At a place where they came upon the ashes of a dead fire, Henry Falkins halted the command, and, accompanied by a lieutenant and Sergeant Newton Spooner, undertook some investigations of his own. It was Sergeant Spooner, led by an inborn instinct which became a compass in the woods, who discovered the thing they sought. He returned in grim silence to the officers, and led them to a small clearing in thebijucatangle. There, roped upright to a tree, was a body wearing the uniform of a first lieutenant of United States Infantry. Newt Spooner had found the "memento." The dead man bore no bolo gashes, and the wound which had disabled him had been only a bullet through one shoulder. Yet, as the officers came near, they realized that he had not been dead when he was placed here. He had stood up, lashed against a slender palm bole, and died on his feet. Yet even that failed to account for the hideous twist of acute agony frozen on the dead features. No ordinary torture would have so stamped the dying visage of such a stoic. The large brown ants were crawling everywhere, but the full meaning of their presence was to pass unrealized until Newton Spooner attracted attention. He silently led them closer and pointed to an amber smear about the lips and nostrils of the dead man.
"Honey, sir," he said briefly, in a voice that rasped like a file; "wild honey. They put that stuff in his nose and mouth, sir. The ants did the rest."
The officers turned away, sickened, and after a moment Falkins ordered briefly.
"Bring a burial detail, sergeant—and, sergeant," he added, as a vicious note crept into the timbre of his utterance, "when we come up with these fellows, we take no prisoners. You understand, no prisoners!"
For ten days after that, a company of United States Volunteers drove their way through the mountains andbosquesof eastern Luzon, with the hammer-blows of forced marches. Their faces were the bristling, unshaven visages of half-wild men, and their eyes bore the inky cancellation-marks of a fatigue which, in such climates, is courtship of death. They had been bearing a noonday steam-like heat that parboiled them and wasted them in floods of sweat. They had marched and slept in wet khaki when sudden rains drenched the land and the jungle simmered afterward. A demoniacal desire for a reckoning in full with one José Rosario sustained them. The chase had resolved itself into a hellish adaptation of hare and hound, for always ahead of them lay clews and information, and evidences of recent departures. Always, the wily guerilla was just out of grasping and crushing distance. In lonely villages, they found marks of his recent occupancy—with prisoners. In the hills, they found the ashes of his fires, but himself they never found. And, as he taunted them, they followed, "as dust-blown devils go": followed with an artificial and superhuman endurance engendered of mountain hate and an unassuaged thirst for vengeance. In many brains queer nightmare shapes rose and had to be brushed aside with a conscious effort, and in many veins the blood ran hot and feverish. The pursuit had carried them in a long circle like the flight of a fox, and brought them back to a point not so many miles from where they had entered the hills, but as far as ever from their quarry. The pursuing force was too large. The rest of the way they would rakebosqueand hill in scattered segments, each acting for itself and seeking to fall upon the enemy while he watched the decoy of the largest detachment.
Major Falkins and a dozen men, including First Sergeant Newton Spooner, were working their way through a jungle which seemed impervious to human progress. For days they had been so working. Step by step they moved lethargically, and in single file. No military order of formation can be kept unbroken where men are weaving their tired bodies in and out through a matted growth of rankbijucaand jungle tangles. Besides, they moved as men half-asleep and indifferent to consequences, dragging leaden feet. The course they had taken had yielded never a sign, never an indication that they had chosen wisely. It led them through an unpeopled country where the valleys were mosquito-infested and malaria-ridden, and where drenching rains brought chill to their aching bones. They forced themselves forward with their hair matted and their brains dull. Clouds of mosquitoes moved with them. They were steadfast and resolute men, but they were also half-insane.
In this fashion, they came to a small, ravine-like channel, which for a little way ran in the direction they wished to go. Through it they could walk upright without fighting vines and cane. Experience had taught the danger of easy ways, but weariness had overcome caution, and for a furlong they plodded silently.
Ahead of them, the dry stream-bed, which was giving them momentary comfort as a roadway, twisted at an angle. Even in their lethargy they observed one rule of military caution. They walked in file with an interval of several yards between each two. Eleven of them had passed out of sight around the turn. Major Falkins, who was number twelve, was just turning the point, and behind him trailed one other. It was Sergeant Spooner, who rarely lagged in the rear. Then the heavy stillness broke into the old familiar thunder, and four men lurched forward and crumpled down on their faces, as useless henceforth to the United States of America as burst bubbles.
"Back here, boys!" yelled Falkins, leaping out of his lethargy into sudden life.
"Git behind this twist—damn ye! Git into ther la'rel!" shrieked Sergeant Spooner in echo, forgetting that the natural cover of the Islands was not the laurel of the Cumberlands. Falkins, standing at the turn, became an instant target, and the sergeant saw his campaign hat fly off spinning; saw the officer set his feet farther apart as one who braces himself, and heard the spiteful bark of his revolver. The sergeant himself was unseen, and it suddenly occurred to him that he might be more effective by remaining so. He saw the men who were still on their feet falling back on the protecting angle with its steep banks, firing doggedly as they came, and one by one he saw them drop short of their goal, except two who reached it only to lie down at the margin of shelter. He saw the major stand for a moment, shaking his head as the voices of the Krags died away and only the Remingtons of the enemy broke the silence.
Then the major, who no longer had a command, stepped back around the angle, and sat down on the ground. He laid his pistol on his knees and wiped blood from his eyes, but, after a moment, as though that posture were not comfortable enough, he stretched quietly out, with one elbow under his cheek, and drew up his knees as a child might lie in a crib when its mother has kissed it good-night. Spooner realized that he alone of that detail remained an efficient. There was no one to save except himself—and Falkins. To save himself was easy. He had not yet been seen.
Cautiously, the sergeant crawled over and possessed himself of all the firearms that lay in reach, without revealing himself; then again he crawled back, burrowing under the overhanging bank. He laid the four Krags in a row with their muzzles roughly trained above the major's body, and waited. At his back rose a bank which would confuse and multiply with echoes any sound.
