yours won’t be a man of merely brute courage. That’s why I am so anxious to hear.”
“In this case I am like one of the messengers toJob—I alone remain to tell you. I have never told any one, but sometimes it occurs to me to write the story of Rawder for the few who care to understand. He is my property, Miss Noreen, a humble martyr with a mighty soul like Saint Paul’s.
“He is a man born to suffer, as all the great are, who crucify themselves in various ways to lessen the sufferings of commoner men. I have never felt the same about any other man. There is something quite miraculous about our relation. Accidentally, as it appears, I have met him somewhere every second year for a double decade—the last time in Hong Kong this trip home. I surely shall see him again? Does it sound foolish to you—this idea of being destined to meet a certain some one from time to time somewhere—until the End?”
“No. I want to hear it all, just as it comes to you, with all your thoughts about it—please. Father will be busy for a half-hour in his study. I think I shall understand.”
Routledge leaned back with a cigarette, which with him was only an occasional indulgence. “As I say, I meet him every second year in my wanderings, and I am always healed from the jangle of the world and world-politics after a day with Rawder,” he resumed, watching her. “He had a strangely unattractive face as a boy—slow with that dullness which sometimes goes with the deaf, and a moist, diffused pallor that suggests epilepsy. His original home was away up in a New England village, restricted as a mortise-box in its thought and heart. The Rawders were a large, brief family—six or seven children—the whole in harrowing poverty. Certain of the littler ones were hare-lipped; all were thefright of other children. I never liked New England.... I can see yet the gray, unpainted house of the Rawders, high on a barren hill against the gray, bitter sky—rags in the broken window-panes; voices in the house that you could not forget, yet loathed to remember.... All died in a year except this boy who became my friend. All met the Reaper without pomp or heraldry, the funerals overlapping, so that the village was dazed, and the name of Rawder stands to-day for Old Mortality at his worst. So there was left only this one, a strange, wordless type of Failure in the eyes of the village.
“He was a little older than I—but a sort of slave of mine. I see it now. I had everything that good family and parental wisdom could bless a boy with, and he had nothing. That I pitied him seemed to warm his soul with gratitude. He expected so little and was willing to give so much. I wish I had understood better then.... He aspired to the ministry, but his ordination was long denied him. He was second in his class after years of study in a theological school, earned with incredible penury, but his trial sermon or something about him shocked the community. I know now that it was a wider, gentler piety. About this time I had come in from my first trip around the world. Unable to get a church, he asked for a foreign mission, the smallest mission in the loneliest, most dreadful land. His answer was a whisper through the assembly of preachers, challenging his sanity. Forgive them, as he did, Miss Noreen. I could not have fully understood the features of his tragedy, but I remember that when I parted from him that time, there was a vague desolation in my heart.I could not forget the deep, troubled eyes nor the heavy homely face, all scourged with harshness from a babe, a veritable magnet of evil fortunes.
“Back from England again, I encountered him in Boston under the banners and torches of the Salvation Army. He was thinner, deeper-eyed, richer-voiced, and all animate with love for his race. For the first time I felt the real spell of the man. It was something in his eyes, I think—something that you see in the eyes of a little child that is dying without pain.”
“Visions,” she whispered.
“Yes, that is the word. Some God-touched thing about the man in the streets of Boston. But I am making my story long, Miss Noreen. I did not know that I had all these details. It has become rather an intimate fancy of mine—this story.”
“Please tell me all. I think it is to be the story of a great victory.”
“Yes, the years to come will end it so.... Two years ago, I was riding with Tarrant’s cavalry in southern Luzon when I discovered Rawder among the troopers. It was in the midst of a blistering march of twelve hours from San Pedro Macati to Indang, without a halt for coffee or bacon. He did not see me, and I could not get to him until the column broke formation. What he must have suffered climbing Fool’s Hill as a regular cavalry recruit! There was a fight in the afternoon, and the column was badly jumbled. Every fourth man stayed behind with three horses and his own. The rest advanced, dismounted, into action. Rawder was with the fighting force. I caught a glimpse of him during the early stress of things. There was just as much iron inhis jaw as in Tarrant’s, whose valor had vibrated across the Pacific. Even so, I heard a non-commissioned officer abuse him like a cur—God knows why, unless it was because Rawder did not shoot to kill. That night when we entered Indang, I could not find him. He was not in the formation next morning. Tarrant rode on without him. Apparently, I was the only one who cared. I think he was regarded much the same in the cavalry as he was by the Methodist conference and before the committee on foreign missions.
