told him I knew not what to do, unless we could get bloodhounds and
put them on the trail. He said there were no hounds within sixty
miles; that all of the planters he knew preferred to lose a runaway
rather than to follow them with the dogs. Rumors of the loss of Mrs.
Martas had spread from plantation to camp, and two or three soldiers
had immediately ridden out to the plantation, and then had followed
us to the scene of the crime. One of them said: “If there are no
hounds, send to camp for old Du Chien. He is better than any dog.”
The remark was so singular that I asked: “What do you mean by saying
‘He is better than any dog’?”
“I mean that he can follow the trail by the scent better than any
hound I ever saw, and I have seen hundreds of them.”
“Is that a mere camp story,” said I, “or do you know it of your own
knowledge?”
“I know it myself, sir,” said the soldier. “I have seen him smell a
man or his clothes, and then go blindfold into a whole regiment and
pick out that man by his scent. I have seen him pull a lock of wool
off a sheep, smell it good, and then go blindfold into the pen and
pick out that identical sheep from fifty others. I have known him to
smell the blanket a nigger slept in, and follow that darky four or
five miles by the scent of him through cotton, corn, and woods. He
is better than a dog.”
The man looked to be honest and intelligent; and while I could
hardly credit such an astounding and abnormal development of the
nasal power in a human being, there was nothing else to do; so I
told him to take my horse and his own, ride as quickly as possible
to camp, and bring old Du Chien with him.
Then we made a litter, and slowly and reverently we bore the corpse
of the murdered lady along the difficult road until we reached a
point to which it was possible to bring a carriage, in which we
placed her in charge of the horrified neighbors, who had by this
time collected at the plantation.
Captain Martas insisted on remaining with me and awaiting the coming
of Du Chien.
More than two hours elapsed before the soldier whom I had sent for
Du Chien, the Man-Dog, returned with that strange creature. He
surely deserved his name. He must have been six feet high, but was
so lank, loose, flabby, and jumbled-up that it was hard to even
guess at his stature. His legs were long and lank, and his hands
hung down to his knees. A bristly shock of red hair grew nearly down
to his eyebrows, and his head slanted back to a point, sugar-loaf
fashion. His chin seemed to have slid back into his lank, flabby
neck, and his face looked as if it stopped at the round, red,
slobbering mouth. His nose was not remarkably large, but the sloping
away of all the facial lines from it, as from a central point, gave
his nasal organ an expression of peculiar prominence and
significance. When he walked, every bone and muscle about him
drooped forward, as if he were about to fall face foremost and
travel with his hands and feet.
Briefly I explained what had happened, and thereupon Du Chien, who
seemed to be a man of few words, said: “Stay where you are, all of
you, for a minute.” Then he started off at his singular dog-trot
pace, and followed the edge of the water all the way around, just as
I had done, lightly, but with wonderful celerity. Then he came back
to us, looking much puzzled. I handed him the coarse, dirty
handkerchief which I had taken from the dead woman’s mouth, and Du
Chien immediately buried that wonderful nose of his in it, and
snuffed at it long and vigorously. Having apparently satisfied
himself, he removed the dirty rag from his face and said: “Nigger.”
“No,” said I, thinking of Celia, and looking Du Chien in his little,
round, deep-set eyes; “a mulatto.”
“No,” he answered, with quiet assurance; “not mulatto; nigger;
black, wool-headed, and old--a buck nigger.”
“What can you do?” said I.
“Wait a minute,” said Du Chien. Then he started off again to make
the circuit of the peninsula, but more slowly and deliberately than
at first. He threw his head from side to side, like a hound, and
smelled at every tree and shrub. He had got about half way around
when he reached a mighty tree that grew on the edge of the swamp,
leaning out over the water where it was narrowest and deepest, and
seemed to mingle its branches with the branches of another tree of a
similar gigantic growth that grew upon the other side. He walked up
to this tree, saying: “Nigger went up here!” and at once began to
climb. The inclination of the great trunk and the lowness of the
branches made the task an easy one. Almost instantly, Captain
Martas, I, and two or three soldiers followed Du Chien up the tree.
