Hazlitt smiled down into her puzzled eyes. Decidedly they were matter-of-fact, these women of thehacienda. "It is good," he assured her, with the calm philosophy of his thirty years behind him. "Of course it's good." Still she looked up at him, forgetting her shyness, and a gust of protectiveness and elder-brotherly affection for this tender, budding woman-thing took hold of him. "It's good," he urged, "and you will always be happy in it."
Back in the dimness Doña Ceferina was sipping her third cup of chocolate, while Raymundo smoked with half shut eyes and smiled inscrutably.
Like Dorcas or Abigail or whoever she was of old, Doña Ceferina sat among her maidens. There were half a dozen of them on the floor, sewing and spinning and chattering in subdued voices, while the mistress of thehaciendasat enthroned in the midst of them. But unlike whoever she was of old, Doña Ceferina had a card-table before her, and on the other side of the table Hazlitt sat, and the two smiled companionably across at each other as they sorted fat bundles of cards.
They were playingpanguingui. One playspanguinguiwith six packs of cards and much patience. Doña Ceferina and Hazlitt had played a good deal of it since they first met, six months before, and Hazlitt's patience had never wearied. Neither had the patience of Señorita Dolores, which is more to the point, for she had to stand behind Hazlitt's chair and help him with the unfamiliar cards. She was standing there now.
"Hazleet, it is your lead," said Doña Ceferina, gathering up her hand. It was a sign of the fellowship established between them that she called him Hazlitt in the good, round, Spanish way, without any fuss over titles. It was a stronger sign that she sat with her feet tucked up in her chair, native-fashion. "One gets used to it," she had explained, the first time she ventured it in his presence, "and it's much more comfortable."
"Hazleet, I shall beat you again," said Doña Ceferina. "Lead!"
Hazlitt laid his finger inquiringly on a card, and looked back over his shoulder, where a pair of interested eyes signalled approval. Suddenly he spied a forgotten card down in the corner of his fistful. Señorita Dolores gave a small wail of dismay as he played it, and Doña Ceferina smiled in pleasant derision.
"I mistook it for a King," said Hazlitt in apology.
"It is a mistake," said the remorseless Doña Ceferina, "which costs you amedia peseta. Now play again."
Hazlitt played again and again, and lost each time, and enjoyed Doña Ceferina's little triumph almost as much as she did. She wasn't half bad, if she was not exciting, this plump good-natured Doña Ceferina, with her eternal cigarette and her cards or novel or conversation. Hazlitt smiled whimsically at that last thought. "What are you laughing at, Hazleet?" his opponent demanded.
He had been thinking of the Frenchwoman who was famed for having such a marvellous gift for conversation, and none at all for dialogue, but he couldn't very well tell Doña Ceferina that. "At the way I'm playing," he replied.
"You couldn't well play worse," said Doña Ceferina good-humoredly, taking toll of her bit of silver. "Lead again."
Hazlittcouldplay worse, and promptly did it. There are infinite possibilities of badness, even inpanguingui. Not at all a bad person to share a secret with, this simple, matter-of-fact Doña Ceferina. And he believed they were sharing one. In Doña Ceferina's placidly romantic bosom, he guessed, had grown a vision of a young prince come out of the West to rescue her imprisoned princess from this tropical Castle of Indolence. A vision had come to him, too, a vision which made him lean back and forget his cards. Six months ago a beach-comber, gilded and respectable, of course, but still a beach-comber, an adventurer, without a country; and now, perhaps, a man whom many a petty prince might envy. Fancy ruling undisputed with Señorita Dolores over the quiet domain of the "Hacienda without a Name!" Jove, what a queen she'd make.
A hand stole down over his and pityingly pointed out the proper card, and Hazlitt sternly repressed an impulse to fling away the cards and take the hand, and keep it. The time was drawing near when he must put his fortune to the test.
The cards ran out, and Doña Ceferina glowed triumphant. "Another game, Hazleet?" she asked.
Hazlitt laughingly turned his pocket out to show that the modest sum allotted for the stakes of the day was exhausted, and Doña Ceferina swept up her little heap of silver. "You play worse than ever, I think," she said frankly.
"Still, I may learnpanguinguibefore I die," said Hazlitt. A sudden impulse seized him. He leaned forward and fixed the mistress of thehaciendawith his eye. "I rather think, Doña Ceferina," he said, with slow emphasis, "that I shall have to stay out here till I die. There seems to be no escape. I shall have to stay and—learn to playpanguingui. What do you think?"
In the heavy eyes of Doña Ceferina a small glow kindled, as of the surviving remnants of a very tiny fire. Hazlitt had seen them light that way before, when Doña Ceferina reached the climax of a novel. The glow deepened, and she looked at his understandingly. Her hand trembled a little on the table. "Why not, Hazleet?" she said. "It—it would be very pleasant for all of us. I—" She rose hastily. "I shall have to leave you for a minute. I hope you and Dolores can amuse yourselves till luncheon," she said with elaborate innocence, and went away.
Hazlitt followed poor unsuspecting Dolores, thus left as a ewe lamb to the wolf, over to the window, and stood looking down with her, while the half-dozen maidens let needle and spindle fall, and exchanged knowing glances.
The rains had come and gone, and the tropical world was thrilling with the swift rush of its springtime. The black fields were mistily green with the new-set spikes of cane, the sky was fleecy with white banks of cloud, the very air was sweet and full of life. Hazlitt drew a deep breath of it. "God!" he said, "what a good old place this old world is to live in."
Dolores glanced up at him. No one would have called her a Madonna now. The spring-tide had entered into her, and she was vibrant with a thrill of living of which no monkish painter ever dreamed. "Why do you talk like that?" she demanded. "Of course it's a good world."
Hazlitt gazed down into the upturned eyes. "And you are happy in it, Dolores?" he asked.
At his tone Dolores flushed rosy and turned away, and her hand gripped the edge of the broad sill with little, helpless, useless fingers. Hazlitt laid his hand over it protectingly, and it did not draw away. "You are happy, Dolores?" he repeated.
"Of course," said Dolores faintly. "Why shouldn't I be, when everything is—so beautiful and—and good?"
"Happy Dolores," said Hazlitt. And then Don Raymundo rode round the turn in the shrubbery below and swung from the saddle. Dolores shrank back, but Don Raymundo only smiled up inscrutably. If he had seen the little comedy, he gave no sign. "I'll join you in a minute," he called to them.
A flash of anger swept over Hazlitt at this man whose mere approach took all the witchery from life. He pressed Dolores' hand before he released it. "She shall be happy," he muttered defiantly, to Don Raymundo and the world. "She shall be happy always."
"There seems to be a great deal of unnecessary time in the world," Don Raymundo observed with his perverse triviality. He and Hazlitt had run across each other in thesalaafter their siesta, and now they were sitting with their long chairs drawn up before a window, waiting for the end of the day.
"Perhaps there is," Hazlitt agreed, slowly gathering resolution for his plunge. "And yet, with agreeable companionship, and perhaps a wife—Don Raymundo, we Americans are blunt. I want to marry Doña Dolores."
Don Raymundo smoked placidly for a moment. "I have been expecting this," he said at last. "I have—shallIbe blunt?—been fearing this."
Hazlitt flushed. "I know it seems presumptuous," he said. "People will call me a climber. And yet— We have no aristocracy in my country, no recognized aristocracy, as perhaps you know. But of such families as we have, mine is not the worst. For five generations—"
"I care little about families," said Don Raymundo coolly.