“The next week Tarrant’s column struck war—a bit of real war. I found all that archipelago-service interesting, hit-and-run campaigning, with all the human interest of bigger lines. We were caught on a sunken jungle-trail and fired upon from three sides. Small in numbers, but that fight was of the sort which makes the mess-talk of English regiments for decades, and their flag decorations. I never saw a bit of action at closer range. It was even shown to me—the peculiar way men open their mouths when struck about the belt. I heard souls speak as they passed—strange, befuddled utterances, from brains and lips running down, but full of meaning—sayings of great and memorable meaning. I saw Tarrant stand for thirty seconds under the first volleys, dismayed in the yellow glare. There is no sight for a soldier so terrible as a glimpse of havoc in the face of his chief, but he righted quickly enough. For the moment the men tried to cover themselves in the soiled short straws of their religion.
“It was a voice in the jungle that had startled Tarrant. I tell you the whole story, Miss Noreen, because ofthatvoice in the jungle. The natives wereled by a white man, who wore the khaki of an American soldier. It was this white leadership which had herded Tarrant’s column for slaughter in that hot sink of the jungle. The cry of ‘Rawder! Rawder!’ went up from the American command. Something in the voice troubled me—just for a second—with the fear that Rawdermighthave run mad at the last.... Listen, I think there is no hate in the world so baleful and destructive as that aroused by a deserter who leads the enemy against his own people. And this man led a black force of Malays!... The natives retired finally, and the white man with them. An Indiana soldier was dying in the sun when all was still. I heard him say wearily, ‘Gawd, if I could only have killed Rawder, hell would have been a cinch for me!’
“That’s how they hated him that day. The story of Rawder, the deserter, went around the world. It had the eternal grip of interest of a scapegoat who turns into a fire-brand. Manila sent column after column of infantry into the Indang country and down below to the Camarines, but the renegade was not to be captured just yet.
“I continued to ride with Tarrant for awhile after that. He found action when there was any; moreover, I felt that the real story of Rawder had not been written. He was big to me, and I could not believe the voice from the jungle was his. Tarrant was ordered with his troop and two others, dismounted, to Minday, a little island south of Luzon, which Nature has punished in various ways. I remember the empty, sun-blinded inlet, as our little transport stirred the sand. Not abancoorcascocame out to meet us. We were in the midst of a peoplewho put up no front for peace. There is a Spanish tradition that each male native of Minday is possessed of seven devils and the leaders ten.
“‘Best fighting men on the islands—these Mindayans,’ Tarrant told me. ‘The price of life here is to kill first, to kill all the time, snakes and men.’ That night I wandered about the deserted port in the Crusoe silence. At the edge of the town, I was ‘put out’ by the route of flashing stars—a blow on the head from behind.
“Oddly enough, Miss Noreen, the natives let me live. In the morning I awoke in a bungalow and discovered Rawder sitting in the doorway.
“His queerly-cut eyelids were drawn together by the intensity of light. Outside, the sunlight waved in pure white flame. It was the vividest time of the day, of the hottest time of the year, in the fieriest island of the globe. Minday is insidious. You can breathe and walk outside, but if you don’t get under cover when your scalp warns you with its prickling, you will likely be buried at eventide by the wild dogs of Minday. Or, possibly, if your vitality is immense, the sun will spare your life, but fry the contents of your brain-pan, which is rather worse than losing an arm.
“Rawder did not note that I was awake. He was exchanging ideas with a young Mindayan whose skin was the color of the dead wet oak leaves which floor the woods at home in the spring. It appears that this stained one had been in Luzon and learned eighteen or twenty words of English. Through these, and the signs which clasp the world, Rawder was amassing Mindayan for the purpose of—administering Methodism to the natives.