Du Chien had gone up some thirty feet into the dense foliage, when
all at once he left the body of the tree, and began to slide along a
great limb that extended out over the water, holding to the branches
around and above him until he got into the lateral branches of the
tree on the opposite side, and thence to the trunk of that tree,
down which he glided, and stood upon the opposite bank waiting for
us to follow. We did so as speedily as possible, and as soon as we
were safely landed by his side, Du Chien said: “Single file, all!”
and started off, smelling the trees and bushes as he went.
The spot at which we had descended seemed to be a hummock similar to
that on the other side, but less regular in its outline; and soon
the way by which Du Chien led us became more and more difficult and
impassable. Often it seemed that the next step would take us right
into the dark and sluggish water, but Du Chien, almost without
pausing at all, would smell at the leaves and branches and hurry on,
now planting his foot upon a clod just rising out of the water, now
stepping upon a fallen and half-rotted log, now treading a fringe of
more solid ground skirting the dreary lagoon, but going every moment
deeper and deeper into the most pathless and inaccessible portions
of the swamp.
For nearly two hours this strange man followed the trail, and we
followed him. At last we came to a considerable elevation of ground
under which opened a little V-shaped valley made by the water of a
branch which drained the high land into the swamp. This valley was
rather more than two acres in extent, and seemed to be a clearing.
But there was a thick-set growth of sweet gum, holly, and magnolia
across the opening toward the swamp, beyond which we could not see.
With quickened steps, and with many of the same signs of excitement
manifested by a hound when the trail grows hot, Du Chien followed
along this hedge-like line of underbrush, and at its farther end
stopped. There, within three feet of where the steep bank ran into
the water, which seemed to be of great depth, was an opening in the
hedge. He slipped cautiously through it, and we followed him in
silence. It was a little garden in the heart of the swamp, lying
between the hills and the water. At the apex of the V-shaped valley
was a miserable cabin with some fruit trees growing round about it.
We gazed upon the scene with profound astonishment.
“Do you know anything of this place, Captain Martas?” said I, in a
low tone.
“No,” said he; “several years ago one of my fieldhands, a gigantic
Abyssinian, was whipped and ran away to the swamp; I never followed
him, and have never seen him since, although every now and then I
heard of him by the report of the negroes on the plantation; I
suppose he has been living somewhere in the swamp ever since, and,
unless this is his home, I can not imagine how such a place came to
be here.”
“The nigger is there,” said Du Chien. “If there are a dozen of them
I can tell the right one by the smell,” and again he put the old
handkerchief to his nose.
“If it is old Todo,” said Captain Martas, “he is a powerful and
desperate man, and we had better be cautious.”
We formed a line, and slowly and cautiously approached. We had got
within ten or twelve feet of his door, when we saw a gigantic,
half-clad negro spring from the floor, gaze out at us an instant
with fierce, startled eyes, and then, with a yell like that of some
wild beast roused up in its lair, he seized an axe which stood just
at the door, and, whirling it around his head with savage fury,
darted straight at Captain Martas. It seemed to me that the huge,
black form was actually in the air, springing toward the object of
its hatred and fear, when one of the soldiers sent a ball from his
revolver crushing through old Todo’s skull. With a savage, beastly
cry, the huge bulk fell headlong to the earth.
“It is a pity,” said Martas; “I wished to burn the black devil
alive.”
At that instant Du Chien cried out: “Look there!” And extending his
arm toward the top of the ridge, he started off at full speed. We
all looked up and saw Celia flying for dear life toward the forest
of the high ground behind the cabin, and we joined in the chase. It
was perhaps forty yards up the slope to the highest part, and about
the same distance down the other side to the water’s edge. Just as
we got to the crest, Celia, who had already reached the water’s
edge, leaped lightly into a small canoe and began to ply the paddle
vigorously, and with a stroke or two sent the frail bark gliding
swiftly away from the shore, while she looked back at us with a
wicked smile. In a moment more she would be beyond our reach, and
the soldier who had shot Todo leveled his fatal revolver at her
head. But Captain Martas knocked the weapon up, saying, in a voice
choked with emotion: “No, no! let the girl go! She is my daughter.”