Finally, the cautious brown heads appeared, and brown bodies flitted among the dead, collecting their spoils. Then Newt cupped both hands at his lips, and let out the mountain yell, a yell which had grown famous in Luzon. At the same instant, as fast as he could work the triggers lying grouped before him, he made the rifles speak from their magazines, as it seemed in unison, and the four reports were magnified by the rocks into a seeming of volley-fire. Instantly and in frenzied consternation, the brown men disappeared, and Newt Spooner worked his way forward, firing as fast as he could until he could peer into the channel. But the white men there would require no attention, and could benefit by none save the impossible courtesy of burial. As for the brown men, they were gone.
In one body, however, there was still life, and that happened to be the body of the battalion commander.
Newton Spooner strapped as many cartridge-belts about himself as he could carry. Then he pressed his canteen to the lips of Major Falkins, and began a slow and tedious journey back toward a point ten miles to the east, where if all went well and every chance favored him, he might possibly strike the camp of the main detachment to-morrow afternoon. To-morrow afternoon! For once in his life, Newton Spooner laughed.
That night, Major Falkins did not die, but lay raving with a delirium of fever in the seclusion of the jungle whither the "non-com" had borne him. And, while he lay tossing, a dark figure sat huddled near-by, lethargically slapping at mosquitoes and bringing himself back with heart-breaking effort out of the heavy-lidded temptation of sleep. The man who so sat, grinned from time to time, and there was the queer, distorted quality of madness in the grin.
When Henry Falkins at last opened his eyes, he saw about him only the dense tangle of the forest, and heard only the bird-voices in the trees. Slowly a recollection of yesterday came to his mind. He tried to rise on his elbow, and discovered his feet were tight-bound. Evidently he had been captured and was now being carried off by the ingenious Rosario to be filed away for future torture. Then he heard a sound like a strained chuckle, and turned his eyes, to find himself gazing into a grinning, lunatic face, which was the face of Sergeant Newton Spooner.
"Where are we, sergeant?" he inquired with forced composure. "Why am I tied up?"
The sergeant's reply was a hyena-like laugh, under which his gums were exposed beyond his teeth.
"I reckon," he suggested slowly, "ye mout es well drop the sergeant part of hit. Thar's jest the two of us left, and hit won't be long twell thar's jest one."
The wounded battalion commander settled back on the ground and said nothing. The demoniacal face of the other was not a face that could be reasoned with. It was the face of a man whose unhinged reason was capable of anything but sanity.
"Ye penitentiaried me oncet," went on the sergeant in dead-voiced reiteration of an old theme. "Ye sent me thar when ye didn't have nothin' erginst me. In the penitensherry—" he talked on half-coherently, half-ramblingly—"a feller jest studies 'bout things and gits meaner—and hyar hit 'pears like he kin git meaner yit."
"You must have dragged me away from that ravine," interrupted Falkins, realizing that they were not where he had fallen, and reasoning rather with himself than with the other. "You saved me yesterday. Why did you do that?"
"Because," retorted the other quickly, with a fierce up-leaping of passion to his eyes, "because I was savin' my superior officer—not you, but a man in that uniform—besides ye b'longed ter me. I wasn't a-goin' ter suffer no nigger ter git ye. Thet would hev been a soldier's death. Now thar's jest two of us—we ain't soldiers now—we're jest men."
Falkins lay of necessity outstretched, awaiting the pleasure of his captor. About him swarmed mosquitoes, and he tossed his head in the vain effort to shake them off, and slapped viciously at them—for with his feet trussed there had been no necessity to tie his hands. Above him he could see patches of blue between the waving palm fronds, and to his fevered eyes the sky seemed to rock and ripple like a placid sea. Then he looked at the other soldier, standing at a distance, and the soldier, too, seemed to wave gently from head to foot as though painted on a fluttering curtain, but he read in the glowering face that the man meant to kill him.
"You fool!" he muttered. "You poor damned fool!"
He spoke in a voice of lassitude, as though his interest in the matter were academic and dilute. In his brain, the tide of fever was rising afresh, and this time it stole on him with the warmth of a comfortable narcotic.
But Newt Spooner went on, more steadily now, though with no faltering of determination.
"I've waited the hell of a time.... I told ye my chanst would come.... I told ye, when ye tried ter play a damn' hero there at 'Frisco, thet I'd git my chanst. Ef I'd kilt ye then, ye'd hev hed all ther best of hit, but now hit's different. Now I kin make ye pray fer mercy—an' not git none."
"Kill me, and be damned to you!" snapped the bound man, for a moment roused out of growing stupor into a peevish irritability. "I'm no more afraid of you now than I was then."
"I reckon," the boy spoke very deliberately and impressively, "I reckon I knows a way ter make ye skeered." It had been a long time now since Newton Spooner had talked in the uncouth vernacular of the hills, but the Newt Spooner of this morning was, it seemed, a man relapsed; a man from whom had slipped all the changes that the months had wrought. He came slowly and unsteadily over, and squatted on his haunches above the prostrate figure. He drew one hand from behind him, and held it out.
"I found a wild bee gum down thar," he went on in a dead, level tone. "This hyar's wild honey. Thet-thar idee of givin' the ants a party hain't so damned bad atter all, is it?"
The major rolled over and presented his back to his enemy. He laughed and his tormentor did not know that it was the laughter of uncomprehending delirium. To Newt, it seemed a misplaced sense of humor.
"Wake me up for breakfast," murmured the major. "I want to take a nap now."
Later, Falkins awoke to a lucid interval, and saw nothing of his mad companion. But gradually his mind began to collect scattered fragments of memory, and the thing he had laughed at rose up to torture him. He remembered the threat now, and he remembered the dead face of the man they had found tied to a tree. He lay alone, shivering in weakness and harried by a terror he would not have cared to confess. An ant crawled over one wrist, and he leaped up, choking off a wild scream. It seemed that he could feel them crawling and stinging in thousands through his nostrils and nibbling at his brain. His fever would return, but for the present he lay sane and clammy with chill.
When the cool of the evening came, Newt reappeared. But his face, too, had lost its maniac glare. It was the face now of a man unutterably weary—as though all day he had been in some great travail.
"I reckon we mout as well be hikin'. Kin ye walk?" he inquired curtly.
"I'm not going to walk," retorted the officer belligerently. "This is as good a place to die as any."
"I ain't goin' ter hurt you," said Newt Spooner in a tired voice. "I reckon the time ain't come yet, after all."
