"For it's Tommy this an' Tommy that, an' 'Tommy 'ow's yer soul?'But it's 'Thin red line of 'eroes' when the drums begin to roll."
"For it's Tommy this an' Tommy that, an' 'Tommy 'ow's yer soul?'But it's 'Thin red line of 'eroes' when the drums begin to roll."
Then came days of blue wastes and sparkling wake; days of lazy lounging on swinging decks and under awnings, and at night the phosphor-play of the Pacific and stars that hung low and softly lustrous. Often Private Newt Spooner surprised himself, as he leaned with his bare fore-arms resting on the rail, to find that his thoughts, instead of busying themselves with war or vengeance, were going strangely back to the added room of the smoky cabin on Troublesome and the girl who sat before the fire in the long evenings when the wind wailed through the dead timber. The logs were blazing there on the hearth he had built for her.
One morning the men crowded and jostled at the rail to gaze ahead where the hunched shoulders of Corregidor Island raised themselves like a crouching sentinel, at the gate of Manila Bay.
If the men of the Shirt-tail battalion had feared the dull routine of garrison duty, they were to be pleasantly disappointed. In those late January days the impending storm which the Honorable Emilio Aguinaldo was brewing for the invaders of his "republic" hung imminent on the horizon of the future.
The mountaineers went into quarters in the Binondo district of the city, but more than two score of them were always on the line of outposts which lay around Manila, resting its left on the salt marshes by the sea, and its right on the sea again at the end of a six-mile arc.
The Kentuckians rubbed elbows with a trim and seasoned command of regulars near the extreme left. To the front beyond the nipa houses and their palm-fringed gardens, lay unseen the parallel, intrenched lines of the Insurgents.
As yet there had been no clash, but each dawn brought expectancy. Private Newt Spooner, carrying his rifle on sentry duty, often glimpsed their straw hats and brown faces, above the trench embankments, and glared across the intervening spaces. Occasionally, too, when regimental officers rode along the front on inspection of outposts, Newt saw the figure of his major. Then his embryonic hatred for the brown men, who lay masked at the back of these palms and rice paddies a few hundred yards away, passed into total eclipse behind a fiercer emotion.
One night when not on outpost duty, Newt lay on his cot in the company-room of the Binondo barracks. The boy was watching the shadows that wavered on the whitewashed wall, and his face wore a lowering scowl. Top-Sergeant Peter Spooner glanced at that scowl, and a faint frown crossed his own features.
Captain Sparvin of B Company had developed into a fair officer, and in actual service a wider gulf yawned between the men who held commissions and those who held warrants than had been the case back in the hills where the company was born. Yet Sparvin more and more depended on the Deacon, and more and more left company affairs in his capable hands. The company's efficiency and deportment were the first sergeant's care. Charges were preferred or dismissed at Sergeant Spooner's suggestion. When a "non-com" vacancy occurred, the man suggested by Black Pete was usually selected to fill it. And to the confidence of the officers was added a sort of idolatry on the part of the enlisted men. It is quite likely that had B Company been out on detached service, and had Sergeant Spooner given a command contradictory to his superior, even after these months of discipline, B Company would have followed the sergeant. Yet Sergeant Spooner had his problem, and that problem was his kinsman, Newt. When Newt scowled in that fashion the top-sergeant was troubled with apprehension. One crazy man in one crazy moment can do things which cannot be undone. Yet there was no outward ground for complaint or charges. In the entire outfit was no more efficient soldier than Newt. None answered more intelligently or with a snappier quickness to commands; none kept his kit in more perfect order; none was more soldierly. The problem was intangible in its outward manifestations, but the sergeant knew that the boy was "bidin' his time."
After "taps" the company-room quieted save for snores and heavy breathing. But Newt, lying quiet on his cot, still staring at the shadows on the whitewashed wall, was not asleep, and Sergeant Peter Spooner was not asleep. The tropic night-quiet had settled over the empty streets of the city, and the footsteps of occasional pedestrians only emphasized the deep silence.
Suddenly there came to the ears of the private and the ears of the sergeant a far-away, but insistent sound, almost a ghost-sound in the vagueness with which it drifted across the roofs from the north. Yet it brought them both to their feet, and in an instant both stood together by the window. Now it was plain enough, and began swelling from a purring rattle to the crescendo of an approaching wind storm. Somewhere out there in the far distance was the constant splatter of Mausers like rain on a tin roof.
Instantly Sergeant Spooner was arousing B Company and turning them out. From the streets, too, five minutes ago quiet with a cemetery stillness, came a confusion of shouting and rushing, punctuated by the sounds of slamming doors and creaking shutters. Presently the clatter of hoofs and the brazen signals of bugles gave official notice of immediate action.
The men of B Company were dressing with the hurry of firemen, and Sergeant Spooner said quietly:
"Well, boys, the feud has bust loose."
Then, almost as suddenly as the clamor of the streets rose, it died again, and the city lay silent once more except for the distant, unending roar of musketry.
At regimental headquarters officers were gathering, and companies were falling in under the vigorous exhortation of non-coms. Newt Spooner saw Major Falkins hurry into the room, through whose open door he could see Private Watson at a telegraph key. The major was buckling his saber-belt as he went. About the instrument pressed a cluster of battalion and company officers, crowding eagerly up for news and orders. In a subtle fashion the news from within floated out and communicated itself to the lines of men impatiently shuffling their feet in the streets. The fighting was all along the north front. That was where the Fifth Kentucky's outposts were stationed. That growing volume of Mauser argument, with the duller rumble of the Springfields, probably told of the Kentuckians holding hard against the pressure. Why did not the line fall into column and move forward? Why did they stand here waiting when they were needed there? Then came a rumor from the telegraph key that only two battalions were to go forward, while the third remained in town with the reserves.
That report sent a low grumble through the ranks. In the very rattle of tin-cup on haversack and rifle-butt on cobbles was a note of deep discontent. Newt could see through the open door the figure of Major Falkins leaning anxiously over the instrument. Then he saw him turn to come out with a smile. Brief staccato orders broke from captains and lieutenants and the Shirt-tailers were swinging down the Calle Lemeri, with the bluegrass battalion at their backs. The streets gave back hollow, ghost-like echoes to the rattle of their accouterments and the quick rhythm of their step. Clearer and noisier to the front rose the insistent drumming of the fight, and the men from the hills and lowlands were going at last into action.
About them were dark streets with jalousies that clicked as anxious house-holders thrust out startled faces. From other streets they heard kindred sounds telling of other columns, battalions and regiments, moving in other currents to the support of their own outposts. The long, swinging step of the mountaineers carried them swiftly. The bluegrass men had need to lengthen their stride to hold the pace, and from their ranks came a low hum of frank and eager excitement, but the high-landers marched in silence.
The First Nebraska had borne the brunt of the initial firing, but from that point it traveled along the whole insurrecto front as forest flames run in dry leaves, eating its way along a segment of five miles of trenches. As the battalions drew nearer and the chorus extended, the night rocked to the solid bellow of musketry, until individual reports were swallowed and lost in one deep and composite note.