Swiftly and silently the slight canoe swept away over the dark
waters of the great, black swamp, now hidden in the shadow, now a
moment glancing through some little patch of sunlight, always
receding farther and farther, seen less often, seen less distinctly
every moment, and then seen no more.
THE AMATEUR REVOLUTIONIST
By John Fleming Wilson
If you should see bronzed men or men with soldierly bearing
frequenting a certain office in a small street in San Francisco, and
if you knew who the men were or what they represented, you could
predict to a nicety the next Central American revolution, its
leaders, and its outcome. That is because San Francisco is the place
where everything commences, and many have their end in the way of
troubles in the “sister republics.”
Three years ago the present government of Guatemala missed overthrow
by just a hair. As the man who had been financing the insurrection
said bitterly when the bottom fell out: “If it weren’t for women
there’d be no revolutions, and if it weren’t for a woman every
revolution would be successful.” He said this to the man who knows
more about troubles political where there’s money and fighting than
any other man in the world. This man nodded his head with a smile
not often seen on his spare face. The financier didn’t like the
look, and he growled some more: “They might at least have let me
hold the government up for my expenses before calling the whole
business off. I could have got everything back and interest on my
venture.”
The other man kept on smiling. “That’s the way you fellows look at
it. If you can’t win, sell out at a good price. But that don’t win
in the long run. One woman can spoil the scheme.”
Two years before this a young woman landed from the Pacific Mail
steamer _City of Para_, and registered at the Palace as from
Mazatlan. She had a little maid who giggled and talked Mexican, some
luggage with Vienna and Paris hotel labels over it, and the manner
of a deposed queen. She signed herself as “Srta Maria Rivas.”
In due time Señorita Rivas left the hotel for quiet lodgings on
Vallejo Street. But before she disappeared from the court, a
gentle-mannered old man, with knotty hands, called and introduced a
companion. “This is the young man I spoke to your excellency about.
I present Señor Thomas Vincent.” Then the gray-haired man slipped
away, and Thomas Vincent was left looking down into the dark face of
Maria Rivas. He did not know why he was there, nor who she was, nor
even the name of the man who had introduced him. But he was not
sorry.
She let him stand while she glanced him over. Vincent drew himself
up at her somewhat insolent manner, and was rewarded by a smile.
“Will you accept an invitation to supper to-night if I press you
very hard?” she asked him in smooth English.
Vincent turned his eyes about the court. Then he looked down at her
again, and nodded curtly. “Certainly, madam.” He flushed, and went
on, “But I failed to catch your name. I am awfully embarrassed.”
She got to her feet, and held out a slender hand. “I am Miss Mary
Rivas,” she said, quietly. “My father was formerly the president of
Honduras. I went to school at Bryn Mawr, and I met your sister
there. That’s why, when I found you were in San Francisco, I asked
to have you brought and introduced.”
Vincent looked at her very soberly, almost pityingly. Then he
offered her his arm, and they went into the supper-room, where
everybody turned to watch their progress, knowing neither of them.
When she removed to the flat on Vallejo Street, Miss Mary Rivas told
Vincent to come and take the first dinner with her. “We’ll christen
the new place,” she said gayly, “and, besides, I hope you’ll find
that I’m really American and can cook.”
That night at nine o’clock when the Mexican maid had departed
giggling to the kitchen, Vincent’s hostess leaned forward over the
table at which they sat, and rested her elbows on it. Her bare arms
framed her face in a sudden way that took Vincent’s heart out of its
regular beat. He leaped to his feet when Maria Rivas, dropping her
head, burst into a torrent of sobs, her white shoulders heaving as
her agony got the better of her.
As he stood there biting his lips she threw back her head and darted
up and to the window. He heard her moan, as if she saw and heard
something too awful to comprehend. He walked over and stood back of
her till she swung round, and he saw the tear-stained face relax and
the swimming eyes close. He carried her to the table, and laid her
down across it, and rubbed her hands. Then the maid came in, still
giggling hysterically, and together they revived her until she sat
up between Vincent’s arms and slid from the big table to the floor.
Vincent sent the astonished maid out by a gesture of command.
“Now, what’s the matter?” he demanded, hoarsely. “If you’re in
trouble tell me.”