The tone was courteous, but the words stung Hazlitt. "I am not a rich man," he said, "but I have enough. I was afraid at first that it was thehaciendaI cared for, not the wealth of it, but the power and romance of the life here. That was what took me at first, but now it's Doña Dolores herself. I know it. I had hoped—" he hesitated. After six months of almost daily intercourse it was as impossible to break through Don Raymundo's smiling reserve as it had been at first. "I had hoped that you might find the company of another white man not disagreeable, that we might perhaps even become friends, but—all that doesn't matter, but simply this: it isn't thehaciendaI want."
Don Raymundo spread out his hands with a gesture of utter weariness. "I care so little for thehaciendaand who has it and what becomes of it," he said, "that if the burden of it could be lifted from me I should be almost happy, I think." And while scorn for the eternal posing of the man was setting Hazlitt's lips, he went on: "My friend, and I call you friend because I feel a friendliness for you, I am going to tell you a story I never thought to tell to any one." Don Raymundo's momentary energy dropped from him. "If you care to listen," he amended, in his most uninterested manner.
"Go on, please," said Hazlitt impatiently.
"It is a story of a young man in Spain," said Don Raymundo, "a boy who had a mama and a sister and a name, all of them associated with a rambling stone house that perched on a sunburnt hill. He also had a somewhat lively and energetic brain, and a very moderate education. All he lacked was an income. I hope I do not bore you more than usual?"
Hazlitt moved restlessly, and Don Raymundo continued: "Observe the sequence. The wealth of dreams is traditionally Oriental, and the Philippines lie in the Orient. So the boy, lying there beneath the broken roof of the gaunt stone house, and being sadly in need of an income, dreams of a journey over sunny seas to a region where Spaniards dwell in palaces and gain untold gold, living like little gods together on broad acres where cane rustles and coffee-blossoms gleam and the hemp sends up its never-dying stalk. Demonio!" said Don Raymundo, with a mocking lightness bitter as it well could be, "I seem to be falling into the mood of that boy who dreamed."
Don Raymundo's silence seemed expectant, somehow, and Hazlitt asked: "He came?"
"He came," said Don Raymundo, "and he awoke. They say that he found the rustling cane and the gleaming blossoms a bit monotonous, even while they turned to gold beneath his touch. His environment, I take it, must have been rather like—" He motioned toward the window and the world that lay outside it, the fields stretching away in the burning light to the dim edge of the forest, the endless sweep of the jungle, the distant glow of the sleeping sea, all the untamable world that pressed around the "Hacienda without a Name."
"Like this," Hazlitt assented reluctantly.
"Like this," Don Raymundo agreed. "People say he said at last that proper companionship, and perhaps a wife—Diós mio, I grow stupid. His nearest neighbor, who was half a native, was—blessed, I believe the proper word is—blessed with a daughter. A most charming young woman in those days, they tell me, very gay, very gentle, very affectionate, most accomplished; she had spent many years on the Continent, I believe. In short, she was an unusually beautiful and attractive young person, very like—"
"Like—" Hazlitt began unwillingly, and stopped.
"Like Dolores," Don Raymundo assented for him. "And this interesting young woman naturally felt ill at ease among her homestaying half-countrymen, and naturally had much in common—but all that is easily understood. They were married. And that," Don Raymundo said with languid brutality, "seems to have been the ending of the young man's second dream. Since then he has lived with open eyes."
Hazlitt felt a twinge of shame come over him at listening. After all, the law which establishes a neutral strip of silence between men is based on something deeper than mere convention.
"Don't you think," Hazlitt asked at last—he had to say something—"that this young man took himself too seriously, too tragically? If he had given more to life, had gone about among people—"
"I understand," Don Raymundo interrupted him, "that he declined to go out among his countrymen, where his wife was received only as a favor to himself and his name. He was a somewhat Quixotic young man, you see. And his Filipino friends, though worthy people doubtless, were somewhat unattractive and dull to both the young man and his wife. So in the end he was restricted to the joys of home. And his wife grew old more rapidly than he. There seemed to be something in her blood that made her grow old quickly."
For a moment Hazlitt felt a gleam of pity for the lonely man beside him. Then his back stiffened.
"I do not think," said Hazlitt, and for his life could not keep the vibration of scorn from his voice, "that I love Doña Dolores merely because she is young and beautiful. What I want is to makeherhappy. We can grow old together."
Don Raymundo smiled, and for once his smile was patient instead of mocking. "You are like that young man of mine now," he said gently. "You remind me very much of him. When you are older, you will judge less harshly. And aren't you overlooking something? Is it my happiness that counts, or yours, or even Dolores', though it's hard that she should suffer for the mistake her father made." He drew himself up in his chair and looked at Hazlitt with a new light in his eyes.
"Have you any right to marry her?" he asked almost sternly. "What of your children? And their children? A hundred years from now, will they be—white? Or must they go on forever belonging nowhere, despised by half the brothers of their blood, and themselves despising the other half? Where will it end?"
Enlightenment burst on Hazlitt in a flash. This was no lover's obstacle, to be surmounted by theatric leaps and bounds. He had come face to face with one of the truths of life, Nature's unescapable law of blood. He saw them coming, the slow generations, men of no race and country. "My God!" he said, and gripped the arms of his chair till the cane splintered.
A door opened at the other end of the big room. "Our companions are coming," said Don Raymundo quietly, and rose with punctilious courtesy.
After the greetings Doña Ceferina went directly to the gleaming tray which bore the chocolate and biscuits which buoy one from the dead languor of the siesta to the full tide of evening life. Hazlitt sank back in his chair again. Suddenly a soft voice asked over his shoulder: "You haven't forgotten to save this day week for ourbaile, have you? You must come, you know, because then," Dolores hesitated at her boldness but rattled on, "because then I sha'n't have to dance so often with these stupid native boys."
Hazlitt gripped the arms of his chair again. The moment for decision had come. All those unborn generations were waiting for his answer. Dolores was waiting too, poor, helpless, innocent Dolores. He looked to Don Raymundo for relief, but Don Raymundo, at a window, had turned his back and was puffing at his eternal cigarette. The pause grew long. Then slowly Hazlitt straightened in his chair, and as he looked up at the wondering face behind him, the law and the prophets were swept away in a gush of pitying affection. Pitying, and then? She seemed so rarely, wonderfully beautiful to him, rare and precious as some golden flower from supernal gardens. He could not let her go, could not give up her surpassing loveliness. "Yes," he said very firmly, "yes, I will come."
"Lalalá!" Doña Ceferina laughed from her place behind the cups. "He speaks as seriously as if he made a vow to Our Lady. It's only a ball, you know, Hazleet. Give the men their chocolate, Dolorcita." She raised her cup and sipped happily. "After all," she said, in a tone of deep content, "there are few things in life more delightful than one's chocolate and cigarette."
Don Raymundo was gazing from his window off into the distance, where the gathering shadows were blending forest and cane-field.
"Chocolate is very good," he said thoughtfully.
Three women tramped in the glare of endless Segovia beach. One was young and graceful; another was a comely, ox-like thing of middle age; the third was at the end of life. They halted for a moment to rest, and the grandmother squatted on her haunches and gazed, unseeing, out over the water.
"There will be a wedding at thehaciendanext month," said the girl.
"Yes," said her mother, "the young American will marry Señorita Dolores. They say he is very rich, richer than Don Raymundo."
"He is very big and handsome," said the girl wistfully. "And Doña Dolores—she is very beautiful and kind."
A flash of jealousy crossed the mother's broad, good-natured face. "Yes," she said, "she is beautiful. But after all she is only amestiza, almost a Filipina like the rest of us. And she will grow old."