"When will it come?" demanded the other, amazed beyond belief at this sudden change of front.
"Thet's my business. I hates you worse than pizen ... but I can't hurt you while we're both wearin' this uniform. It beats hell how much a man gets to thinkin' about a damn' pair of government breeches!" He stopped off as if in embarrassment. Then he added: "Besides, I'm beholden to your wife. She gave me a lift once on the high-road."
Two days later, just as the platoon, flushed with a success which the others had missed, was preparing to break camp for the day's march, two men, both gibbering foolishly, both shambling on unsteady feet, tattered, thorn-torn and scalded with fever, dragged themselves, in the locked embrace of drunken men, up into sight of the outposts, and collapsed. One wore a major's uniform, and one had on his sleeve what was left of a sergeant's chevrons.
The policy of splitting the command into bits, and leaving one platoon to carry on the seeming of the full force, had brought both disaster and success. The main body had taken a middle course upon which the smaller details might—theoretically—fall back, and on either side squads had scouted. While the men under Falkins were being misled and trapped, another detachment had slipped fortuitously upon a scouting party of the enemy, and, being less fatigued by reason of an easier course, they were stealing through thebosquewith unabated caution, and not one of that scouting party escaped alive except two who were captured. The detachment rejoined the platoon, and in view of the spirit in which the main command received these prisoners, they finally laid aside their show of sullen stubbornness and talked volubly.
Not only did they talk, under the effective persuasion of their captors, but they acted. They agreed to lead theAmericanosto the camp of General Rosario, which they said was pitched in a particularly inaccessible part of the mountains only a day's march away. Then the command, which had for so long been following a fox-fire, rose up, invigorated by the prospect of final success, and all day they slipped forward through trails which they could not have found alone. They marched with the swiftness of the final spurt, and at nightfall lay under cover, feasting their eyes on a column of smoke which rose from a canyon where the enemy lay in fancied security. The captives had done their work well, once they had undertaken it, but the onslaught must be sudden. There must be no time given to slaughter the American prisoners whom Rosario was carrying north with him as a present for Aguinaldo.
They could but admire the sagacity with which the enemy had selected his lair. They must attack through two high-walled gorges where machine-guns waited to mow them down. But theAmericanosmeant to reach those guns before they were discovered, and after that the impregnable strong-hold would become a trap without exits.
The column had therefore divided, each section taking a guide. The guides, with bayonets at their backs as reminders of their mission, had gone forward and with passwords bespoken the sentries, whose voices had been choked off in the pitchy darkness before they could give outcry.
Then came the mountain yell, but it came only from the narrower gorge, and it was accompanied by musketry which the steep walls echoed and re-echoed. The flood of flight surged into a wave of disorganized rout toward the other opening—where it fell back in broken spray from volley and bayonet. Useless now were the machine-guns; worse than useless the impregnable walls of rock. The insurgent forces, remembering their red iniquities, asked no terms or quarter, but hurled themselves on the bayonets and went down in the close chaos of bolo and clubbed musket. "And luckiest of them that fell, were those of them that died."
It was a little keyhole picture of red and black inferno, while it lasted, but it did not last long.
Yet, of General Rosario and his white prisoners there was no trace. That wily leader had gone on with a small escort before nightfall, and no one was left to tell what direction he had taken.
So it happened that when the two survivors of the ambuscade came tottering into the camp which they had hoped to reach much sooner, they found the main detachment just leaving. Had it not been belated by the delay of the successful expedition into the hills, it would have passed this point twenty-four hours ago, and the half-dead refugees would have been too late.
It had taken Henry Falkins and Newt Spooner two days instead of one to cover that ten miles ofbosque. They had come staggering, sometimes gibbering, and rarely were both of them sane. Sometimes they raved in duet, but during the first day Newt kicked and pummeled his superior forward as long as he could walk. After that, he carried, dragged and rolled the limp figure, obsessed only by the fixed idea that he had a package to deliver somewhere "over yon." Frequently he forgot that the package was a thing of life. Frequently, too, he madly beat it and swore at it, but always he worked it forward, falling time after time to rise again and stumble ahead. Then Newton Spooner became a thing without consciousness, and a faint spark of realization flickered back into the murk of the major's brain, and laid on his sick soul the same necessity. That day, or part of it, he dragged and carried and kicked. At last, with neither fully conscious, they linked arms about each other's shoulders, gazed at each other with wild, agonized eyes, mumbled at each other with swollen tongues, and shambled, crawled and hitched along together.
Between two cots in the village at the mountains' edge the wife of Major Falkins vibrated like a pendulum for several days, and when the commanding officer's tongue became again a thing which he could lift and command he told her of his rescue by the boy who had taken a blood-oath against him, but he told nothing of the episode in which the sergeant had debated the fulfilment of his vow.
Later, when the company had marched back to its headquarters in the town with the church, Mrs. Falkins drew a glowing picture of heroism in a letter which she wrote home to the States. The colonel, her father, in due time received it, and it found its way into news column and editorial, and was duly read by many persons.
"Clem's gal," no longer at the mountain college, but studying at the State University in Lexington with the scholarship that she had won, was one of the many. She read in the little dormitory room overlooking the quiet campus. She had come here to prepare herself for a return to the mountain school as a teacher, and when next she went back to the Cumberlands the paper went with her, that the prophet might have honor at home.
It was October, and she had been summoned by the illness of her step-mother. Now, as the girl rode along the creek-bed roads, the hills were flaunting their watch-fires of autumn, and the horizon wore its veil of Indian-summer softness. Clem had met her in Jackson with his nag, and she was riding, mountain-fashion, on a pillion behind him. Her father was battered and disheveled, and about his clothes clung the smoke-house odor of the windowless cabin with its log fire, but there also clung about the vaulting slopes and ruggedly beautiful ravines the fragrance of the fall, and the girl could not find it in her heart to feel gloomy, even though she was exchanging the wholesome life of the university for the squalor of the cabin. Thanks to Newt, she had her room, where she could withdraw as into her own castle. She felt almost gay, and, as she thought of the room which a rude, sullen-eyed boy had reared for her with his calloused hands, her eyes grew soft like the horizons. That boy, too, had been away into the world, and had become a hero. Presumably he was mending his broken life.