The Shirt-tail battalion at last left the ordered streets behind and began its journey through the sparser-peopled environs. They hurried through villa-adorned suburbs, passing old Spanish mansions. Now overhead they heard the whine of the Mauser bullets. These messengers went by with a spiteful song like a whispered shriek: they purred and whistled like a strangling human throat: they brought to the ear a ripping noise like the violent tearing of silk. They rattled nastily as they struck corrugated-iron roofs, and popped when they found billets in the walls of nipa houses.
A strange silence sat upon the marching column, or a silence which would have been strange, with less taciturn men, and they went as though they were going to mill with grain to be ground. As they were reinforcing outposts, no advance guard felt its way at the front. The colonel, major of the second battalion, and part of the staff, all mounted on Philippine ponies, rode a few paces ahead of the column. The way now led through scattered houses and straggling gardens, where ragged palm-fronds waved to the sea-breeze. From some of the windows came wails of fright as immured house-holders heard the popping of bullets against their frail habitations.
Suddenly, above the din of rifle-fire, rose a deep boom, followed by a rumble like the rail-song of a distant express. Two seconds later came a loud swish, and two or three of the frail nipa shacks to the left and rear collapsed as though a ten-pin ball had struck houses of cards. The column was under artillery fire, and should by all military theories deploy into open formation, instead of offering a compact target. But ahead lay anestero, or slough, which must be crossed on a bridge. Beyond that were open fields with rice-dykes and cane—a place of comparative security not yet attained.
At the order "double-quick" ringing from the bugles, the column leaped eagerly forward to a clattering trot, but before they reached the bridge two more of the loud-throated roars gave warning, and two more of the solid shot plowed past, to demolish other houses perilously near by. Henry Falkins looked back to see how his men were standing this initial test, and smiled, well satisfied.
Then the bridge was reached and crossed, and the command was spreading fan-like into open order. Now the bullets were not only giving voice overhead, but kicking up the dirt near at hand.
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.
During the night a siege-gun had been brought up by hand, and now, from its place where the road cut through the entrenchments, it opened with the morning greeting of a hoarse bark, as the crew serving it began feeling over the landscape for the field-piece which had boomed so insistently last night.
Then, as the morning wore on, and orders to advance came, the slow rifle-firing began again and increased in volume as the sun climbed.
The night-long rain of random lead had taken its toll in a few wounded, though none had sustained mortal hurt. Two or three men from B Company came back to the front from the improvised dressing-station at the rear, wearing reddened bandages, which they displayed with the cocky pride of medals, as they picked up their pieces and joined again in the game.
The masking woods told nothing of the trenches beyond except in the swish of Mauser bullets, which shredded drooping palm fronds into tatters. Newt Spooner was squatting on his haunches in the trench, with a pipe between his teeth. Every now and then he came to his knees and fired a shot. At his side knelt Jim Dodeman, who until he joined the militia had never fared twenty miles from the cabin on Troublesome where he had been born. Jimmy was bored with the ennui of shooting at a screen of palm trees and crouching between times in a hot ditch. So, at last, he rose for a fuller view and to stretch the cramp from his limbs. He rose silently and as silently lay down again, but this time he lay flat, and, when a pause in proceedings gave Newt leisure to relight his pipe, he looked down to recognize in Jimmy's posture the dummy-like quality of death. The little muddy spot under the soldier's temple was fed by blood trickling from his brain.
First-Sergeant Peter Spooner had been going back and forth along the company line, curbing the inclination of its restive integers to over-spend cartridges in futile bickering. He stopped and turned the prostrate figure face up, and for a moment looked into the dulled eyes.
"Dead," commented the sergeant briefly.
Newt nodded.
"Them damned Falkinses got him," he said over his shoulder. Then, remembering that he had swapped enemies, he grinned, and corrected himself: "I mean them other varmints."
At noon, a brigade staff-officer brought instructions. The whole line was to be advanced five hundred yards to a new position where the woods would no longer screen the enemy, and it was there to dig trenches along a roadway, which paralleled the present front.
That news sent a drone of excited pleasure through the bluegrass companies, and even into the phlegmatic stoicism of the Shirt-tail battalion crept the suppressed expectation of the first charge. Major Falkins went along the line for final instructions to company commanders, and First Sergeant Spooner cast down his company front the anxious glance of a stage-director who awaits the curtain call, on a first night.
But the two platoons seemed steady enough as they rose from the trenches in extended order, and waited for the word that should launch them forward.
Then a bugle rang, and the entire two battalions started silently and stolidly onward. In a few minutes the silence would be broken—from the front. On to the screen of the woods they went at a rapid quickstep, and through the foliage they broke into view, like circus riders through paper hoops. As they emerged into the open rice-fields, and could see the straw hats at the top of the trenches four hundred yards to the north, the stillness was ripped in one wild roar of musketry, and their terrific welcome had begun. Its echoes rolled away in waves of sound that merged with fresh outburstings, and nearer at hand, in weird shrieks, piercing the louder detonations, whimpered the lost-soul wail of the Mauser bullets. As the straw hats bobbed hysterically up and disappeared again, the men of the two battalions began stumbling and lying grotesquely down in the rice-fields.
They reached the road, which the brigade order said was to be their resting place. But neither brigade nor division orders can keep men alive in a place where the physical topography forbids. The road ran at the right and left in a sunken band between banks two or three feet high, affording—to east and west—a natural protection; but for the length of several furlongs it elected to rise and proceed in a level flush with the rice-fields and gave to even the closest-lying and most prostrate figures pitiless conspicuousness as targets. On each side, the troops were at work, improving their cover, and for their work they had partial security; but the Kentuckians were left mercilessly exposed. They were firing desperately at the solid earth ahead and receiving in response a death-hail which they could not for many minutes endure.
Sergeant Peter Spooner, running in a crouching attitude, dropping, rising, his rifle barking, was doing all that mortal being could do to make moles of his men and burrow them into the earth. The situation was intolerable. The Shirt-tail battalion and the bluegrass battalion stood in peril of decimation in their maiden engagement.
Newt Spooner lay stretched behind a mound of earth some seven inches high. He lay spraddled and flattened like a large drab lizard, hugging the earth with his feet stretched apart, and even his heels held tight to the clay. At each report of his piece Private Spooner opened the block and blew through the breech, as a trap-shooter blows the powder out of a shot-gun. Private Spooner's face was sweating with exertion, and the dust turned to mud as it gathered on his chin and jaws.
Behind similarly insufficient mounds, or no mounds at all, several hundred other privates were similarly employed. At the front rose a dense fog of fleecy white, for the volunteers had not yet been afforded the luxury of smokeless powder. Ever and anon a man rose on one elbow and strained his eyes in a vain effort to penetrate the pale smoke, and as the hour-like minutes wore on, more and more of them rolled quietly over and relinquished their rifles and stared up out of eyes which the hot glare had ceased to trouble.
Orders are orders, and the line was commanded to remain here, but Major Falkins knew that his section of it must move forward, or fall back and leave the line broken. The colonel was at the regimental center where the line lapped on the deeper banks. Falkins, with a scarlet thread down his face where death had brushed him in passing, found the commanding officer.