Then, having halted a moment, they tramped on along their path like phantoms risen on the lifeless beach, for the youngest was but a memory of what the eldest had been a little time before, and the eldest was only a prophecy of what the youngest soon would be.
I cannot hope to describe to you my dismay at finding myself back in that ancient temple of Tzin Piaôu, nor the dislike with which I looked into the eyes of that old heathen priest, those slant eyes where cynical amusement, like a little, undying flame, danced and flickered.
"And so," said the bland old gentleman, raising himself languidly on his hollowed slab of stone, "and so you find the company of the ladies more agreeable than mine? I do not wonder. How did you leave them all in the temple of Lal?" It would be impossible to indicate the sly mockery which rustled in his tone.
"So that was your doing, too?" I asked.
He moved a deprecatory hand, smiling blandly through me into space. "I may have been used as an unworthy instrument," he murmured, "but for most of your experience, I fancy, you're indebted to the Little Gods themselves. Did you find amusement, or instruction, was it?—forgive me, I forget—in the Games they showed you?"
"I'm very tired of your Little Gods, if they exist," I said bluntly, for he made me angry. "As I told you once, and as I would tell them to their faces, I think them cowards. I ask you again, do they never give their victims a fair chance? Is there never a single plaything of theirs which, fighting bravely and in good faith, is permitted to win? Are the dice always cogged?"
"You like to see them win?" my old heathen priest asked in bland surprise. "What a very commonplace taste; for people are always winning what they strive for, thousands of them every day. It's only the exceptions, the surprises, which are interesting. I thought you asked to see Life through my eyes. But since your taste runs that way—" he yawned ever so slightly behind his hand—"You'll excuse me, won't you?" he apologized, "but this is an hour which I invariably devote to a nap." He made a little careless, dismissing gesture. "Wander where you choose," said he, "and watch men fight, since that's your taste, and win—what they may win."
It was my dismissal, and there I saw him last, as I had seen him first, lying motionless on his hollowed slab, smiling blandly, cynically, into Emptiness, with light yet bitter mockery in his smile.
Then, or so it seemed to me, I wandered far and long, and saw many men striving mightily for many things, and most of them were winners, and most of them, winning, found themselves no nearer their hearts' desires. But among them I marked three, and have remembered them, whose striving seemed to me not wholly without interest. The first of them was a very common-seeming man indeed, and the only thing about him which made him worthy of remark was, that he was an optimist.
Samar is a sorry strip of island which rises in gray-green, commonplace, and yet sinister ugliness from a green and treacherous sea. Its coasts are a desolation of over-thrifty vegetation. Its interior, so far as it has been explored, is a wilderness of forest and precipitous mountains. And the people who inhabit it are worthy of the place, outcasts and refugees from other islands, outlawed men for whom no other spot of earth holds a future.
Toward the end of 1901, soldiers and marines and sailors, the 41st Infantry, U.S.A., among them, were rushed to Samar to punish the murderers of Balangiga and cleanse the plague-spot of the Philippines of its spawn. The work proved to be difficult and slow. The blazing summer had darkened into such winter as the Eastern tropics know, a season of lowering skies and deluges of rain, and dank cold and boisterous winds, and still the quarry flitted elusively from stronghold to stronghold of the untracked mountains, emerging at rare intervals to strike with murderous suddenness at unexpected places and then disappear, as hard to bring to bay as any other beast of prey which makes cunning atone for its lack of strength and courage.
At Sabey, a hopeless town half-way up the east coast of the island, Company B of the 41st was stationed, as hard-fisted, hard-mouthed, hard-living, hard-fighting a set of terriers as ever was enlisted. Its Captain, one Burrell, delighted in catching his pets wild and taming them to his peculiar taste. B's ranks, for the most part, were filled by transfer from other organizations whose officers were glad to turn over their black sheep. Burrell, by some method of his own, speedily made soldiers, his sort of soldiers, of them, and they swore by him.
It was unusual for B to sit in garrison when the 41st was afield, for the company had a reputation consonant with its character, and was welcome at the front whenever there was action. But all that autumn it was held in quarters, while the rain drummed on the iron roof and reports came in of little battles north and south and west.
"Ev'rybody had a man's size grouch on, fr'm th' Old Man down," they reported afterward. "Ev'rybody but just John Henry Sullivan, him we called Peaceful Henry. You couldn't hammer a grouch onto Peaceful with an axe."
Sullivan was the humorist of the company, a long, lank, freckled figure-of-fun who was tolerated, ordinarily, though unmercifully mocked, for a certain likable simplicity of mind and a childish friendliness for everything. But that fall his antics palled on B. "They was times when we'd a been glad to kill him," as they said, "if it hadn't been for havin' to look forrard to a long enlistment with him down below."
But at the very end of the year a hope of cornering the enemy appeared, and the spirits of B Company rose accordingly. Midway of its length, Samar narrows till a scant thirty-five miles separates the long rollers of the Pacific shore from the quieter waters of the Visayan Sea. So, at least, the triangulation of the Coast Survey bore witness, then. Until that winter there was no record of men who had crossed the savage island. But a local tradition asserted that an old and long-abandoned trail led from Sabey on the east coast, that very Sabey where B was stationed, to Nalang on the west.
If that ancient trail could be opened once more, Samar would be cut in two, the activity of the skulking outlaws would be impeded, and a scheme of effective reconcentration would be possible at last. The men of B Company felt that their old luck was with them when the duty of making the first reconnaissance of the old trail fell to them.
They were ready to move at once, and soon after reveille, on the morning of December 25th, Captain Burrell, Lieutenant Roberts, and twenty men, all dressed in the blue and khaki of field service, and bearing haversacks bulging with four days' rations, assembled on the beach at Sabey to make an attempt at crossing Samar.
It was an inauspiciously gray and threatening morning. Behind the explorers, breakers crashed thunderously on the sand, and a roaring northeast monsoon whipped spume about in frothy sheets. Before them, the wilderness lay grim and forbidding, in the cold light. But they accepted the rawness and the gloom with the indifference of long acquaintance. Four marches straight westward, of ten miles each at most, child's play to men like them, should bring them to Nalang. There was no breath of adventure in the air.
Yet of the party which faced the hills that morning, seven lie within the shadow still, and only one came out again unaided, seventeen days later, to report that somewhere behind him fourteen men of B, including the Old Man who made it B, lay starving and delirious with fever.
On the morning of the start, they had of course no premonition of all this. Burrell and Roberts waved careless farewells to the one lady of Sabey, the post surgeon's young wife, the men grumbled aimlessly at the prospect of a wet march and a wet camp, and Sullivan, settling his haversack strap more comfortably, grinned at the disappointed ones in front of quarters who could not go. "Reckon we'll locate that overland route for the Sumner this time, sure," he remarked, with a fatuous attempt at humor.
"Fall in," the Captain ordered, and the little column set its front westward and swung off along the drenched banks of Sabey River.
Four days later, as an early nightfall was closing down, eighteen of the party struggled to the summit of a half-wooded ridge in the interior of the island, and the worn-out men straightened up with momentary eagerness to peer into the cloud-hung west. Only the blankness of further up-tumbled ridges and black waves of forest veiled in sheets of rain lay before them, and to north, south, and east as well. Nowhere on the circle of the horizon was a leaden gleam of the guiding sea.