“I had been unconscious for many hours. I couldnot rise, and my brain seemed to be working on a little boy’s shift. For ages, it seemed, I watched the hand and lip converse, too weak to call, to ask why I lived—my skull filled with sick-room wonderings. Rawder labored on with the language, calm, gentle, homely unto pain. He was leaner, stronger, than before; untanned, but the pasty pallor was gone from his face. Years had outgrown the heritage of physical disorder. I had always noted how his thoughts formed, slowly, thoroughly, without adornment, but each thought straining his limitations to the roof of his brain. If an action were involved in any of Rawder’s thoughts, he carried out that action, as good hounds run—to the death. I saw now that wonderful look about him, that Heaven-warmed something which distinguishes a man who has great work to do in the world. Perhaps I alone could see it. They say God never sends a great soul among men without some one to recognize it. It may be that the honor is mine in the case of Rawder. Stricken as I was, I could not help noting his endurance of concentration. This, as you know, is the gift only of mystics. He was driving the monkey-mind of the Mindayan interpreter to the beds of torture with it.... He saw, at last, that my eyes were open, and came to me, kneeling down to take my hand. The native seized the moment to escape.
“It transpired I was in the real village, two miles back from the port. The Mindayans had brought me with several American soldiers who had wandered the night before over the edge of camp, to furnish a bright torture-entertainment in the town-plaza. Rawder hadsaved my life, but the others had gone out in unmentionable ways.
“‘I was awake when they brought you in,’ he said. ‘These people have not rallied to me very strongly yet, or I could have saved the boys who were captured.... But you—I begged for your life through the interpreter, saying that you were a great teacher and not a soldier, showing them the difference in your garments—and your face.’
“Perhaps you can picture, Miss Noreen, his struggle with the natives, while I had lain unconscious that night.... I explained to him that Tarrant’s command took him for a deserter and a renegade, whose leadership had made fiends of the Tagals. He stared out in the open for a long time without speaking. He was not whipped nor enraged, as a lesser man would be. I think I shall always remember his words:
“‘I seem to fail so many times and in so many ways before getting started in my real work, Mr. Routledge. The soldiers are not to blame. They could not understand me; and yet my purpose was so simple. I should not have told them that I meant to be a missionary in Asia when my enlistment was through. It confused them. Some time all will understand. Some time I shall do well and not fail.’
“‘But how did you get away from the command?’ I asked.
“‘I do not know,’ he answered. ‘During the fight I fell from the heat and a slight wound. I awoke alone, concealed my arms in the jungle, and tried to follow the troop. I must have mistaken the trail, because I never saw the American outfit again. Three days ofnight travel brought me close to the big native coast town of Triacnakato, where I fell in with a party of Mindayans, there on a trading voyage——’
“‘Tell me, Rawder,’ I interrupted, ‘why you joined the cavalry in the first place.’
“‘Asia called to me. Always, in those last days in Boston I heard Asia call me to work. I had no money to reach the Pacific nor to cross it, so I was enlisted with a regiment ordered to service here. I had heard of certain soldiers doing good work among their fellows in the old English regiments, and thought that until I was free again I might be a help in the troop. White men do not seem to listen to me, Mr. Routledge.’
“Thus he talked, Miss Noreen. Do you like him a little bit—my great man, Rawder?”
The girl regarded him hesitatingly for a moment, as if to reply was not easy. “I like him so well,” she answered at last, “that I wish it were my destiny to meet him every little while up the years, as you do. Tell me all.”
“And so he had started in to teach the words of John Wesley, and others, to these Mindayans whom Spain had left to themselves on account of their ferocity. God knows why the Mindayans gave him a Messiah’s chance to learn their language and explain his message, but they let him live. And now I must tell you about another moment or two of battle. There has been far too much war already for your frightened eyes, but this is short and about my bravest man.
“As we talked, there was a sharp crack of a Krag carbine. I could not rise, but crawled to the doorway. The Mindayans had formed in the plaza for action.Tarrant was coming with his squadron of cavalry to settle for the murders of the night before, and the naked Mindayans essayed to meet him in the open—as the Tagals of Luzon had never dared to do. It was all on in a moment. Out of the jungle came the boys from the States—queer, quick lines, blowing their bubbles of white smoke, dropping down to fire and running forward in skirmish, answering the trumpet-talk as running metal answers to the grooves of a mold. In the blazing open—in a light so intense that it was pain to look through it—the forces met. Mindayans, with guns dating from Magellan; the Americans with their swift, animate Krags; a squadron of white men, three skeleton troops picked from forty States, stacked against a thousand-odd glistening blacks all enthused to die. Hell’s forbidden chambers were emptied that hour, Miss Noreen. I hated war then—but have hated it since far more.