"I can't stay where I am," he shouted; "I must go forward."
"Go," acquiesced the "C. O." crisply. "And go like hell!"
At the returning major's elbow pressed the battalion's trumpeter, and, at the signal of a nod, he set the bugle to his lips and blew, "Cease firing!" It was the command for which he had been fretting. The brazen message went only a little way along the noisy line, but it was relayed by word of mouth; and, as the firing fell away, the second command clamored upon the first. "Fix bayonets!"
Those notes were magic. They stood for the wild dash and close quarters and hand-to-hand punishment. They promised vengeance for the men who had fallen asleep. Down the front ran the ominous metallic click of engaging hilt and muzzle, and, as the pall of smoke began to rise, the line came shouting to its feet and set its eyes hungrily on the yellow stripe that marked the top of the earth-works. They stood, a moment, exposed as the command of "forward" flexed their taut nerves. There were three hundred yards between them and their goal, and these three hundred were annoyingly and maddeningly broken with fences and gullies, but now they were free to fire at will, which meant as fast as they could load. Also, as they advanced, they left behind their own blinding curtain of powder fog. And these men from the hills, shooting now at a point-blank range to which they were accustomed: a range at which every man was a sharp-shooter, combed and harried the yellow earthen band ahead of them with so galling and stinging and venomous a punishment that the straw hats drew down like turtle heads into shells, and the Mauser bullets, fired at random, went wilder and higher.
It was not easy work, though much easier than lying prone and being shot to pieces. Even with random marksmanship and growing panic, the brown men were still sheltered, and many shots went home. Newt, clambering over a fence, saw at his shoulder a boy who used to sit at his side on the split-log bench at school. He saw the boy loosen his hold on the same fence and roll over and over in the rice-stubble, clawing at his breast, while his lips snarled and swore.
Then, sixty yards from the yellow rim of the trenches, the bugle rang out its most blood-quickening call, and, in answer, the line trembled and leaped forward, and mountain reticence broke at last in one prolonged mountain yell of fury and loosened passion.
And, as that barbaric howl of impending doom smote upon the ears of the Filipinos in their ordered trenches, they read in it a cue for swift exit, and their white-clad bodies began clambering out of the rifle-pits, and their brown legs began twinkling through the rice-fields behind.
The Kentuckians redoubled their pace. It was intolerable that the men whom they had left strewn along the rice-paddies should go unavenged. Yet, when they clambered across the trench fronts, it was to find them empty, save for those who lay dead.
For a moment, the victors halted, winded and almost exhausted at the trenches they had carried. Companies were as hopelessly jumbled and mixed as a galley of type that a compositor has dropped downstairs.
Private Newt Spooner and perhaps enough men to make a half-platoon, after a few moments of gasping and sweat-wiping, rose up and started on in the trail of the fleeing insurgents.
"Hold on there!" bellowed Sergeant Peter Spooner, for once losing his composure in a volley of profanity. "Where the hell do you think you're goin' to?"
"We're goin' atter 'em!" shrieked back Private Newton Spooner. "Come on, boys—we kin git 'em."
Major Falkins had seen the trouble and rushed up, his face steaming, but triumphant.
"Get back, damn you!" he ordered. "Get back to those trenches." He had neither time nor inclination to explain why pursuit was denied. Such matters as preserving division alignment were of no interest to these men.
For a moment, Newt Spooner hesitated, surveying his battalion commander with an insolent contempt, then he turned to the other restive privates.
"Come on, boys!" he yelled. "Don't suffer them niggers ter git away."
The major and his sergeant acted promptly. With the flat of sword and clubbed musket, they beat back the mutinous and excited men, and, after one blood-mad moment, all except Newt turned readily enough with shamefaced grins.
But, in the momentary flail-like wielding of his saber-blade, Henry Falkins had struck Newton Spooner one light blow, and straightway the boy forgot any war between the United States and Aguinaldo; and remembered only the old war between himself and the man who had sent him to prison. He slipped a cartridge into his breech and would have settled the score at the moment.
But, in that same moment, Sergeant Peter Spooner caught his hand, and whispered in his ear.
"Obey orders, damn you! This ain't your only chance. This ain't no private quarrel."
No one else had seen that look, or in the larger excitement read its significance, and, even while Sergeant Spooner held Private Spooner's steaming wrist, and their faces bent close together, sweat-wet and dirt-stained, a new roar awoke two hundred yards to their left, to seize their attention. The windows and doors of the old Spanish church, that stood with a crooked cross tottering over its stained stucco walls, was belching fire upon them. There was no time to form company or platoon now, or to sort men into their rightful commands. Major Falkins waved his saber and led the way at a run toward the offending walls, and Sergeant Spooner at his heels was herding the group forward at pell-mell speed, their rifles blazing and barking as they went.
A few of them did not reach the place, but enough did, and, as they came to the front, spreading and dividing to prevent possible escape from other entrances, the doors opened, and the over-venturesome refugees rushed out in a pelting tide of effort to fight their way to freedom by a sortie. Then the wrath of the mountaineers was appeased, and those of the enemy who did not remain for burial went back as prisoners.
As Henry Falkins hurried back to his command, Private Newt Spooner followed close at his heels and this time his rifle swung at his side. Its bayonet bore some stains which he wiped off as he walked. At the trenches, the bugle was sounding assembly. Across the face of the country, wisps and attenuated clouds of smoke were wreathing their way up and melting in the blue. From the rice-paddies and dykes rose wavering mists of heat.
The Kentucky hillsmen, now reformed into column, were going back to their fellows. They alone had had the capping triumph of crossing the earth-works and effecting the hand-to-hand dislodgment of the enemy. So they went back with a jaunty tread, and they paused before starting across that four hundred yards where they should be watched as returning victors, to pull out their shirt-tails. Marching in that style, they would not have to declare their identity.
To Henry Falkins they suggested, as the skirts of their flannel shirts flapped around their legs like kilts, those far-off ancestors of the Scotch highlands whose blood flowed unamalgamated in their veins.
That inflexible grip which the service takes upon its units and fractions of units, had slowly and unconsciously altered the view-point of The Fifth Kentucky foot. Back there in the stagnant riffle of a life which for a century had not taken a forward step, their motto had been, "Let us alone," and every man had been a law to himself; despot over his own affairs and the affairs of his family. Now, because they obeyed in a common cause and of their own volition, obedience no longer irked them, and they had come to think of themselves less as individuals than as bricks mortared together in a military arch.
The second day after the outbreak of insurrection passed with no greater excitement than occasional and desultory firing from the front. Night fell with utter quiet as though both armies were exhausted and ready for sleep. The stars overhead were bright and close, and the men, sprawling on the earth, were thinking softened thoughts, or crouching around campfires in rehearsal of recent events.