The men seemed dazed. They had made their four marches, of far more than ten miles each, it seemed, at such cost of strength and courage as no one who has not travelled in that land can comprehend. They had made the last march on all but a remnant of their food, and the baffling trail they followed had led them nowhere. An hour before it had vanished in a thicket. Since then they had cut a trail with their bayonets, pushing for this ridge in the hope that from its summit they might see the coast at last. Instead, they found that they were lost in the Samar hills. Faint from hunger and exertion, chilled to the bone from tramping in clammy clothing and sleeping in drenched blankets, with shoes that burst from their swollen feet like pulp and hung in shreds, already halting of speech and step with the burning weakness of fever, half a dozen of them, they stood there in the beating downpour, stunned, and daunted.
All this had come to them in four days,—that was the paralyzing fact. It appalled them that all their pride of strength should have vanished in that little space, when other days were coming, how many no one knew, of uglier promise. Foiled, while they still had food and strength, by the task they had set themselves, each day of increased weakness and privation now would call them to increased exertion till the sea was reached—the sea which might, and might not, lie beyond the furthest of those mountains to the west, if it was west. Dumbly they stared at them, avoiding each other's eyes.
Captain Burrell, still weakened by the wound he got in front of Tientsin, was one of the hardest-hit of the fever-victims, and his teeth chattered when he talked, but he retained a humor dryer than the weather. "I reckon we'll camp right here," he said. "H'm. We can't quite fetch the coast to-night, and this ridge is well-drained, anyway. H'm."
The least weary of the men smiled forlornly in response to the spirit that lived in their Old Man, and Sullivan laughed outright. "I've been lookin' for a well-dreened place like this to start my cactus-farm in, sir," he remarked. Already the formalities of rank had vanished, and discipline meant obedience for the common good, not ceremony.
"Might do it, by irrigating," said the Captain. "H'm." He cast a sharp glance at his one unapprehensive subordinate. "The rest of you camp right here," he ordered. "Sullivan and I are going back along to stir up those loafers who fell out."
"See here, sir," Lieutenant Roberts cried, in half-hearted protest, for every inch of his six feet of young body was aching dully, "that leg of yours—"
"Is a corker," said the Captain shortly. "H'm. Come along, Sullivan."
An hour later the two, staggering with sleep, herded the last of the sodden, half-delirious stragglers up to the fire which spluttered in the wet and gloom, and the sick men sprawled obediently among their unconscious fellows. For an instant the officer stared down at them. "Hopeful lot, ain't they?" he muttered. "H'm."
"It sure looks some like a graveyard, Captain," said Sullivan cheerfully. The Captain glanced at him again.
"Don't you ever get—blue, Sullivan?" he asked curiously.
Sullivan seemed doubtful. "I—I do' know's I ever thought much about it, sir," he said.
"I reckoned not," said the Captain. "H'm. Well, don't. Go to sleep."
"I was thinkin' I'd keep th' fire goin' a while, it looked so kind of homelike," Sullivan objected. "I ain't much sleepy. You turn in, sir."
"I'm not sleepy, either," said the other gruffly. "H'm. Roll in now.Pronto." Obediently Sullivan sank down where he stood, and was asleep.
Burrell sat long, brooding over the fire, listening to the deep breaths and smothered groanings of his men. One of them babbled in delirium, piteously, for a moment, and the Captain went and soothed him, awkwardly. Then he stood above him, gazing off into the gulf of blackness to the west. He glanced down at the muttering soldier, and away again into the night. "God damn you," he said to the Island of Samar gravely, courteously, as one might deliver a challenge to mortal combat.
Next morning they breakfasted on what was left of their food, consuming all but a precious emergency ration of two tins of bacon, a pound and a half in all. Then they pushed on in what was meant to be a last desperate dash for the coast, going down into a long wide valley smothered in primeval forest. Every trail had vanished, each step of advance had to be slashed from a jungle of underbrush and creepers, and for all their suffering they gained a scant five miles. They halted at nightfall in a little opening, where they shed their equipments as they stood, and sprawled among them. Sullivan and the Captain, going back for the many stragglers, failed to discover two of them.
They camped that night without food or fire, in a rain that came down harder than ever, if such a thing could be. Next day, without breakfast, they resumed their dogged advance, halting often to rest and search for food. But in that dead season the forest yielded nothing more edible than leaves and bark, and a few woody seed pods like rose-haws in size and shape.
"Hell-apples," Sullivan named those, after he had had opportunity to observe their effects. "They look all right, and they taste all right," he explained, "but they sure do raise hell with your insides."
The men munched them greedily, despite their uncomforting properties. A time was coming when a rotting log that harbored store of grubs would seem a treasure-house to them.
The bayonets did not hack out a trail as rapidly as they had on the day before, and they had made no more than three miles and a half when night shut down. Yet, slow as the advance was, only half a dozen men were up with it, and, when Burrell would have gone back for the others, his wounded leg crumpled under him. Without a word, Lieutenant Roberts joined Sullivan, and it was midnight when the pair brought in the last straggler they could find. Three were still missing, and the Captain forbade further search. "They'll have to take a chance," he said. "H'm."
When the next day broke, merely a lightening of the gloom under the dripping branches, Lieutenant Roberts rose stiffly from the pool that had formed about him in the night and stood, blue-lipped and shaking, over the Captain, whose tortured leg would not permit him to do more than raise himself on one elbow. The two officers faced the situation together. They needed no words. All about them lay the forest of that deadly central valley. Somewhere beyond it, unattainably far for the majority of the men, rose the western rampart of the island. For thirty-six hours they had had no food but hell-apples, the fever was growing on them, and three-fourths of the command, any doctor would have said, could not march a mile.
The Captain spoke at last, staring sullenly at the ground. "Call the men, will you?" he asked. "H'm. I reckon it's time to split."
Roberts' face brightened. "I'll make it out all right," he declared. "Never felt huskier in my life. I could break world's records from here to a plate of grub."
Only ten men of the seventeen who were left responded to the call. The others, roused from the stupor of deep sleep, merely stared up vacantly and muttered, so Roberts let them lie. "Boys," said Burrell, when they had formed a little circle round him, "'most of us need a lay-off. H'm. So we're goin' to rest up here for a couple of days and then push on slow. Mr. Roberts and a couple of you can plug ahead now, though, so's to have some grub cooked up to meet us. I reckon we'll raise a famine in Nalang. H'm. Roberts, who'll you take with you?"
Despite the lightness of the officer's tone, every man knew what he asked for, and as the subaltern's eyes swept round the circle, shrewdly weighing each man's serviceability, shoulders squared and faces took on looks of quite ferocious good cheer.
"I seen you first, sir," Terry Clancy cried all at once, and stumbled to his feet.
"I've got a fine healthy appetite, myself," Sullivan remarked plaintively. "I'm with you for a sprint, Lieutenant."
"You're too old, Clancy," said Roberts kindly. "I want yearlings for this. And you, Sullivan,"—his voice held good-natured condescension, as he glanced down at his own bulging chest and sturdy limbs,—"you're too spindly. You're liable to double up, any time."
At last he chose Red Hannigan and Peter Kelley, two men of his own kind, bull-necked, thick-limbed and heavy-shouldered. The Captain handed him one of the two tins of bacon. "We'll look for you back," he said, "long about—H'm—day after to-morrow. Or day after that. H'm."
The eyes of the officers glinted into each other. "Sure," said Roberts, gravely shaking his commander's hand. "Come along, you fellows."
Twelve days later a party from Nalang found Lieutenant Roberts, the first white man to win across Samar, sitting contentedly on the beach in the sunshine, forty miles above the town, eating snails and aimlessly tossing the shells at what had been his feet. Red Hannigan and Peter Kelley were never found, for Roberts never could remember where they left him.
After the departure of the rescue party, apathy settled over the camp in the valley. The Captain straightened his bad leg and lay back with closed eyes. The others lay about him, dozing. Even the worst of the fever-victims only cried out occasionally. Beside the relief of not having to march, cold and wet and hunger and sickness were little things.