The old horse plodded slowly and sometimes the girl slipped down and walked alongside. Clem had little conversation after he had told how "porely" the step-mother was. "He reckoned hit all come about from gittin' dew-pizened." But, as they made the trip, the girl recited to him the news from the far-away islands.
The man listened stolidly, and at the end inquired:
"Did I onderstand ye rightly, M'nervy? War Henry Falkins ther feller he saved?"
When the information was confirmed, he ejaculated in wonderment:
"Well, doggone my ornery skin! Hit seems like jest yestiddy thet Newty lit out acrost these-hyar hills, hell-bent on lay-wayin' Henry Falkins fer a-penitensheryin' him."
Then Minerva remembered the lad's face when she had told of Henry Falkins awarding her medal, and for the first time she understood.
Back in the town with the church the months went by with routine of garrison duty and periods of fevered activity.
The energetic Rosario had for a time lain dormant after the paralyzing blow which had obliterated so large a portion of his command, but as the natives began to evince a growing confidence in the protecting hand of the American government, the general bestirred himself, and once more tidings of his atrocities drifted into headquarters. During these months there passed between Sergeant Newton Spooner and his major no reference to the morning in the jungle when the last echo of the old threat had found expression.
It was as though, on this subject, the lips of each were sealed by oath, but Sergeant Spooner went about his work with a smart and soldierly alacrity that kept the men of his company always on their toes. When there was trying work to do the commanding officer found himself instinctively turning to that company, and since the company responded to its top-sergeant like a muscle to a nerve, that meant that he turned to Newton Spooner.
Then came an epidemic of outrage.
Villages withAmericanista presidenteswent up in smoke. Haciendas of loyal Spaniards and Ilacanos were raided, and their people put to the bolo. With the wild stories of Rosario's activity that drifted in, there came persistently the fame of a white man who stood at the Filipino's right hand, giving him counsel. The rumor added that this man was a deserter from the American army. The truth or falsity of that allegation did not particularly interest the 26th Volunteer Infantry. The 26th from its Shirt-tailed beginnings had been stainless of the reproach of desertion. If other commands had been less fortunate it was not their affair. But it was very much their affair that, when they ran down a band of guerillas and closed with them, they encountered more numerous casualties, because someone had been teaching the brown men how to fight and shoot as they had never in their lives fought and shot before.
It very closely concerned the 26th Volunteer Foot that the game of war was being taught their foes by a renegade who had learned it under their own colors.
But the insult, set upon injury, came one day with a grim humor that was to have an even grimmer sequel.
The telegraph operator at a near-by village was passing the time of day with the S. C. man at the headquarters key. Suddenly the instrument went dead with a splutter, and, while the headquarters operator tested and cursed, it remained stubbornly dumb. The line had been cut again.
Before a detachment could be despatched to follow the wire to the break, the instrument set up a buzz, and the buzz became Morse code. As the astonished operator read the dots and dashes this message was clicked out to him: "General José Rosario, in passing, presents his compliments and hopes to report other mementos in near future."
Obviously the wire had been grounded and the message sent by the enemy himself at some point where he had tapped it with a field-transmitter. That must be the work of the renegade—presumably a Signal Code deserter, and yet though thebosquewas combed for days by peeved and eager soldiery, no sign of a hostile force was found. Newton Spooner and a squad of scouting men came upon a muddy spot in thebijucatangle where a number of feet had trod, and, though the top-sergeant noted the print of a service boot, he said nothing of the circumstance—at the time.
But while Newt said nothing he thought much. Keeping to himself, he was fighting a battle which one way or the other must prove decisive in his nature. He knew that he was facing a conclusion which could not be lightly turned aside, and which could not be met without harrowing his soul. To fail to face a certain specter which had unexpectedly arisen would be to brand himself in the tribunal of his own inner consciousness as a traitor to the service. To face it and accept the consequences that might, and probably would, arise, would be to put behind him and trample under foot the code of the mountains, and to confess that all his preconceived ideas of life had been distorted and without value.
Two deep-rooted impulses were wrestling with a ferocity that made the boy's soul a battle-ground, torn, scarred and utterly miserable. The chaplain had preached a sermon on Golgotha, and had told how the Master had gone to the Place of a Skull, and had fought there with the spirit. Newton Spooner was not the man for prayer or fasting, yet he fasted because his palate revolted against the rations, in the torture of indecision that racked him.
And as he could not eat, so also he could not sleep and the wide eyes which stared at the walls beyond his cot were eyes that burned with feverish misery. Whether or not one is to become an Iscariot is a problem that must bring its agony, an agony beyond the appeasement of thirty pieces of silver. But when the problem so complicates itself that instead of being merely a problem it is a dilemma, and not only a dilemma, but the dilemma of choosing between proving an Iscariot to one's code or to one's country, the matter is one which may well unbalance a brain already depleted and jumbled of perspective by steaming jungles and the assaults of the tropics on one's sanity.
There was no one to whom Sergeant Spooner could go for counsel. To every man comes one black night that tests the metal of his soul, and makes or brands him with its result. It is a night when the furies ride shrieking, and when the border between the man and the madman wavers. He may not know it, but the dawn that comes at the end of such a night breaks on a soul that has accepted its damnation or has liberated itself and transformed itself.
About the garrison, Sergeant Newton Spooner bore a face in which the eyes were sunken and about whose lips ran deep lines of travail. In his duties he was prompt and smart, but that was the ingrained training, which had reached a state where it responded automatically to routine. As he tossed on his cot, he suffered agonies and when he fell asleep it was not for rest, but for nightmare. His dreams were harassed with a bitter problem and what the end was to be hung in the balance. Dreams are precarious and lawless, yet it was in the end a dream which decided him.
Just before he was aroused one morning he fell into a feverish slumber, following a wakeful night, and to him, as to many men before him, a vision came.
Minerva seemed to stand before the regimental band at dress-parade. She waved the flag and said, in a voice which no one else heard:
"The soldier serves his colors."
It happened that about the same time themestizagirl whom Sergeant-Major Peter Spooner had honored with his attentions, before he had fallen into the villainous hands of Rosario, came back to the town. She did not remain long, and her face was sad. She had come, she confided to Mrs. Falkins, hoping to see the great, brave soldier, and, when she was told of how he had died, her sobs tore her until the spectacle of her grief was insupportable.