Near the spot where Newt Spooner lay stretched on his blanket, a bearded, gaunt man, with a sprinkling of gray in his beard, was writing a letter home. It was Uncle Jerry Belmear, whose forge and smithy stood at the forks of Squabble Creek. The yellow flare from a shaded lantern fell in sharp high lights on his lean cheekbones and on the cramped hand, laboriously pushing its pencil. His lips moved, automatically spelling out the words of difficult composition. Newt was watching him with the reflection that there was nowhere anyone to whom he himself could send a thrill of pleasure with a letter. Then, since strange influences were working in the boy's starved heart, he wondered if, after all, "Clem's gal" might not be glad to hear from him. Minerva was "eddicated," and in her head were cogitations which he could never hope to comprehend. She took medals for "larnin'"—he ground his teeth as he thought from whose hand she had taken one. He was ignorant and "pizen-mean." The contrast was obvious. Yet, she had looked at him with a friendly glance, and had been grateful for his championship.
But these idle thoughts were violently interrupted by a sudden staccato outburst and the darting of Mauser tongues through the dark. Recumbent figures came to their feet. Uncle Jerry Belmear rose with the half-finished letter in his hand, and as he stood up he was struck. Had the same man been wounded in a charge or lying in his trench, he would have fallen silently, but that messenger out of the night, coming when his thoughts were all back in the silent Cumberlands, startled him into outcry. He wheeled, and from his lips broke a sound that started as an oath and ended in a weird shriek, heard along the whole battalion front.
As though they had wanted only that cue, the battalion, hitherto patient to await orders, sprang to the trenches and began pumping their Springfields frantically into the night. Buglers were madly blowing "Cease firing"; officers and sergeants were carrying profanity and strong language the length of the line, but the panic spirit had to spend itself before the men heard or obeyed—and realized with chagrin that stray bullets had upset them.
But that mild disgrace of showing nerves, instead of nerve, must be lived down, and it served to put the newly made veterans the more on their mettle.
Almost every day that followed brought its clash with the enemy, and once or twice the Shirt-tailers came into hand-to-hand struggles, where it was bayonet and butt, and "fist and skull," and where their barbaric yell drowned the bugles. They grew accustomed to the thunderous roar with which the cruisers in the harbor shelled the Insurgent positions in preparation for their advance, and so day by day, and step by step, the still parallel lines of the brown men gave back, and those of the American force hitched forward.
And in these, by no means idle days, the word went abroad among them that they were only waiting here to be relieved by fresh troops from the States, and were to be a part of the force designated to push on to the Insurgent capital.
But the rumor went ahead of the actuality. Sometimes there were days of quiet and even brief informal truces at certain sections of the front, when the open rice-fields became a common playground. Then the straw hats that had heretofore bobbed up only to fire and bob down again, moved about in the open, and watched theAmericanosplaying baseball. Once a band came out from Manila, and, when the heat of the day was spent, gave a concert in the rice-fields, and at its end, as the national air swelled out and the troops from home stood at attention and uncovered, the straw hats across the open fields were also doffed. Though he did not quite understand why, that incident caused a strange and new emotion to pulse through the arteries of Private Newton Spooner; an emotion in no way kin to the "pizen-meanness" for which he was justly notorious. But the courteous enemy never allowed these pleasant recesses to endure long, and after a lesson or two in treachery they ended.
At last came the forward movement, the rush into native towns across their defenses, the pursuit of fleeing insurgents, and the glare in the sky as the nipa houses went up in flame; and the lying down at night in bivouac under the stars. In due course followed the end of state-troop days and the organization of new regiments of United States volunteers. Yet, this was more a change in the technical than the real, for while the Fifth Kentucky ceased to exist and the Shirt-tail battalion was no more, most of the men who had comprised the command were again together in the Twenty-sixth Volunteers, and the men from the hills still followed Major Henry Falkins.
Young Manly Fulton had returned to Louisville with a degree from Harvard University and an ambition to become a journalist. At the newspaper office where he was carried exceedingly near the bottom of the pay-roll, he was classed as a cub whose value no one took seriously save himself. In the course of time, it entered the mind of young Fulton that a visit to the schools and "colleges" of the Cumberlands would make a "feature-story" of general interest. He heard of young people, and older people, too, who were struggling to shake off the bonds of a century-old illiteracy, so he confided to his Sunday editor that herein lay, ready to hand, a subject with genuine "heart-interest." The Sunday editor laughed, and explained that this story had been often written, but, if the reporter wished to ring one more change on an old theme, he might go—at his own expense. So the young man went to Jackson, and from Jackson, with mule and saddle-bags, to the college on Fist-fight Creek. As the principal was showing him over the place, a girl passed through the library, and the "furriner" was presented.
The girl looked unwaveringly into his eyes as the professor smilingly said, "This is Miss Minerva Rawlins; one of our native-born. We are rather proud of Miss Rawlins." Manly Fulton looked back at her, and his clean-cut young face for some reason flushed. He had heard much of the slatternly women of the hills, women who bore drudgery and children, and early became hags. Now, he found himself being put at ease by a young creature who carried herself like a goddess, and whose eyes shielded, behind a naïve reserve, the truant impulse to twinkle into amusement at his evident confusion.
Later, the head of the faculty suggested:
"If you want to see and appreciate the full contrast between the school-life and home-life of these people, persuade Miss Rawlins to play guide for you along Troublesome. To-morrow is Saturday, and she will be riding home. Why don't you ride with her?"
So, when "Clem's gal" started across the mountains, the young man rode at her side, listening eagerly to the new point of view that her speech developed, and marveling at the life he saw about him; a life in which he seemed to have stepped back a century. It was all wonderful, for spring had come to the hills and kissed them, and they were smiling with a smile of blossom and young leaf, and whispering with soft breezes and the singing of crystal waters.
For a time, her conversation was, "Yes, sir," and, "No, sir"; for, though at first it had been himself who was embarrassed, it was now she, and so, until she discovered how boyish and frank he was, she eyed him with shy and sidelong glances. But, at last, she began to reveal a flower-like personality which was altogether charming, strangely blended with a gravely mature point of view. Her language, partly the hard-conned "proper speaking" of the school, and partly idiom, amused him with its quaint out-cropping of Elizabethan phrases, which fell in tripping unconsciousness from her lips.
When near sundown they came to her cabin, he felt the girl's embarrassed eyes on him as her father invited him "to light an' stay all night." And at table, though his stomach revolted against the greasy and uninviting fare, he knew that, as she served him standing, her eyes were fixed upon him. He caught the high-chinned courage of her unapologetic loyalty, even to swinish blood, and gamely bolted his food with mock relish.
"God!" thought the boy, as he vainly tried to sleep that night in the swelter of the over-crowded cabin. "What a life it must be for her! And yet," he added, "what escape is there?"
The next day, she took him rambling along creek-beds where she had friends among the early flowers and ferns and budding things and the feathered and singing things. She was in an unusually light and gay mood, and chattered until he felt that he was in an enchanted forest, and through her talk, which was all of birds and blossoms and woodland mysteries, he caught brief flashes of insight into herself.
"Do you know," he suddenly demanded, looking up from a mossy place where he was gathering violets, "that you are a rather wonderful sort of person?"
She stood over him, slender, and simply garbed in a blue calico dress and a blue calico sun-bonnet. Into her belt she had thrust a cluster of violets, and her eyes, which were closely akin to their petals, grew suddenly serious. The corners of her lips drooped in wistfulness.