It was well on in the afternoon when Clancy was roused by a sound which puzzled him. Stumbling out of camp, he came upon a sight which struck him speechless.
Sullivan, sitting astride a mouldering log, was wrenching off strips of sodden bark and digging his fingers deep into the punky wood. Suddenly the meaning of it burst on Terry. "Quit that!" he cried. "Quit it, I tell you."
Sullivan, glancing up, had the grace to redden. Then he lowered his eyes, and resumed his pecking. "I don't care," he muttered defiantly. "I'm hungry enough to eat anything."
Clancy turned away. Presently, from behind a clump of undergrowth, there came the sound of ripping bark. For a while Sullivan, still busy, preserved discreet silence. But his grin broadened slowly, and at last he sang out, "Hi, Terry! Pick for the little white ones. The others has kind of soured, I reckon."
There was no answer. After a time another man limped out, watched Sullivan for a little, and soon the sounds of the chase rose from another secluded spot. There was no element of sociability in those meals as yet.
Then came a slow succession of days not so tremendously hard to bear, as the pangs of hunger faded into the milder discomfort of starvation, and the fever felled them one by one. Days so like each other that only the calendar notched in the grip of the Captain's revolver kept their count.
Each morning fewer of them were able to join Sullivan in the search for grubs and seed pods, and he began bringing them what spoil of the forest he could find. They took it unquestioningly from his hand, those who were conscious, like children. Indeed, as the days passed, the rough fellows turned for all their needs to the man who had been their butt, and he never failed to meet their primitive wants. That lanky body of his held a surprising store of tough endurance, and he seemed fever-proof. As for his cheerfulness, it was inexhaustible.
Big Terry Clancy and the Captain were the last to yield to their weakness, refusing, gently, the food Sullivan brought them. Hard men as those of B were, not one of them, in his sane moments, spoke a word of discontent or of complaint during those days. I like to remember that of them, as I like to remember that I never heard an American regular soldier, traditional grumbler that he is, grumble when he had a reason for it.
On the fourth evening after the departure of Lieutenant Roberts, the tenth night out from Sabey and the fifth since they had eaten food for human beings, Sullivan was the only man left stirring in the camp. In spite of the rain—and I would have you read always to the torrential beat of a tropical downpour and the soughing of cold, damp-laden winds—he had managed, with the last of the matches and the powder from half a dozen cartridges, to kindle a fire in a fallen trunk, and had kept it going, and had dragged his comrades round it. He sat beside the Captain, and presently, glancing down, he saw that the officer's eyes were fixed steadily on him. "Anything you want, sir?" he asked.
"How many of us," Burrell asked abruptly, "are what you could call fit?"
Sullivan surveyed the prostrate men about him. "Well," he said imperturbably, "I reckon there's me. And you."
"H'm," the Captain grunted, and even in his sickness his eyes brightened. "Then," he said, "I reckon it's up to—us. H'm."
For a moment he mused, and then he went on, "It's no use trying Nalang. Roberts tried that. But if some one could get back to Sabey I think some of the men would try—"
"The boys would get you out of hell, sir," said Sullivan gravely, "if you sent th'm word."
"Think so?" said Burrell. "H'm. Well, to-morrow you'd better send word to 'em." The Captain's eyes had a queer brightness as he stared at Sullivan, reading his face. "H'm," he muttered at last, "if I ever do have to get a message out of there, I hope you'll be round to carry it."
Something in his tone dragged Sullivan toward him with suddenly blazing eyes. "Captain," he begged, demanding assurance from the man who was his deity, "do you mean that? No jollyin' now, sir. You sure think I can do it?"
"Think?" said the Captain. "H'm. I'm bankin' on you, Sullivan. I know you can do it."
"Then," said Sullivan blissfully, "by God, I will, sir."
Early as it was next morning when Sullivan rose for his start, he found the Captain's steady eyes on him. "You don't need your rifle," he said. "Nor your belt."
"I reckon not, sir," said Sullivan whimsically, "not for buggin'."
"You take that can of bacon out of my haversack," his officer continued. "I've saved it for this."
"I don't need it none, sir," said Sullivan, edging away. "There'd ought to be fine buggin' back along. An' hell-apples, I reckon."
"Take it," said Burrell shortly, and Sullivan yielded to the habit of obedience. He turned for his journey.
"Hold on," his officer commanded. "You're forgettin' something." He lifted a clawlike hand, and Sullivan gripped it for a minute in silence. He strode across the little opening to the beginning of the back trail. There he halted, turned, and hurled the tin of bacon at his commander. "You go to hell, sir," he shrilled defiantly. "I'll do fine, buggin',"—and he ran stumblingly down the trail.
The Captain twisted his head—it was the only movement he could make—and watched the retreating figure of the mutineer. "H'm," he muttered after it, and shut his eyes, to wait.
For the first few hours Sullivan, uplifted by the thought of his mission, went on at what seemed to him a tremendous pace. In reality his knees lifted jerkily, his feet came down flat and stiff, and his stride was that of a child. A giddiness, too, overtook him now and then, and a white mist drifted before his eyes. At such times the walls of the trail seemed to rush by in a blur of green, and he had an exhilarating sense of rapid movement.
Long before noon he had covered the three miles and a half to the first camp on the back trail. There he hesitated. A temptingly crumbly log lay beside the trail, and his stomach was cramped with such hunger as he had not felt for days. But he halted only a moment. "Time enough to eat to-night," he muttered, and went on.
The afternoon was harder. The giddiness and the mist assailed him oftener, and several times, when the blankness became complete, he was roused by finding that his face had come into not ungentle contact with the ground. Once, doubling limply, he struck his face on his knee instead, and a cut lip gave him the pleasant salty taste of blood. Sharp pains of breathlessness stabbed his sides at intervals, and his heart had fits of throbbing suffocatingly. But he never halted as long as he could see. When the trail was only blackness in the night he sank down.
The rain and the light woke him to an accusing sense that it had long been day. He moved on at once. "I'll eat when I've made that up," he muttered, as the blur enclosed him.
That day was mostly blur until, along in the afternoon, his mind cleared suddenly. The ground sloped upward under his feet. A rocky, sparsely-wooded ridge rose above him. Remembrance tingled through him. "My cactus-farm!" he cried, in delighted recognition. "I'm gettin' almost there."
With his knees doubling under him, he clawed his way to the ridge, and a well-remembered landscape lay about him, dark billows of unbroken forest and a horizon of up-tumbled hills. The huge emptiness of it smote him like a blow and he turned to the old camp. The signs of human occupation, the remembrance of men who had spoken there and of the words they had said, comforted him wonderfully. "Here," he said, having fallen into a way of thinking aloud, "is where Ieat. They'd ought to be fine buggin' here."
But the ridge was disappointingly bare of provender. Not a rotten log, not a seed pod, rewarded his toilsome search. At last, where a hanging corner of rock had sheltered it, he came upon a torpid colony of tiger-ants. He looked at them dubiously. "I wonder," he muttered, "if anybody everetan ant? I reckon not. Don't seem to be muchtoth'm."
As he stirred the sluggish insects with a doubtful finger, one of them set its mandibles in his flesh. Sullivan's eyes lit with determination. "I'm hungrier'n you be, I reckon," he said gravely.
With the refreshing acidity of his experiment strong on his tongue, he rose at last, regretfully. "It would seem kind of home-like sleepin' here," he said. "But I reckon I'd better be gallopin' along." And he pushed on till once more darkness brought him merciful oblivion.