Then Newton Spooner did an unprecedented thing. Unversed as he was in the ways of courtship, he dogged the steps of themestizagirl, fetching and carrying for her with doglike devotion.
And, since he was willing, instead of pressing his own suit, to sing the praises of the late sergeant-major, she let him sit at the threshold of her nipa house, and gaze at her while she sewed. When she went away and Sergeant Spooner asked a brief leave of absence to accompany her on a part of her return journey, the men of the garrison shook their heads and announced that they would be damned.
Newt Spooner was gone a week, though he had only announced it as his purpose to escort the girl as far as a near-by village.
In three days more, according to the articles of war, his name must be dropped from the company roll, and his status become that of death or desertion. Even if he came back at once, he must face the lesser charge of absence beyond leave.
When the sergeant did return, he bore the marks of jungle travel, and as he reported to his company commander, his face indicated that his explanation would not be merely personal.
Yet Sergeant Spooner was secretive, and asked permission to guide a small force into the hills. He said that he had come upon evidence which would not wait, and he had, therefore, taken the liberty of following it up independently. He believed he could lead a detachment to a place where a party of insurgents were in hiding, and—at this his captain sat up and took notice—although it was a small party, he had information which led him to believe the renegade might be one of the number.
But for such an enterprise Newton Spooner's superiors required no urging. The sergeant said that no considerable force could hope to reach the place unheralded, so two picked squads stole out that same evening, and before dawn of the third day (for they marched only at night and lay hidden while the sun shone) were creeping through the long grass upon a native farm where two nipa houses proclaimed the presence of humanity. They crept cautiously, for though the place had all the seeming of private and peaceful domiciles, they had learned to distrust appearances and to trust Sergeant Newt Spooner's judgment. The spot was very wild and desolate, lying remote from any village. In the gray mists between night and morning it seemed a land of ghosts, with broken hills and jungle closing about it.
As daylight crept to the east, soldiers stood silent and patient at each door and window of each house. It was a strange disposition of troops about thatched houses that lay soundless and wrapped in profound slumber. The lieutenant who had come in command stood at the right of the front door of the larger house, and over against him, on the left, stood Newt Spooner. But each stood with back pressed to wall, so flattened against the uprights that, in that dim light, one coming out of the door would pass them by unseeing. And at each of the other openings the watchers were likewise flattened as though they had been figures in bas-relief fantastically wrought by the builder.
They stood without sound or movement, until, as the light strengthened a little, the door opened and amestizagirl in slippered feet and partial attire came out, carrying an earthen water-vessel. As she crossed the threshold, looking neither to right nor left, New Spooner's tight-pressed palm shot out and silenced her carmine lips. The officer recognized the girl. He had himself recently turned away unable to watch her sobs for her dead lover, and now he felt an impulse to resent this rough indignity at the hands of the sergeant. But something in the sergeant's face gave him pause, and at the same moment Newt Spooner sternly whispered to his prisoner in Spanish:
"Call him—call him, I tell you!"
For an instant, the girl stood trembling from head to foot, with dumb agony in her eyes. It was evident that she was facing the hardest crisis of her life, and that terror was dominant. As Newt bent forward with threatening hardness in his relentless face, she shrank back against the wall, bowing her head in forced assent, and with the soldier's strong hand still close enough to stifle any unwished-for outcry, she called in quavering, heart-broken Spanish:
"Beloved, come to me. Comepronto!"
There followed, at once, a sound of bare feet from inside, and a gigantic, half-clad figure appeared anxiously at the door. It was the figure of a white man; and, as the lieutenant caught its shoulder, and threw his revolver muzzle to its broad chest, he found himself looking into the grave eyes of former Sergeant-Major Peter Spooner, late of the 26th Volunteers.
For an instant, the officer stood too dazed to credit the testimony of his eyes, but, while the Deacon glanced down the barrel of Newt's leveled rifle, and shrugged his shoulders with a low oath, the officer realized that he had under his hand the mysterious renegade.
And then, as the deserter, still gazing into the flinty face of his kinsman, raised his hands in surrender, he coolly turned toward the house, and shouted back in excellent Spanish:
"General, we are captives. Resistance is useless."
In answer to that message, there shortly appeared, framed in the door, the startled countenance of the notorious Rosario himself. Once too often, he had trusted himself with those inconsiderable escorts which had enabled him to pass from place to place without attracting attention.
The detail made its march back to headquarters, taking its prisoners with it, in a semi-dazed condition. Against Rosario they felt little vindictiveness, now that he was captive to their arms. But this other, this sergeant-major who had organized most of them into soldiery back there in the Appalachian hills, with him there was a ghastly difference. He had been a hero, mourned as lost. He had taken the pay of the service and held its highest warrant—and he had been false to his salt, for those tin bars which they roughly stripped from his shoulders.
But, if the command was struck sick with astonishment, Black Pete himself treated them to no show of emotion. He had already considered and weighed what it meant to desert to the enemy in time of war, and he had been taken in attendance upon the enemy's district leader, wearing the enemy's livery. He was already, in effect, dead, and he meant to maintain the stolid silence of death.
And so the detachment marched into headquarters with the grim silence of a funeral cortège, though as yet the corpse walked upright and on its own feet.
No lips were tighter set, and no face more stonily expressionless than that of Sergeant Newton Spooner. His was the capture, his the credit—and, in part, the shame. Between himself and the man who must hang existed the bond of one blood and one name. The smirch upon the regiment was likewise a smirch upon that blood and name.
The struggle in himself had begun from the moment when he found the print of a large boot in the mud, and the disgrace to the service and the regiment had come home to him ... the one form of disgrace which he had ever understood. But the mental sweat was not yet over. It must have its ugly culmination at general court-martial, and when that time came he, Newt Spooner, must say the words upon which conviction would indubitably follow. He knew that in its hideous fulness, had known it from the start, and yet, when the hour came and he took the stand to testify, no voice could have been steadier, and no gaze more unflinching than that with which he held the eyes of the accused.
But the gaze with which the Deacon met his was in no wise weaker. As Black Pete listened to the proceedings in which his life-sands were running out, his eyes were thoughtful and perhaps a shade wistful, but undrooping, and unwavering.