"Am I?" she questioned gravely. It was the nearest thing to a compliment that had come her way.
"Yes," he asserted, rising to his feet. "Anywhere else in the world people would be wild about you, and here whom do you see? You know the verses, 'full many a flower was born to blush unseen.' Don't be one of them."
"How am I going to help it?" she asked him simply. He did not respond, because he was asking himself the same question. But, when that only visitor from the outside world had ridden away, the place seemed rather empty and desolate to the girl, and she sat alone in the spring woods while some voice insistently queried, "How can you help yourself?" She would marry no man who was ashamed of her people, even if such a man should come to woo her, and no man whom she would care to marry could well escape being ashamed of her people. Only one man had she ever known who seemed to feel for her a sort of reverence; to look up to her as superior to himself. That man had been very rough and wolfish in his championship—and that man had been a felon!
If some man might come who felt that way, and yet who had a living and enlightened soul; if such a man should say, "I love you—"
"Clem's gal" bent forward and pressed her fingers against her temples. "Oh, God!" she whispered.
Long ago Malolas had been taken, and the armies of Emilio Aguinaldo were giving back. Soon was to come the second and longer phase of the insurrection: that of the guerilla days. But as yet there were still occasions of battle.
The enemy lay one day with his trench-tops commanding a steep river-bank and a deep, swiftly-flowing current of tawny water, adding defense to his front. Half-way across this stream the broken abutments and twisted girders of a dynamited railroad bridge showed his preparations for attack. Yet both river and trenches must be crossed, and the 26th Volunteers had come, among others, to do it. A small mortar was merrily tossing shells across the way, but they fell on roofs devised of the rails from the uptorn track, and fell for the most part harmless. One small section of the earth-works was unroofed, and from it the mortar had driven the Insurgents. That troubled the enemy only because it was the one loop-holed portion of the defenses and consequently more healthful for riflemen.
A few strong swimmers might carry a rope across, thought Major Falkins, and attach its loose end to the bamboo stakes which went up at the very edge of the trench-embankments, provided they could live long enough. Killing is quicker work than swimming in a strong current. But, if three started and one arrived, his fellows could follow in the few leaky barges that were available. These barges could cross, if at all, only by rope-ferry. The current set its veto on any use of oars. For such character of work a "suicide squad" is asked to nominate itself, and among those who responded was Corporal Newton Spooner, formerly Private Newton Spooner of the Shirt-tailers, and before that, No. 813 at Frankfort.
As the boy stripped off his khaki and stood naked behind a screening tangle of riverside growth, several machine-guns and the musketry of the regiment were preparing to give him at least a noisy end.
Major Falkins stood by, coaching the three swimmers as a trainer coaches his jockey when the saddling bugle sounds in the paddock.
"Watch the rope," commanded the major briefly. "Swim in single file, and not too close together." He turned to Newt, who happened to be standing nearest him.
"It's going to be mean work, Spooner," he said in a low voice; "I hate to order it."
Corporal Spooner saluted, but his eyes narrowed and glittered with a light venomously serpent-like.
"I reckon," he said in a guardedly low voice, which only the major heard, "you'd like to see me peg out, wouldn't you? But I ain't goin' to do it. I'm goin' to live long enough to finish a job I've got to attend to yet. I reckon you know what it is."
Then he slipped without a splash into the water, for he was to lead the little procession. The major raised his hand in signal, and the spattering roar became a solid thunder. Rapid-fire guns, mortar and Krags played on the earth-works. Every Shirt-tailer was sighting as though for a sharp-shooter's medal—carefully, deliberately. A scathe of lead raked the trench tops, under which every brown head went down and stayed cautiously invisible. With strong, sure strokes the three naked men shot out into the stream and past its center—seemingly unobserved. It began to look as though they would gain the other side unseen by the enemy. But suddenly, from the loop-holed section, came spiteful little squirts of fire. Against that fire only the mortar could cope—and the mortar had turned its attention elsewhere. Tiny geysers kicked themselves up where the Mauser bullets struck and skipped on the water. The roar from the Shirt-tailers rose in louder indignation, and the crew serving the mortar was feverishly refinding the range. A few more strokes, and the three men fighting the current would be safe in the lee of the steep bank—but the little geysers were multiplying. The third man suddenly turned his face backward over his shoulder, and shook his head. He raised a hand as one who waves farewell at a railroad station, and went down. Corporal Spooner and the other man were reaching out to grasp the projecting roots that fringed the opposite shore, but, as the second man crawled up on the bank, there appeared on his naked flesh a constantly spreading splotch of crimson. Corporal Spooner paused to drag him under cover, then proceeded to tie the rope and—safe, because of his very proximity—sat down, panting, to wait.
Two general officers were eye-witnesses to that river crossing; they chatted about it over the cable with the government at Washington. Major Falkins, too, who had conceived the plan and crossed in the first barge, before the mortar got the exact range of the loop-holed breast-works, was also mentioned in these despatches. Later, both the major and corporal were given the Medal of Honor, and Newt became Sergeant Spooner, whereat the Deacon, now battalion sergeant-major, patted him approvingly on the back. But fate sometimes indulges in satiric contrasts. One afternoon, when the rush on a trench was over, and had been so mild an affair that the men felt like a fire company turning out to a false alarm, the last straggling volley from the routed enemy dropped both the major and the new sergeant in the stubble.
Newt's hurt was a shattered arm, but the superior officer had an ugly hole torn through one lung, over which the field surgeons shook their heads and whispered things about grave complications. Both were jolted back in wagons to the railroad.
Sergeant Spooner knew that his trouble was simply a matter of hospital inactivity and waiting, but in Manila, as in the field, surgeons talked anxiously about the battalion chief. Every day an orderly from division headquarters clattered up to the hospital to inquire after his health, and the ladies who had followed their soldier husbands as far as Manila sent flowers. It was finally decided that Major Falkins could only complete his recovery, if at all, in a more temperate climate, and so he was invalided back to the States. Newton did not know he was gone until the transport had sailed, and, when a hospital orderly brought the news, he said nothing, though his face set itself as he gazed at the whitewash of the ward wall, and sniffed the antiseptic odor of carbolic acid.
There were days of convalescence when with his arm in a splint the mountain boy wandered about the town, which he had, until now, had so little opportunity to investigate. Each day he would stroll to the north bank of the Pasig River, where it cut the city in half, and wander among the strange many-colored sights and pungent reeks of the Chinese bazaars in theEscolta. If these explorations brought him any sense of wonderment or interest, it was denied expression in his brooding eyes. Sometimes he would cross the ancient stone bridge, and wander at random into the walled Plaza de Manila, which had been the town of three hundred years ago. Late afternoon usually found him on thepaseoalong the bay, and there, with the tepid water heaving drowsily at his front, he would lean until darkness fell, thinking of two things. Somehow, the face of "Clem's gal" rose often and insistently into his reflections, and the set of his jaw slackened almost to a smile. Then the thought of his old grudge would come, and the jaw muscles would stiffen again, crowding out the softness.