He woke to daylight with all his senses clear but one. He understood—there had been times when he forgot even that—that he was Sullivan, that behind him lay his comrades, starving, that before him the trail led to men who needed but a word, and that he had been chosen to take it. But his sense of time was gone. How long he had slept he could not guess. It might have been one night, or many. They might all have died behind him, those sick men and the Old Man who banked on him.
In torture at the uncertainty, he rose and stumbled forward again. After a while—it might have been an hour or many days—the trail brought him to a torrential river. He recognized it dimly as the Sabey. They had come up it once, sometime, any time, walking in its rocky bed. Now its swirling waters covered the trail.
Painstakingly Sullivan collected his misty faculties. There was a general feeling of morning in the air. By night he must be at Sabey, he was convinced. He must hurry, therefore. A clear idea flashed across his mind. A raft! He must build a raft and hurry with the rushing river, since there was no more trail. He drew his heavy knife-bayonet and turned to the woods. After a while darkness shut down and stopped his work. But he had cut a good many poles.
The next thing he knew it was light again, so he dragged one of his poles to the river and dropped it in. It sank. Another and another did the same. When they touched the water they sank. When Sullivan understood that his poles would not float, he lost his steady hopefulness for the first time.
But after a while he turned wearily, and stumbled off along the rocky, overhanging banks of Sabey River. When he had walked dizzily a little distance, he fell and lay still. A fall on that cutting volcanic rock was another matter from a fall on the trail. At last he recovered enough to stagger on for a few more steps. Then he fell again. That time he did not rise.
But the shock and the loss of blood cleared his head. At last he recognized his predicament. He was through. There was no bitterness in the thought. He had done his best, and failed. The torment of hurry was gone, and he lay and watched the foaming river and the overarching trees. "I can't do it," Sullivan told himself simply, and quit.
But suddenly his merciless self assailed him. "There's another way," it urged. "You can do it. Th' Old Man said so. Try it."
Weakly, half-sobbing, Sullivan obeyed the summons, and got to his knees. He put out a hand and planted it on the rock, drew up his knee toward it, and his body swayed forward. He put out his other hand, drew up his other knee, swayed forward again. He had gained a foot, at least.
"By God," shouted Sullivan's self to him exultantly, "you can do it! Try it again. You can't walk, but you cancrawl, I reckon. Whoop-eee-ee! Hit her up!"
And Sullivan, obedient as always, hit her up.
And so at last, seventeen days from the time he left Sabey, he returned to it, a blind, gaunt, rain-beaten, silent, grimly crawling thing. He had almost reached the barracks when a soldier, hurrying through the rain, spied him and raised a shout. He revived for a moment when they lifted him, and opened his eyes.
"Back along," faltered the messenger. "Starvin'. Hurry up. God!" he sighed, and collapsed in their arms.
They carried him to the shack they called a hospital, and while the relief party gathered and went out, twenty silent men loaded down with rations, the post surgeon and his wife worked over him. Suddenly the girl broke down.
"Oh!" she cried. "Look at his poor hands and knees! Oh, Will, what didthatto him?"
"What?" stuttered the young surgeon gruffly. "What! Why, the—the nervy son—son of a gunwalkedon 'em, God knows how far, that's all! Fill those water bottles, will you. Andhurryup."
Two days later Sullivan opened his eyes, and stared wonderingly at the room, and the lamplight, and theollahanging in the window, and the post surgeon's pretty wife, who sat beside his cot. At last his eyes rested on his own hands, shapeless in bandages. And as he looked at them his lips trembled, and he began to cry, weakly, like a child.
The post surgeon's wife thought she understood, and her own breath caught. She was very new to the Army, and she was trying to make a hero of Sullivan. "Poor fellow," she murmured, "I know they're bad. But we'll fix them up. Don't cry about them."
"I ain't c-cryin'!" Sullivan whispered, in tremulous indignation. "I'm l-laughin'. I reckon," he muttered, and a ripple of the old whimsicality swept across his face, "I must be about th' first man ever wore his hands to a blister, walkin'." The wonder of the thought held him entranced.
The girl thought he was light-headed. "Is there anything you'd like?" she asked soothingly.
Sullivan considered. "Salt," he announced emphatically. "I want salt. Ev'ry drop you've got in th' place. What're you lookin' at? Salt's cheap enough, ain't it? Well, I want some. Seems like I hadn't had no salt f'r years."
How the relief party did its work is another story, and a brave one. It is hard to kill strong men by exhaustion, and, by the time Sullivan could walk a little, the Captain and the other rescued men were sitting up in bed. At last a day came when Burrell was permitted to have one visitor. "Send Sullivan," he ordered.
The lanky fellow shuffled in bashfully, and stood with averted eyes. "Glad to see you're back, sir," he muttered.
"Well," asked Burrell gruffly, "you can shake hands, can't you?"
Sullivan, grinning sheepishly, held up a muffled paw. "I reckon not, sir," he said.
"What's the matter with 'em?" the Captain demanded.
"Blistered th'm, sir," Sullivan responded with solemn joy. "Blistered th'm, walkin'."
"H'm," the Captain muttered. His eyes were burning into the man. "Sullivan," he said abruptly, "there's a can of bacon in my haversack that belongs to you."
Sullivan gulped. Discipline had him by the heels again. "Beg y' pardon, sir," he mumbled nervously. "I reckon I must a been sort of loco that day."
"Well," said the Old Man of B Company gravely, "maybe I'll let it go this time. But see it don't happen again. H'm."
This Fortune you speak of, tell me, what sort of creature is she, to have the good things of the world so in her hands?—The Inferno of Dante Alighieri.
The second of my Argonauts was of quite another sort. Whatever graces of body and mind Nature has to give, she had given him—and he had wasted them. With his invincible and dauntless youth he might have been a companion for Cortez and stout Bernal Diaz, a Crusader, almost anything he chose, and he was—I borrow the phrase of a better man than I—a Camp-Follower of Fortune, a wasted man. The outskirts of the world are full of them. That such things can be, that men can be born so strong, so lovable, and then be wasted, seems to me the most inexplicable of the caprices of that Fortune which puzzled Dante Alighieri long ago.
Mid-heaven high, the morning sun blazed above the forlorn little lumber-port, calling the inhabitants thereof to arise and make hay diligently during the few weeks it still had to shine before the change of monsoons and the rainy season blotted the world in mist. The call seemed to arouse little enthusiasm. Over the channel, where the Rio Bagalayag winds out by the bar, a pair of gulls wheeled aimlessly, plunging into the yellow water now and then, and rising with harsh cries. Out beyond them in the distance, where Point Bagalayag wavered in the heat, a lorcha drifted with limp sails, becalmed in the lee of Mount Bagalayag. In the one street of Bagalayag itself, the grassy lane which follows the curve of the shore, two Chinamen with a long whip-saw were gnawing a plank from a four-foot log of molave, sawing steadily with the patient endurance of their race, brown arms swinging in and out, brown bodies swaying. At the end of each stroke, they grunted rhythmically, and the music of their industry—Ugh! Kch-chee-e-e-Arghh! Kch-chee-e-e-Ugh!—was the only sound in Bagalayag that morning, save the raucous complaint of the distant gulls.
As a matter of fact, Bagalayag was waiting in hushed expectancy for something inevitable to happen. On the shady side of the nipa church, which still manages to rear its rickety walls at the corner of the brown and weedyplaza, the populace was gathered—forty-one men, fifty-two women, fifty-two babes in arms, and seventy-three children of varying sex and age, speechless for once, with the smoke of their cigarettes dissolving above them like unfragrant incense. And the gaze of all that multitude was fixed unwinkingly on a tin-roofed house—the only one in town—which stands on the other side of the street, close to the water's edge.