The defendant testified that, when he was captured, they offered him choice between death and a captain's commission. He had chosen the latter. They took him north, and he had talked with Aguinaldo in person. The "President" had received him as an officer and a dignitary. He had beguiled him with hopes of foreign recognition and a filmy vision of ultimate success. The Deacon had held during his life one goal and one ideal. His dream was leadership. He had tired of the warrant of the "non-com." He wished to sit in council with men of higher rank. The experiment had failed. He made no plea.
The hearing before G.C.M. came after the regiment had left the town with the church. It was on a larger parade ground that the united battalions were drawn up at sunset, and the regimental adjutant stepped a pace forward to the colonel's side and "published the order," which announced that Peter Spooner was "to be hanged by his neck till dead."
The lines stood silent as the adjutant's words were read. Black Pete at "the front and center," to be seen of all men, presented a picture quite as uncompromising as he had ever presented before. His contemplative gray eyes bore straight to the front as he stood at attention, and in them slept a thoughtful expression, as though they were looking off beyond horizons hidden to other men, and already piercing the opaque things of life and death.
And Newt Spooner gave his company front a motionless, sternly impersonal figure upon which to gaze. In neither condemned nor informer was there a vestige of tremor as the officers came to the "front and center" and the formation ended.
In the wet mists of a rainy morning, they escorted Black Pete to a scaffold around which ranged, in hollow square, the regiment he had betrayed—and there they hanged him high as Haman. Brooding hills looked down, rain-shrouded, and to their crests at the last moment the condemned man raised his eyes.
There was silence, save for the pelting of rain on iron roofs, until it was broken by noise of the falling trap and the low whip-like snap of the tautened rope. Then the burial detail went out and did its work. Sergeant Newton Spooner returned to his routine duties with a grim taciturnity which did not invite conversation.
It was at Manila, many months later, that Major Henry Falkins again called Sergeant Spooner to battalion headquarters, and spoke with a certain embarrassment:
"Spooner," he inquired slowly, "have you come to realize that one man may bear testimony against another for reasons other than spite?"
A slow flush, brick-red and hot, spread over the bronzed face of the non-commissioned officer.
"I've come to understand a good many things, sir," he replied gravely. "And I've paid for learning them."
"We'll be mustered out before long," suggested Henry Falkins, "but I won't be long out of uniform, I hope. I'm going to stay in the service. Once I promised you a chance—"
Newt Spooner grinned.
"I reckon the uniform's good enough for me, too, sir," he interrupted. Then he added, with a diffidence which all expression of deep feeling brings to the mountaineer: "I reckon, sir, as long as I can serve under you I'll go on reënlisting."
Falkins was a mountaineer, too. He hastily changed the subject.
"Commissions from the ranks are going to men less capable than you—but examinations must be passed. If you'll study, Spooner, I'd like to get behind you and help."
"I've never spoken of that to any man, sir, but I've been thinking about it," announced the sergeant diffidently. "I've been studying for eighteen months."
Not far from the corner of Main and Limestone Streets in Lexington, Kentucky, and almost in the shadow of the Phoenix Hotel, a poster on the sidewalk and a flag from an overhead window proclaimed that "Men were wanted for the United States Army." Out of the door of the building so decorated, one spring morning, when the trees were in delicate new leafage, came a sergeant attached to the recruiting station. He was selected, as many of these men are, for his soldierliness of appearance. Such men are the best advertisement the service can use, and it uses them.
The sergeant was not overly tall, and, though spare, he was by no means lean. His shoulders swung back squarely, and his chest, rounded and strong like a barrel, bore on its olive-drab blouse a sharp-shooter's cross and the Medal of Honor, which must be bestowed by an Act of Congress.
His face was clear-cut and bronzed by tropic sun and ocean winds. In fine, as the sergeant walked to the corner, casting his eyes up and down Limestone Street, he was an inspiriting figure of a man—and a soldier man. He had for the time nothing better to do than to stroll, and as he strolled a flicker of reminiscent amusement brought a pleasant grin to his firm lips. Sergeant Newt Spooner was thinking of the black-clad, lowering-faced boy who years ago hiked through this town, bent on assassination.
As he went along the historic street, where every square held traditions of ante-bellum days, he began to encounter other strollers, college lads in sweaters and caps, and college girls with books. But his eyes finally focused their gaze on a young woman who came out of a house and also turned up the street, walking ahead of him. She was a slim girl in simple gingham, but in her cheeks was an apple-blossom glow and delicacy, and her movements were informed with the lithe grace of out-of-doors. Newt wanted to overtake and accost her. He wanted to see if she would recognize him, changed as he was, as quickly as he had recognized her, who was even more changed.
For this girl looked like some splendid young blossom that had come to flower in open woods, and the soldier saw, with mingled pride and twinging jealousy, that all the boys and men who passed took off their hats with frank ardor in their eyes. This was such a metamorphosed Minerva that he fell into shyness and delayed announcing himself until they had reached the stone gate-posts of the rolling campus, where, under the maples, the macadam road wound up to the college buildings, and the old field-gun of civil-war days looked out over the cadets' drill-ground.
There he plucked up courage to call in a low voice, "M'nervy!" and at the mountain pronunciation, coming unexpectedly from behind, the girl wheeled and stood for a moment, confronting him in a pretty picture of delight and astonishment, while a warm color stole into her cheeks.
"Newty!" she cried, as she held out both hands in greeting. "Where in the world did you spring from?"
They stood there under the maples for a while, and the boy made her talk of herself, and, while they talked, a man, wearing the uniform of a lieutenant of infantry, came down the walk. He was a likeable-looking fellow, well set-up and soldierly, but very young. From his campaign hat to his polished puttees, he was new, new like the lately minted coin that has not long circulated. Lieutenant March was not long from the "Point," and he was at present stationed here as Commandant at the University. The sergeant, with his back turned that way, was deep in conversation with the girl, so that, as he heard a pleasant voice saying, "How are you, Miss Rawlins," he turned just in time to see the officer's lifted hat, and to catch the smile on his lips. But his soldier instinct was now second nature, and in the same glance he saw the "U.S.A." of the collar-ornaments.