The grip of the service was strong upon him, and he could salute his superior without a wince, and stand as respectfully at attention as any other of his comrades; but he knew that this was only because he had learned to dissociate the personal self from the military self. His hatred and the resolve born of it were undying. Generations of Spooners had made a virtue of hating until it coursed as an instinct with their blood. He knew now that simply to kill Henry Falkins would be no revenge at all. True punishment must involve the torture of dread, and for the major death would fail to attain that purpose. He must, therefore, devise something more exquisitely painful, and now, having leisure for reflection, he let his mind run on ways and means.
The Islands are not a good place for one to brood upon a fixed idea. On every transport he saw men, backward-bound, whose faces wore the imprint of melancholia and morbid derangements; men who were climate-mad.
Yet, the sergeant had another idea at the back of his head to which he never referred, and while he was waiting to be sent back to his regiment he might often have been seen sitting on one of the paseo benches, deep in the study of a spelling book, or arithmetic.
While these things were going on in Luzon, Henry Falkins was fast coming back to health. This was natural enough, for each morning the breeze stirred the chintz curtains of his window in the old mansion near Winchester, and the breeze was freighted with the heavy sweetness of honey-suckle. Each morning as he came down to breakfast, he would meet on the old colonial stairway a girl whose eyes sometimes danced mischievously and sometimes deepened into sweet serenity. Then in the dining-room, where Jouett portraits of men in blue and buff gazed down, this girl would pour his coffee from the old silver pot that these same ancestors had brought out of Virginia. And the colonel would fall pleasantly into reminiscences of days when he, too, wore a uniform, though it was gray, and rode with Morgan's men.
But there was a better medicine than that for Henry Falkins: the medicine of joy. Sundry preparations were going forward in the house. Dress-makers were working like beavers, because when the major had recovered sufficiently to return to the Philippines, he was not going alone. There was to be a wedding in the meantime. The girl had been down to "Bloody Breathitt," and stood with him on a high place in the hills. She had breathed deep with appreciative delight as she gazed off beyond the crests of their wooded slopes, where the patriarchal pines and oaks stood sentinel over the valleys. And there she had ridden the trails tirelessly, and the rude mountain folk had treated her like a young queen come from another land, because, with her sesame of graciousness, she had won her way into the sealed reserve of their hearts.
Together, the two had gathered the blossoms from the rhododendron, and down in shaded recesses where the waters whispered over mossy rocks and the elder-fringed forests closed in until only slender threads of sunshine filtered through, they had gathered ferns and been children together.
At last came the day when they knelt down and rose together from cushions before an improvised altar in the wide hall, and the colonel led them all to the wainscoted dining-room. There, in a vintage that had lain for a generation in the cobwebbed sleep of the cellar, both the old man from the mountains and the old man from the bluegrass toasted them—"Even if," as the colonel chortled, "the youngster is a Yankee soldier."
When the journey across the continent ended, they had lazy days at sea. As Henry Falkins gazed at his wife, panama-hatted, white-clad, with the Pacific winds stirring the one curl that, in persistent truancy, escaped its confinement to trail across one eye, he wondered if she were really not too delectable a vision to be real. And his brother officers seemed to think so, too, so that she reigned on the quarter-deck.
But, if the testimony of so astute an observer as General Sherman is to be accepted, war is not unbroken honeymoon, and in the Islands in 1900 the general's monosyllabic descriptive was more applicable. At least, that was true in certain provinces, where the orders ofEl Presidentewere being carried into effect with ardor and pertinacity. Those orders were to disperse, live outwardly asAmericanistas, and under the semblance of peace to harry, sting and annoy the army of occupation. The seventy thousand troops now in the Islands were no longer marching and bivouacking as armies, but, "split in a thousand detachments," were scattered into garrisons from the China Sea to the Pacific.
Over beyond the mountains and across the level plantation lands of Nueva Ecija lay a town from whose center radiated many meagerbarriosand villages. It was a town with a small stone church, from whose teetering cross one arm had been shot away.
That church had a line of graves—inside its walls, with stones identically alike—and a history. Here, for almost a solid year, a garrison numbering at the outset fifty Spanish soldiers had held out with heroism against a swarming horde of Insurgents equipped with artillery. The town bore manyrecuerdosof that long and dogged fight. The walls of the church showed them in disfiguring scars, like those on the face of a man who has been mercilessly pitted by small-pox. The ruins of nipa houses showed them in fallen roof-trees and gaping breeches. The even ranks of gravestones, within the walls, bore eloquent testimony in successive dates of death.
In long, underscoring lines of brutally strong trenches and transverses, went still more of the record. How snugly and safely the besiegers had burrowed into the ground, and swept and whipped the starving garrison inside, was easy to read.
It was in this town with its church that Henry Falkins with his battalion was ordered to "wait in heavy harness, on fluttered folk and wild." The way thither lay over a hundred miles of plain and mountain, and in that hundred miles, under the extremely capable eyes of Lacuna and Paolo Tecson, the brown hornets were buzzing with extraordinary and tireless stinging power.
The battalion would make the march with a mule train and an escort of two extra companies, and when it was ensconced in the village which the war-scarred church dominated, the escort would say farewell and return to Manila. The extra companies would be picked up for the homeward journey by a cruiser, which would meantime have steamed with supplies around the north end of Luzon, through Batingtang Channel, and down the Pacific coast. After that, from time to time other ships would come and bring old mail, and look in to see that the garrison was still there and on the job. It was not a place to take a bride, even though the bride had crossed the Pacific to be with her husband and held determined views on the subject of being left behind in her rooms at the Orient.
Possibly, Henry Falkins told her, she could follow later by sea.
For three days, the command, with its train of fifty mules pushed on through a level country, well watered, and seemingly uninhabited. On the fourth, it struck the mountains, and from that point crawled, scrambled and panted. Up slopes steep and slippery with untrodden grass, where hoofs and feet shot treacherously out, the column crept, until the mules balked, and their burdens had to be transferred to human shoulders; a half-dozen pack animals shot over cliff edges, and burst like balloons in rocky gorges below.
Then, descending into a valley where the grass grew long and lush along the waterways, and lay brownly parched a little distance back, the column readjusted its impedimenta, and mended its pace. Sometimes the heat over the grass simmered in misty waves, and the marching men clamped their unshaven jaws, and set their eyes eastward. The eyes were growing blue-circled and weary, and the infantrymen picked up each foot with a sense of distinct and separate effort. Sometimes from the long grass at the side broke an unwarned din of rifle-fire, as the "point" ran into an ambuscade, and then the column closed up and in the merry response of volleys for the moment forgot its weariness. Sometimes the parched grass, kindled by unseen and hostile hands, burst into scorching sheets of flame at the front, necessitating tedious detours. In this fashion, at the end of ten days, they came to the town with the church, and found the cruiser awaiting them. The escort returned at once, and left the First Battalion of the 26th Regiment, United States Volunteers, to attend to its knitting, with the Pacific Ocean in front of it and the ragged mountains at its back.