In that pretentious dwelling an unprecedented event seemed likely to happen, for in its upper chamber one of the lords of the earth lay deathly sick of a fever. Bagalayag as yet recorded no death of a white man in its simple annals, therefore it sat and smoked and waited, all except its stolid, alien Chinamen, who cared nothing for life or death or anything but planks.
Occasionally a voice floated out from the Tin-Roofed House, weak and thin but full of helpless rage, and at the sound the inhabitants of Bagalayag wagged their heads and spoke softly. "The Señor Ess-soffti is not dead—yet," they murmured.
In Hamburg, far enough from Bagalayag in miles, there is a house which sells anything, from elephants to orchids. Every product of the animal or vegetable kingdom from one pole to the other, 'round with the equator and back again, is included in the complete line which theHamburgische Gesellschaftcarries, for this body is a true body whose busy nerve-ends net the round world. Men on grimy ships whose battered fore feet are set across uncharted leagues of sea, men who rot in unheard-of towns—yet continue to live and trade in defiance of every hygienic law—men who plod untracked continents and unknown, sleeping islands with savage followers, are the organs by which it acts.
Set above all these is the good Right Eye of the Company, the man who, by virtue of wild-wood lore and craftsmanship, and first-hand knowledge of the far nooks and byways of the earth, by right of energy and perseverance, outranks the army of traders and collectors and stands next the Brain. Herr Felix Schrofft is his name, always spoken with respect and envy by his associates and rivals in his strong man's calling. And now, become the Señor Ess-soffti on liquid Malay tongues, he lay alone at bay in the Tin-Roofed House, and held the breathless attention of the populace of Bagalayag in Mindoro.
The arena where he fought, that small, bare, upper chamber, was very simply furnished with a round table, a couple of chairs, a camphor-wood chest, a bamboo cage imprisoning a parrot, and a folding cot upholstered in the severest taste with dingy gray canvas. The table held the fly- and lizard-bitten remnants of a meal, the chairs were draped with the muddy garments their owner had flung there hastily three days before, a litter of other clothing sprawled from beneath the lid of the chest, and on the cot, which stood before a seaward-facing window, was stretched the redoubtable Señor Ess-soffti himself, not at all in the mental attitude which our Christian convention prescribes for thosein articulo mortis. Despite the pallor of the cheeks beneath the smut of the newly sprouted beard and the yellow gleam of the eyeballs and the leaden inertness of the shrunken limbs which barely hollowed the taut canvas where they lay, the shaggy, wizened monkey of a man was plainly beset by the very worst of tempers, which only his extreme weakness kept from violent expression.
So he lay chafing there that morning, just as he had lain for days. Occasionally his restless eyes met the beady ones of the parrot, and the imprisoned bird shrieked with silly laughter. On such occasions the Señor Ess-soffti shook his fist, a menace which showed mostly in the convulsions of his face, and muttered weakly, "Sing, you deffel, sing!" falling thereafter into a murmured torrent of words, as he consigned the Philippine Islands and all things in them to everlasting torment.
Even a hidebound moralist, knowing all the circumstances, might have found some palliation for Herr Schrofft's unspiritual estate. Fever had stricken him at an inopportune season, and, for the first time in his life, he faced a possibility of failure with which he could not cope. Even now the freighterSarstoonhad turned her stubby nose Mindoro-ward at Schrofft's suggestion. In ten days she would be lying off Bagalayag, waiting for the cargo he had promised her, and even when one has no fever, ten days are little time in which to fell and trim a hundred cubic meters of a wood so dense that it eats an axe like granulated metal, and float it down the miles of oozing mud they call the Rio Bagalayag, and load it before the northeast monsoon—already threatening in the clouds—comes to lash the open roadstead into a fury of spume and breaking rollers.
He could foresee it all, the excessive sympathy of theSarstoon'sskipper, the meek explanation of the House to the impatient customer, the commiseration and sly elation of his acquaintances and rivals that he had failed at last, the universal grunt of "Hard luck, Schrofft"—hard luck in a trade whose frankly brutal creed discredits a man for one adverse stroke of fortune as for any other sign of personal weakness and unfitness. All that must come, unless he could find some means of thwarting Dame Fate. And so, not finding the means, he cursed the officious beldame heartily.
Suddenly he noticed that the drone of the saw had ceased. Doubtless the coolies had stopped to wipe their streaming faces, but Schrofft was in no mood to seek excuses for them. "Loaf, you deffels, loaf!" he shouted venomously.
As if in response to his taunt, the music of the saw began again, but mingled with it came the chatter of many voices and the soft flop, flop of many padding feet. Raising his head a wearisome half-inch to peer from his window, Herr Schrofft saw, with supreme disgust, the sprung masts and frowsy rigging of the monthly packet from Batangas in the river. Somehow or other the hours had dragged by uncounted; it was afternoon, and the crazy lorcha had drifted to her haven in spite of calm and childish seamanship; while he, Herr Schrofft the indomitable, had one day less in which to do his work. For the first time in his illness, the hard-pressed little man groaned for sympathy, and pitying, sentimental, Teutonic tears burned his eyes. "If I only had just one white man with me," he muttered.
The confusion without came nearer, drawing down the street, and presently the stairs of the Tin-Roofed House clattered under booted feet and its fabric trembled slightly. The invalid's face brightened with curiosity. No native of the Philippines has the combined weight and energy necessary to make a house shake when he walks.Deus ex Machina!That was a favorite phrase of Schrofft's, almost the only Latin of Gymnasium days that had stuck. Perhaps the Man had come with the Hour. Schrofft watched the door with feverish intentness.
It opened and a white man entered, white at least in fundamental coloring, although his skin was a raw, beefy red from newly acquired sunburn, tall, broad-shouldered, clad serviceably in sombrero, the relic of an army shirt, the ruins of khaki riding-breeches and, most incongruously, a pair of handsome riding-boots, whose russet leather was cleaned and polished till it glittered. So far all was well, but the face—the hollowed cheeks, the dark puffy rims beneath the eyes, the wavering glance of the bright blue eyes themselves, the nervous twitching of the full red lips, set in a smile of deprecating impudence, the keen, high-bred features blunted and battered by dissipation, all spoke of one thing. Schrofft sized up his visitor with narrowed lids, and spoke his opinion briefly. "I haf no use for bums," he said.
Like a mask, the wheedling smirk dropped from the newcomer's face. "Hock the Kaiser, a wandering Dutchman!" he cried airily, advancing to the cot.
Schrofft's little eyes burned red. "I am Herr Felix Schrofft, Explorer for theHamburgische Gesellschaft," he said with dignity, "and I haf no use for bums. Get out."
"'Tis a certain matter of delayed remittances," the stranger explained, as he unceremoniously dumped the encumbering garments from a chair, and sat down by the table. "I must identify myself, Herr Softy. I am Richard Roe, Esquire, ward of the famous John Doe, of whom you may have heard. While the remittances delay, I wander, seeking whom and what I may devour." Mr. Richard Roe gazed ruefully at the dusty viands before him. "As usual, I seem to have come to the wrong shop," he murmured. "But here at least are cigarettes. I will not stand on ceremony."
While the match flared, Schrofft stared at his tormentor with at least as much of bewilderment as of wrath. "If I could hold my revolver," he said at last, "I think I would shoot you. I haf no use for bums."