At once, Sergeant Newt Spooner stood at attention, his heels together and his hand at his hat-brim in salute. The officer, too, was taking in those things which military men observe. He saw the service stripes and the two medals on the breast, and his eyes brightened. As he returned the salute he cheerily inquired:
"What command, sergeant?"
"Fifty-ninth Infantry, sir; late of the 26th Volunteers."
"Here on leave?"
"Recruiting detail, sir."
The officer's eyes were dwelling on the decorated breast.
"Medal of Honor man," he said. "What service was that, sergeant?"
The girl, whose less-trained eyes had not recognized the import of the little metal disc, flushed with pleasure. Newt flushed, too. It irked him to talk about himself; but the military ethics were ingrained, and he still stood upright, and answered respectfully, but as briefly as possible:
"The islands, sir. Province of Nueva Ecija." When the lieutenant had gone, the sergeant looked down in an embarrassed fashion at the white road.
"Minerva," he said, "I don't know whether it interests you, but I'm studying pretty hard myself. That's why I asked for this detail. That and one other reason. I'm only a non-commissioned officer, and you're almost a school-teacher. I'm on the wrong side of the line, but I've applied for an examination, and, when this term of enlistment is up I've got a good chance of a commission." He saw her looking at his medal, and heard her saying:
"I should think you would have, Newty."
"Oh," he hastened to tell her, "I mean that I've got an influential friend, who's going to help me."
"Who is that, Newty?" she demanded; and, as he answered, the young sergeant flushed.
"The best soldier in the service, Colonel Henry Falkins."
The girl looked down at the pavement and then up at the tender green of the maples. Her only reply was a low, "Oh!" but her voice said more, and presently she added a question:
"You said, Newty—" her eyes now held a challenging twinkle as she spoke—"that there was one other reason why you asked for this—what do you call it?—oh, yes, I know, this detail. What was that reason?"
The sergeant raised his face, and held her eyes with a steady gaze, until her own eyes fell, and her cheeks grew more rosy.
"That reason," he announced boldly, "is that I want plenty of chance to tell you what the reason is."
THE TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE.Illustrated by F. C. Yohn.
The "lonesome pine" from which the story takes its name was a tall tree that stood in solitary splendor on a mountain top. The fame of the pine lured a young engineer through Kentucky to catch the trail, and when he finally climbed to its shelter he found not only the pine but thefoot-prints of a girl. And the girl proved to be lovely, piquant, and the trail of these girlish foot-prints led the young engineer a madder chase than "the trail of the lonesome pine."
THE LITTLE SHEPHERD OF KINGDOM COMEIllustrated by F. C. Yohn.
This is a story of Kentucky, in a settlement known as "Kingdom Come." It is a life rude, semi-barbarous; but natural and honest, from which often springs the flower of civilization.
"Chad." the "little shepherd" did not know who he was nor whence he came—he had just wandered from door to door since early childhood, seeking shelter with kindly mountaineers who gladly fathered and mothered this waif about whom there was such a mystery—a charming waif, by the way, who could play the banjo better that anyone else in the mountains.
A KNIGHT OF THE CUMBERLAND.Illustrated by F. C. Yohn.
The scenes are laid along the waters of the Cumberland, the lair of moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two impetuous young Southerners' fall under the spell of "The Blight's" charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the love making of the mountaineers.
Included in this volume is "Hell fer-Sartain" and other stories, some of Mr. Fox's most entertaining Cumberland valley narratives.
WITHIN THE LAW.By Bayard Veiller & Marvin Dana.Illustrated by Wm. Charles Cooke.
This is a novelization of the immensely successful play which ran for two years in New York and Chicago.
The plot of this powerful novel is of a young woman's revenge directed against her employer who allowed her to be sent to prison for three years on a charge of theft, of which she was innocent.
WHAT HAPPENED TO MARY.By Robert Carlton Brown.Illustrated with scenes from the play.
This is a narrative of a young and innocent country girl who is suddenly thrown into the very heart of New York, "the land of her dreams," where she is exposed to all sorts of temptations and dangers.
The story of Mary is being told in moving pictures and played in theatres all over the world.
THE RETURN OF PETER GRIMM.By David Belasco.Illustrated by John Rae.
This is a novelization of the popular play in which David Warfield, as Old Peter Grimm, scored such a remarkable success.
The story is spectacular and extremely pathetic but withal, powerful, both as a book and as a play.
THE GARDEN OF ALLAH.By Robert Hichens.
This novel is an intense, glowing epic of the great desert, sunlit barbaric, with its marvelous atmosphere of vastness and loneliness.
It is a book of rapturous beauty, vivid in word painting. The play has been staged with magnificent cast and gorgeous properties.
BEN HUR.A Tale of the Christ.By General Lew Wallace.
The whole world has placed this famous Religious-Historical Romance on a height of pre-eminence which no other novel of its time has reached. The clashing of rivalry and the deepest human passions, the perfect reproduction of brilliant Roman life, and the tense, fierce atmosphere of the arena have kept their deep fascination. A tremendous dramatic success.
BOUGHT AND PAID FOR.By George Broadhurst and Arthur Hornblow.Illustrated with scenes from the play.
A stupendous arraignment of modern marriage which has created an interest on the stage that is almost unparalleled. The scenes are laid in New York, and deal with conditions among both the rich and poor.
The interest of the story turns on the day-by-day developments which show the young wife the price she has paid.
MADAME X.By Alexandre Bisson and J. W. McConaughy.Illustrated with scenes from the play.
A beautiful Parisienne became an outcast because her husband would not forgive an error of her youth. Her love for her son is the great final influence in her career. A tremendous dramatic success.
THE GARDEN OF ALLAH.By Robert Hichens.
An unconventional English woman and an inscrutable stranger meet and love in an oasis of the Sahara. Staged this season with magnificent cast and gorgeous properties.
THE PRINCE OF INDIA.By Lew. Wallace.
A glowing romance of the Byzantine Empire, presenting with extraordinary power the siege of Constantinople, and lighting its tragedy with the warm underglow of an Oriental romance. As a play it is a great dramatic spectacle.
TESS OF THE STORM COUNTRY.By Grace Miller White.Illust. by Howard Chandler Christy.