There was much to be done, for not all of the command was to stay there. In near-by towns smaller detachments under company officers were to establish themselves and put the fear of God and the Eagle into rebellious hearts. That these outlying factions might not be cut off from headquarters, nerves of telegraph wires must be strung across the hills and through thebijucatangles of thebosque. These lines must, in places, follow bolo-cut tunnels through the jungle where the air was hot and fetid; where one fought for breath and was blinded by the streaming sweat, and where the stiffness of one's spine oozed out in flaccid weariness. Also, it proved immensely diverting to the loyalamigosto creep out by night with a pair of wire-nippers and undo in a moment what men had moiled through days to accomplish. When these wires sputtered and fell dead it was usually a fairly good indication that news of some fresh atrocity would finally percolate, and that a new "punitive expedition" must fare forth.
And yet in the town itself, and even in the smaller garrisons clustered about it, there was no overt act of rebellion—only ghastly news from the hills and hinterland.
In these days, former top-sergeant Peter Spooner, now battalion sergeant-major with the 26th Volunteers, became more than ever a force in himself. The smattering of Spanish which he had picked up in old Mexico had become a fluent stream. He was so valuable in a dozen ways that the semi-clerical work of sergeant-major often fell to other hands, while Black Pete was out on special detail. His scouting expeditions were effective of such results that the name of the dark giant became with the people of the enemy, as it had once been in the Kentucky mountains, a word to conjure with. In short, Black Pete Spooner was such a treasure of a "non-com" as gave his superiors food for mess-table boasting.
"Spooner," declared his captain, "could command a battalion if called on. He absorbs detail. He has even picked up the Morse code, and only yesterday I found him relieving the signal-corps man at the key. That's an example of his versatile efficiency."
In many scouting expeditions, Sergeant Newton Spooner likewise won for himself the bitter hatred of the guerillas. These mountain men had, in common with the enemy, the ability to become invisible, and often when they were supposedly being stalked it was found that they were really stalking.
So the days passed, and at last a steamer brought fresh supplies and also Mrs. Henry Falkins, who would no longer be denied.
Months in the isolation of a tropic garrison bring to the minds of men strange vagaries. When the work is that of hunting down elusive little traitors, who present faces of friendship by day and develop ingenious and atrocious deviltries at night, the effects are neither softening nor humanizing.
The presence of Mrs. Henry Falkins was to the men of the battalion like the steady freshening of a clean and fragrant breeze into a miasma. Had they had their way, they would have set her up, a living image, in the place of the patron saint above the bullet-scarred altar of the church. But even saints have defects, virtuous and noble defects perhaps, such as erring on the side of too great faith in humanity, when humanity is treacherous.
One native woman, whose face bore more strongly the characteristics of some far-off Castilian ancestor than of immediate forbears and mixed race, came to headquarters, and ingratiated herself with the commander's lady. When she brought in the week's washing, her smile was a dazzling flash of milky teeth and lips touched with Spanish carmine.
And it fell to pass that, though he had always been an immune to feminine blandishments, the tall sergeant-major was seen frequently strolling between thenipahouses with themestizagirl.
The Deacon, who had always been reserved, even melancholy in the thoughtfulness of his expression, was in these days more deeply somber than before.
Newt Spooner, alone in the command, recognized that there was some secret gnawing within his kinsman and that it was not a pleasant secret.
Deaths in the battalion had claimed several lieutenants, and left vacancies which carried commissions. Sergeant-major Spooner felt the time ripe for him to cross the line from non-com to commissioned officer. He could, in the old militia days, have had captain's bars for the taking. Now it would need the mandate of Washington, but the fact that nothing was said about it secretly grieved him. His officers from major down had bragged endlessly of his efficiency, yet the thought that was constantly in his mind never seemed to occur to them, and he doggedly refused to suggest it. It should not be inferred that the non-commissioned giant went sulking about his work. On the contrary, whatever rancor he felt was inward and unworded, and for that reason the more dangerous.
Newt, too, was feeling the influences of marrow-pinching days and jungle-burrowing and mountain-climbing on chases that came to nothing. More and more prominently, the haunting presence of his private grudge thrust itself to the front of his brain and grew sinister.
The boy held his peace, though he knew that Sergeant-Major Spooner had received a letter from one of the Insurgent "generals" offering him a captain's commission "in the service and just cause of the Republic." Black Pete himself believed that this proffer was in reality an effort to lure him into the power of the enemy for torture and death, and he mentioned the incident only to his major.
Then, one morning, themestizagirl bade a smiling farewell, which was also tearful, and was kissed by the major's lady. She was going away, she explained, to relatives who dwelt in the mountains. She waved her hand vaguely toward the Cordilleras: "Muchodistance away. No longer could she see the beautiful señora, or"—and here her dark lashes drooped and her olive cheeks flushed—"or the tall, bravesoldado Americano."
Sergeant-Major Peter Spooner walked with her, as far as the outskirts of the town, and the two talked in low voices, in Spanish. So the Deacon was the last to bid her farewell, as befitted the man who had most impressed her heart.
If the sergeant-major was cast down, he only devoted himself more industriously to the service, and gave no sign.
And the service had need of him, for a few days later came word of a sizeable force of the enemy camped in the mountains, and bent on mischief. In one of the few loyal villages thepresidentehad been murdered and manyAmericanistahouses put to the torch. Swiftly enough the battalion prepared for pursuit and punishment. Yet to go out in force would mean failure, so several scouting parties left in advance of the column. One went under the command of Lieutenant Sperry, and Sergeant-Major Peter Spooner was included at his own request.
It was thought natural that the sergeant-major should wish to be one of the avengers. The native girl had gone that way; might be in that region whereamigoswere being slaughtered, and it was perhaps known to the guerillas that she had loved an American soldier whom they blackly hated.
The detail embraced only twelve men, one of whom returned. But even that one did not return to the town by the church.
At a considerable native village, some ten miles away and lying at the edge of the mountains, was garrisoned a platoon of the battalion under the command ofTenienteBarlow. The road between the town with the church and this subsidiary station was, for that country, good, and the garrisoned village itself was as safe as a fortress. It was beyond that the work lay.
When Mrs. Falkins learned that a company from headquarters would march at once to follow up what news the scouts brought in, she promptly announced that as far as the village she would accompany the expedition. The major raised no objection. It was a pleasant thought that he could defer his farewell with his wife until he left the edge of the safety-zone, and meet her there on his return. Mrs. Falkins rode her native pony along that ten mile-march with a feeling of exhilaration and pride. These men who marched and fought behind her husband, were to her all members of a great family, of which he was the head. They were no longer raw men, "unmade, unhandled, unmeet," but seasoned and tempered veterans, and her young heart thrilled with pride as she drank in the morning air, and gazed with fascination at the vivid colors of the forests and the weird picturesqueness of the thatched hamlets by the way.
For five days after their arrival in the village, they awaited news from the hills. They had hoped for definite tidings before that time, but as yet the delay had caused no anxiety. The scouts might have found the reconnaissance a larger enterprise than they had anticipated. So those at the village invoked the philosophy of patience—and waited.