Through a cloud of smoke, Mr. Richard Roe gazed whimsically at the invalid. "The question seems to be," he suggested mildly, "whether the bum has a use for you. And I rather think he has." He crossed one leg over the other and became pleasantly didactic. "I am not always what you see me now, Herr Softy. One short week ago I sat in Don Miguel Rafferty's establishment in Batangas, wooing fickle Fortune at the wheel. The jade stripped me, I was sold out, up against it; so I became a thorough bum, in manners, morals, and in dress. The boots," he digressed, glancing complacently at his well-shod feet, "are somewhat out of character, I admit. Otherwise I am a bum pure and simple, as you have three times observed, but a bum of a quality of which you never dreamed, a masterless man reduced to his primal elements, three appetites and a sense of humor. Herr Softy, beware of me. I am a dangerous character, I warn you frankly at the start."
Mr. Richard Roe approached the cot once more. "Speaking of revolvers," he remarked, "reminds me that I left my own in Batangas, in care of Uncle Monte de Piedad." He drew Schrofft's weapon from beneath the pillow, and inspected it rapidly. "A poor thing, but a Colt's," he muttered. "Calibre 41, of course. How European!"
Herr Schrofft, his eyes still closed, groaned weakly. It was hard that his respectable and well-ordered brain should conjure up a nightmare of vagabondage like this, and supply fitting words for the figure.
"I came southward to Mindoro," the drawling voice went on, "and at the first stroke I am half a man again. I have a gun. Here is a Tin-Roofed House in which to sleep; here is tobacco to smoke; through the chinks in the floor I perceive sleeping chickens which promise food. Best of all, I find here a companion for my solitude. Herr Softy, you may need an heir before long. Behold him here in me."
"Herr Gott!" Schrofft groaned again, "I am going crazier every minute." Suddenly he opened his eyes, for the door swung on its hinges and a head surmounted by a shock of coarse black hair was thrust within. At the sight of it, all his aggressiveness returned. "Son of fifty fathers!" he screamed. "Because you think I am dying you run away, and now you have the shamelessness to come back! Go and be amuchachofor the deffel! I shall not die; in two days I shall be strong enough to kill you."
"It was only his canny Filipino way," Mr. Richard Roe broke in, coming to the rescue of the unfaithful servant. "He wanted an alibi for the inquest. Slave," he announced sternly, "I have saved your life. Fetch more cigarettes and a bottle of whatever burning water the market offers. Then kill three chickens and cook them with plenty rice—and no grease. The Señor Softy and I will have a mucho grande chow-chow to celebrate my home-coming. I am his heir.Sigue! Pronto! Madili!"
Schrofft glared hopelessly at Mr. Richard Roe. "Then you are real!" he cried. "That boy, he sees you also, he hears you, he obeys!Mein Gott!You are a bum. You haf no home, you haf no money, you haf no grub, you haf no chob. And I would gif a hundert dollars for just one man!"
"Alas," said Mr. Richard Roe hollowly, "I am not a man, and the hundred is unclaimed. I am the stuff that dreams are made of, bad dreams. But I have my better impulses, and I feel them stirring at the prospect of food. I will be a ministering angel to you, an airy, fairy, army nurse, pressing my cool hand softly on your fevered brow." He suited the action to the word, save that the hand was hot and gritty. "Herr Softy, your pulse is rapid, your temperature is rising, you tremble on the verge of a paroxysm of fever. Where is the quinine?"
The recurrent hot stage of his disease had indeed seized the patient, and as it grew upon him he lost more and more his grip of reality under the mad contradictions of Mr. Richard Roe's speech and conduct, and the potent spell of the drug which he administered with a lavish hand. Dimly, as in a dream, the room stretched wider and higher about him, and as the pulse boomed and roared in his ears, he saw in the distance a phantasm which he knew was called Mr. Richard Roe, sitting at a table and going through the motions of a real man. It drank thirstily from a bottle which a frightenedmuchachobrought; it smoked endless cigarettes; it dismembered a steaming chicken with its fingers, and ate it daintily, ate another, stretched back in its chair and grunted with content. Phantom or reality, Mr. Richard Roe began to be a comfort, he made himself so much at home. Schrofft closed his eyes and dozed.
Suddenly through his slumber cut a well-remembered sound:Ugh! Kch-chee-e-e-Arghh! Kch-chee-e-e-Ugh!He woke to a moment of clear-headedness and the sense of his predicament. It was almost sunset; only eight days were left. "My trees, my trees!" he quavered, trying weakly to sit up. "I must go and get them."
Instantly the "cool hand" rested on his forehead and, not unkindly, he was shoved back on his pillows. "You've been dozing," the voice of Mr. Richard Roe explained soothingly. "What's the matter?"
Brokenly, still as in a dream, Schrofft heard his own voice go croaking on, speaking ramblingly of trees, always of trees. The clump of iron-woods that grow at the corner where the mangroves are thickest on the bank, thirty miles up-stream. The twelve huge trees that stand up so high and have their tops pleached together. Those were the ones; they must be cut without delay. He must start at once, because, you see, theSarstoonwould be in on the 18th, and, if she didn't get the trees, the monsoon would change. And then her voyage would be wasted, and the customer would not have for six more months the wood of unique density which he wanted for non-magnetic gears, and the House would have to bear the blame, when it was all the fault of a fool named Schrofft, who lay around with fever when there was work to do.
At a great distance he saw Mr. Richard Roe sitting with crossed legs, smoking in long, meditative purr's, and inspecting him narrowly with keen, unwavering blue eyes.
"You're a rather game little man," said Mr. Richard Roe approvingly. After a long time he spoke again. "Thirty miles up, you say. Is there any one around who knows an iron-wood when he sees one?"
There was a new, a compelling quality in the voice, which Schrofft had not heard before. "That coward muchacho, that Juan, he knows. He has been there with me," said Schrofft.
"And the tools, where are they?" asked the compelling tones.
"In the canoes, all ready," Schrofft answered obediently.
"I can't understand his getting so excited about a few trees," Mr. Richard Roe muttered. "Inever could. But he's a game little man, and if he wants his trees as bad as all this, by Jove, he's got to have 'em." He rose lazily, and stood towering above the cot. "It's all right, Schrofft. Go to sleep. I'll have your trees here by the eighteenth."
"You can't," Schrofft objected sleepily, with the unmalicious frankness of one who states a well-established fact. "You're nothing but a bum."
"Go to sleep," Mr. Richard Roe repeated soothingly. "Perhaps, since there's so much hurry, I'd better start to-night. There's a lovely moon now, like a Swiss cheese. Last night it made me think of beer."
"Those trees on the right bank," Schrofft muttered, trying to rise once more.
Strong hands pressed him back and held him there. "Schrofft," Mr. Richard Roe said slowly and impressively, "pay attention just one minute, and then you can go to sleep. When I want anything I go and get it,sabe? Same as I came here and got grub. Same as I'd go to the devil for a drink, when I wantthat. I never happened to want trees, but I'll get some for you. Now go to sleep."
Under the spell of the assuring voice and the comforting grip of the strong hands on his shoulders, Schrofft's eyelids drooped lower and lower, till even the clatter of energetic feet descending the stairs did not cause them to flutter.
He must have dreamed still more then, for strange things happened. Outside in the village, even in peaceful Bagalayag, a riot rose, voices of men angry and protesting, voices of women tearful and imploring, voices of children shrill with excitement, and, dominating all, a languid, vibrant voice speaking sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in crude but vigorous Bisayan, threatening, cajoling, domineering. Gradually all the others died away into a murmur of resignation, and then, suddenly, the song of the saw stopped with a spluttering drawl not unlike the squawk of a frightened hen. "Come along, you chaps," said the masterful voice. "Got a job for you other place,sabe?"