A girl from the dregs of society, loves a young Cornell University student, and it works startling changes in her life and the lives of those about her. The dramatic version is one of the sensations of the season.
YOUNG WALLINGFORD.By George Randolph Chester.Illust. by F. R. Gruger and Henry Raleigh.
A series of clever swindles conducted by a cheerful young man, each of which is just on the safe side of a State's prison offence. As "Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford," it is probably the most amusing expose of money manipulation ever seen on the stage.
THE INTRUSION OF JIMMY.By P. G. Wodehouse.Illustrations by Will Grefe.
Social and club life in London and New York, an amateur burglary adventure and a love story. Dramatized under the title of "A Gentleman of Leisure," it furnishes hours of laughter to the play-goers.
CHIP, OF THE FLYING U
A breezy wholesome tale, wherein the love affairs of Chip and Della Whitman are charmingly and humorously told. Chip's jealousy of Dr. Cecil Grantham, who turns out to be a big, blue eyed young woman is very amusing. A clever, realistic story of the American Cow-puncher.
THE HAPPY FAMILY
A lively and amusing story, dealing with the adventures of eighteen jovial, big hearted Montana cowboys. Foremost amongst them, we find Ananias Green, known as Andy, whose imaginative powers cause many lively and exciting adventures.
HER PRAIRIE KNIGHT
A realistic story of the plains, describing a gay party of Easterners who exchange a cottage at Newport for the rough homeliness of a Montana ranch-house. The merry-hearted cowboys, the fascinating Beatrice, and the effusive Sir Redmond, become living, breathing personalities.
THE RANGE DWELLERS
Here are everyday, genuine cowboys, just as they really exist. Spirited action, a range feud between two families, and a Romeo and Juliet courtship make this a bright, jolly, entertaining story, without a dull page.
THE LURE OF DIM TRAILS
A vivid portrayal of the experience of an Eastern author among the cowboys of the West, in search of "local color" for a new novel. "Bud" Thurston learns many a lesson while following "the lure of the dim trails" but the hardest, and probably the most welcome, is that of love.
THE LONESOME TRAIL
"Weary" Davidson leaves the ranch for Portland, where conventional city life palls on him. A little branch of sage brush, pungent with the atmosphere of the prairie, and the recollection of a pair of large brown eyes soon compel his return. A wholesome love story.
THE LONG SHADOW
A vigorous Western story, sparkling with the free, outdoor, life of a mountain ranch. Its scenes shift rapidly and its actors play the game of life fearlessly and like men. It is a fine love story from start to finish.
THE RULES OF THE GAME.Illustrated by Lajaren A. Hiller
The romance of the son of "The Riverman." The young college hero goes into the lumber camp, is antagonized by "graft" and comes into the romance of his life.
ARIZONA NIGHTS.Illus. and cover inlay by N. C. Wyeth.
A series of spirited tales emphasizing some phases of the life of the ranch, plains and desert. A masterpiece.
THE BLAZED TRAIL.With illustrations by Thomas Fogarty.
A wholesome story with gleams of humor, telling of a young man who blazed his way to fortune through the heart of the Michigan pines.
THE CLAIM JUMPERS.A Romance.
The tenderfoot manager of a mine in a lonesome gulch of the Black Hills has a hard time of it, but "wins out" in more ways than one.
CONJUROR'S HOUSE.Illustrated Theatrical Edition.
Dramatized under the title of "The Call of the North."
Conjuror's House is a Hudson Bay trading post where the head factor is the absolute lord. A young fellow risked his life and won a bride on this forbidden land.
THE MAGIC FOREST.A Modern Fairy Tale.Illustrated.
The sympathetic way in which the children of the wild and their life is treated could only belong to one who is in love with the forest and open air. Based on fact.
THE RIVERMAN.Illus. by N. C. Wyeth and C. Underwood.
The story of a man's fight against a river and of a struggle between honesty and grit on the one side, and dishonesty and shrewdness on the other.
THE SILENT PLACES.Illustrations by Philip R. Goodwin.
The wonders of the northern forests, the heights of feminine devotion, and masculine power, the intelligence of the Caucasian and the instinct of the Indian, are all finely drawn in this story.
THE WESTERNERS.A story of the Black Hills that is justly placed among the best American novels. It portrays the life of the new West as no other book has done in recent years.
THE MYSTERY.In collaboration with Samuel Hopkins Adams0 With illustrations by Will Crawford.
The disappearance of three successive crews from the stout ship "Laughing Lass" in mid-Pacific, is a mystery weird and inscrutable. In the solution, there is a story of the most exciting voyage that man ever undertook.
RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE,By Zane Grey.Illustrated by Douglas Duer.
In this picturesque romance of Utah of some forty years ago, we are permitted to see the unscrupulous methods employed by the invisible hand of the Mormon Church to break the will of those refusing to conform to its rule.
FRIAR TUCK,By Robert Alexander Wason.Illustrated by Stanley L. Wood.
Happy Hawkins tells us, in his humorous way, how Friar Tuck lived among the Cowboys, how he adjusted their quarrels and love affairs and how he fought with them and for them when occasion required.
THE SKY PILOT,By Ralph Connor.Illustrated by Louis Rhead.
There is no novel, dealing with the rough existence of cowboys, so charming in the telling, abounding as it does with the freshest and the truest pathos.
THE EMIGRANT TRAIL,By Geraldine Bonner.Colored frontispiece by John Rae.
The book relates the adventures of a party on its overland pilgrimage, and the birth and growth of the absorbing love of two strong men for a charming heroine.
THE BOSS OF WIND RIVER,By A. M. Chisholm.Illustrated by Frank Tenney Johnson.
This is a strong, virile novel with the lumber industry for its central theme and a love story full of interest as a sort of subplot.
A PRAIRIE COURTSHIP,By Harold Bindloss.
A story of Canadian prairies in which the hero is stirred, through the influence of his love for a woman, to settle down to the heroic business of pioneer farming.
JOYCE OF THE NORTH WOODS,By Harriet T. Comstock.Illustrated by John Cassel.
A story of the deep woods that shows the power of love at work among its primitive dwellers. It is a tensely moving study of the human heart and its aspirations that unfolds itself through thrilling situations and dramatic developments.