“They met—before my eyes they met—and the dead flew out of the lines like chaff, and were trampled like chaff by the toilers. Hand-to-hand at last; shiny black of flesh against the dull green-brown of khaki; the jungle alive with reserves exchanging poisoned salads of metal; science against primal lust; seasoned courage against fanaticism; yellow sky above, yellow sand beneath; blood-letting between, and the eternal jungle on every hand. It was a battle to haunt and debase a watcher’s brain.
“I did not know Tarrant’s prowess until that day. One man might falter in his command, but the lines were rigid as steel. His trumpeter interpreted every movement of the commander’s lips. I pawed the matting of the hut, but could not lift the anchorage ofmy hips. Rawder stood above me, watching, the lines of his sweating face weaving with sorrow. The thing was growing upon me—what the end of the fight would mean to him—but his sad face was clean of all fear. Years ago, when I was a boy and loved physical courage, I should have worshipped that clean look of his. Tears in his eyes for the men who had brutalized him!...
“There is always a last minute to a fight, Miss Noreen,—when each force puts forth its final flicker of courage, and the lesser zeal is killed. The last drain of gameness wins the battle, when strength and strategy are gone. It wins for spiders and boys and armies. Tarrant had it.... When it was all over, the men of Rawder’s troop saw him in the doorway and rushed forward.
“‘Mr. Routledge,’ he said softly, ‘they are coming for me. The boys have spoiled my mission here.’
“His hand touched my forehead. The ghastly illness left me.... I don’t believe in telling a lady a story which one would refrain from telling his fellow war-scribes, Miss Noreen, but believe me, you have impelled it with perfect listening——”
“His hand touched your forehead,” she repeated.
“Yes, and there was something about the touch that a dealer in war-stuff could not very well enlarge upon in print. At one moment I was but the shell of a man—and the next I could rise.
“Rawder’s old troop was running forward to finish him—Tarrant in the lead. I tried to make them hear—these white men, as they rushed in, full of the hang-over hell of a fight. But they would not hear me. The men saw only the crown of a great day—to kill the deserterwho had led the Tagals against them in Luzon—Rawder, the renegade, whom they believed stood also behind the deaths of last night and this day. To kill him after whipping the Mindayans would call down the glory of the Pantheon.... Rawder stepped back, smiling, empty of hand. I managed to trip Tarrant and yell the story in his ears as he fell. A top-sergeant went by me with a native-knife.... The fluids were running from the man who had saved me, before Tarrant or I could intervene, but the rest were stopped.
“Hours afterward, in the night, he regained consciousness. At least, consciousness wavered in his eyes, and I bent to hear, ‘I am not yet to die.’...
“And it was true, Miss Noreen, in spite of a fearful wound—but that is all healed.... Tarrant was relieved from Minday. Back in Manila, we learned that the real renegade of lower Luzon had been captured alive by volunteer infantry. His name is Devlin, and he is since notorious in Luzon story. Through Tarrant, whom I saturated with the substance of Rawder’s character, my bravest man was discharged for disability.... A month ago, I left him on the Hong Kong water-front. He had found night-work among the sailors—saving them from the human vultures who prey upon poor Jack-ashore-with-money-in-his-pocket—hard, evil-judged work, but the only kind that Rawder knows so far. Many a drugged or drunken sailor has awakened on board his own ship with a tithe of his earnings and a whole skin left, to wonder vaguely in after voyages who was his strange-voiced, gentle-handed protector—the last he remembered in Hong Kong.... Rawder told me I should find him in India next—said that he wascalled to the heart of India by a dream. He is to find his teacher.... Is it beyond belief to you, Miss Noreen, that there is a great meaning in this Indian shadow which has fallen upon my bravest man? I have known Hindus who could look beyond the flesh of men—despised by their own race—and discover souls of stirring evolution and inspiring purity.”
Jerry Cardinegh entered. Noreen caught her breath quickly, as if suddenly awakened from a dream.
“I feel that some time I shall see your bravest man, Routledge-san,” she whispered.