It had been some time since Lieutenant Barlow had seen a woman from God's country. He was one of the men who had come to the regiment with its reorganization, and now he was glad that he had turned a native bungalow into a fairly comfortable place for the quartering of his superior and his superior's wife. There was a small thatched porch, shaded against the mid-day glare by a grass curtain. From this verandah when the moonlight flooded the village, one had a view not to be despised. Across a bare space of so-called plaza stood the house occupied as headquarters, and now, on the fourth evening after their arrival, its office stood open-doored and vacant, save for the musician of the guard, who must remain on duty there until tattoo.
Everywhere about the village was the ordered quiet of a town well guarded. The girl sat in a deep wicker chair, while the two officers nursed their khaki-clad knees on the steps—and all talked of the States. The moonlight seemed to gush and flow over the face of the world, and to throw walls and roofs and palms into the fantastic picture-shapes of a fairy tale. Off between the houses, she could see the pacing figure of a sentry. Overhead from the nipa roof came the occasional stirring of a house-snake, and in the long silences, which the night stillness fostered, they heard tiny sounds of delicate scurrying footfalls as the lizards scampered across the walls.
One of them darted out into the yellow light of the open door, and halted near the lieutenant's knee. There, flashing like luminous jade and inflating his small crimson throat, he shrilled out his small, strident voice, and others answered.
It all seemed very unreal and far away and strangely beautiful. Then to their ears drifted a call from the sentry line for the corporal of the guard.
Athwart the front of the headquarters building lay an unbroken space, which the moonlight dyed with the deep blue-green radiance of a black opal. Shortly there appeared into this space two figures, carrying something which seemed heavy. They moved slowly as though their burden were a thing that required much care and, as they came nearer and made their way slowly toward the open door of the headquarters office, it became obvious that what they bore between them was a very limp human being. At first, it seemed unconscious and hung sagging in their arms; but, before they had disappeared through the doorway, it came to life with a nerve-rasping jargon of delirious sounds and lashed out inconsiderately with its arms and legs at the men who were giving it assistance.
Major Falkins and Lieutenant Barlow rose hastily, and crossed the space of moonlight. The girl rose, too, but she went into the house with that sound of raving still in her ears—and sat down, suddenly unnerved.
In the office, the major and lieutenant found the creature which had, several days ago, been a private soldier of the headquarters scouts, lying on the floor in the lemon-colored lamplight. It was mumbling inarticulate things through parched and cracking lips, and gazing wildly out of a couple of red embers that had formerly been eyes. Its clothing hung on it in tatters, and the exposed flesh was bolo-gashed and briar-torn. This was the one man of the twelve who came back to report—and came back decorated from torture. The surgeon was already kneeling on the floor, doing what human skill could do—which was too little.
The raving man made tortured efforts to speak, as though the eternal peace of his soul required it; but, of those bending over him, none could construe the hoarse gibberish of his swollen tongue and unbalanced brain.
Sergeant Newton Spooner had silently entered the office in response to the major's summons. Now, he stood at attention just within the threshold, and his eyes were not pleasant eyes as he gazed on the threshing, disfigured thing, and recognized in him a kinsman. But, if his face was hard-set and lustful for vengeance, it was hardly more so than that of the battalion commander, standing by as the surgeon forced brandy between the teeth of the wrecked face. The physician finally rose with a shake of his head.
"It's no use," he announced briefly. "He can't last two hours."
But to the object of erstwhile human shape came a momentary flash of revival. He tried to prop himself on one elbow and waved his torn fingers toward the mountains. From his mouth came incoherent sounds, and in his eyes burned the desperation of a final effort to rid himself of some message. Then he reached his hand around to his neck, and they saw that he bore, pinned to his belt, a package wrapped in the red calico of whichtaobreeches are fashioned.
They removed it, and opened the covering, to find inside a communication of the sort that scrapes the civilization from men as a coarse cloth scrapes the tender blush from a peach.
"This memento we return with compliments," ran the screed in neatly penned Spanish. "The rest will be dealt with as befits foes of the Republic. If you follow you will find at Santa Rosa another memento.
"Adios, con mucho felicidad, General José Rosario."
Major Falkins wheeled to Sergeant Newton Spooner. His face was very white and stony. "Have your company ready to hike—quick!" His words were snapped out like the cracks of a mule-whip; but Sergeant Newton Spooner had saluted and disappeared before the final syllable was uttered.
Within the hour, Mrs. Henry Falkins stood at the shell-paned window of the bungalow and saw the company swinging toward the edge of town with a step that argued coming events. At their head, guiding them into the blind trails of thebosque, went a native from the village, but he went with a rope around his shoulders, which was held by a sturdy private of the advance guard. There was no intention that he should abruptly disappear into the jungle and carry warning, instead of giving service as guide.
At noon the next day, the column had proof that thus far at least they were following the right trail. The overhead wheeling of buzzards would have guided them now, even had the native failed of loyalty.
In the gulch of a stream that ran between tall and tangled banks, the advance came upon the bodies of the two men who had comprised the "point," and who had first run into the ambuscade. What the other ten had done was plain enough. At that first outbreak, they had scattered into a second slough, running at right angles with the dipping trail. There they had lain down and taken cover among the scattered rocks, and there eight of them still lay. It was the only thing they could do, also it was what the enemy had planned they should do. Major, lieutenant, and sergeant went over the ground and read the signs. It was quite easy. They could tell the approximate order in which each had died, by counting the litter of empty cartridge-hulls about the bodies.
Then they found one pile of these spent souvenirs in a place where there was no corpse, and it was perhaps the largest pile of all. That should be the spot where Sergeant-Major Peter Spooner had come to bay for his last stand. Probably he had lost consciousness from blood-letting at the end. Otherwise, he would hardly have been taken alive.
The bodies were hurriedly buried, and the graves marked; then the column pushed on, a little grimmer and a little more silent and a little faster, toward Santa Rosa.
At dawn, the men of the 26th Volunteers filed into empty streets which echoed their marching tread. It was like a village of the dead, a place of empty houses and open doors. No one had waited to explain to the wrathful avengers. But they found, nailed conspicuously to the front of a nipa shack in the principal street, a large white sheet of paper, bearing another note of satiric directions.
"On the trail which leads from this street, thebosquewill, at the distance of one league, contain one more memento.
"Adios, con mucho felicidad, General José Rosario."
There was no spoken word, as Falkins, turning from the message, nodded to the company commander, and the column swung forward. There was no sound as they marched through the deserted street, except the rattle of cup and canteen on haversack and the purposeful thud of their own feet on the hard-beaten earth.
And beyond the edge of the town, where a sullen-looking carabao bull, sole occupant, gazed after them, there was still grim silence as they plunged into the thick growth of thebosqueand bored their way into the country, which at every mile was growing wilder and more impassable. The eight bodies they had buried, and the one which had doubtless been, by this time, buried back at the garrison, accounted for seventy-five per cent. of the detachment which had gone ahead. The three others included Lieutenant Sperry, of Jackson, and Sergeant-Major Peter Spooner, and those two had been taken alive. The column was so grim in its purpose now that it needed no more orders than blood-hounds would have required.