She panted before him. “It was what I remembered,” she replied. “How
can I forget?”
“After I had been five years in the States papa sent for me to meet
him in Colon. I got off the steamer, and he was waiting on the
wharf. I knew he would do it just that way. He put on his glasses
with both hands and looked at me as if he were very glad, and oh! I
loved it, for it was just like it was when I was a little girl and
ran into the big room.
“But trouble came in Panama, and papa thought we’d better come up to
San Francisco. ‘I’ve been so busy down here one way and another,’ he
said, ‘that I’m always suspected of conspiracy. Your mother is dead,
and the fun of life is out of it. We will live peaceably as befits
an old man and his daughter.’”
Vincent’s voice broke in on her story. “When was this?”
“Five years ago. And everything went all right till we got to
Amapala. There a friend of papa’s came on board and showed me a
paper. It said papa was not to be allowed to land in Honduras, as he
was plotting an insurrection. He put on his glasses to read it. When
he looked up at me, he said: ‘We shan’t see where your mother is
buried, nor the place where you were born.’ He shook hands with the
friend, and said nothing more.
“On the day we were at Ocos, in the afternoon, I saw the
_comandante_ come on the steamer with some soldiers. He said he
wanted to arrest papa, but that if papa came along willingly he
would not use force.
“‘I am under the American flag,’ papa said. ‘I know who has done
this. It would mean my death if I went with you.’ Suddenly I heard a
shot and then another. I hurried to papa’s room. Outside there were
two soldiers aiming into it. I saw papa sitting on his camp-stool
and his two revolvers were in his lap. He was hunting for his
glasses, but the chain had slipped down. He could not see to shoot.
One of the soldiers, after a long time, fired his gun again, and
father suddenly picked up his revolvers, and I cried out again. He
didn’t shoot, and I know now that he was afraid of hitting me. Then
he fell. The soldiers fired again and ran away, panting and yelling
to each other. I went in to papa, and he asked for his glasses,
sitting up on the floor very weakly. When I found them and gave them
to him, the blood was running very fast down his breast. He put on
his glasses with both hands, wrinkling up his forehead in the old
way, and looked at me very----He looked.... He said, ‘I am glad I
could see you, little one ... before I go.’ That was all.”
She went to the window and stayed there, immobile, while Vincent
walked up and down behind her. At last she turned around. “That was
five years ago. No one has done anything to punish them.”
Vincent, because she was suddenly to him the woman, did what every
man once in his life will do for one woman: he sacrificed his sense
of humor. With all seriousness he stiffened up. “It was under my
flag he was shot down. I’ve served under it. Give me another flag
for Guatemala and I’ll go down there and those murderers shall die
against a wall, with your flag flying over their heads, its shadow
wavering at their feet on the yellow sand.”
Maria Rivas, because she was the Woman in this case, understood
perfectly. “A revolution?” she said, very quietly. He bent over her
hand gravely and youthfully. His manner was confident, as if he saw
very clearly what was to be done and knew how to do it, not as if he
had promised a girl with tear stains on her cheeks to overturn a
government because of a murder one afternoon on a steamer in a
foreign port.
This was the beginning of the affair. Its continuation was in a
little town on the Guatemalan coast, where Vincent landed with a ton
of munitions of war, marked “Manufactures of Metal,” and thirty
ragged soldiers. A month later he had a thousand insurgents and
twenty tons of munitions, and his blood had drunk in the fever that
burns up the years in hours. The first thing Vincent did under its
spell was to march on Ocos and take it. When the town was his and
the _comandante_ in irons, the young man took out of his pocketbook
a little list of names, made out in Maria Rivas’s hand. He compared
this list with the list of prisoners, and ordered out a firing
squad. Half an hour later the shadow of the flag made by the Woman
in the Vallejo Street flat wavered over the sand on which lay six
men in a tangle. Generalissimo Thomas Vincent went out into the sun
and looked at the last postures of the six, and then out across the
brimming waters of the Pacific. A mail steamer lay out there in the
midst of a cluster of canoes, the American flag drooping from her
staff.
An Irishman in a major’s uniform came out of the cool of the
barracks and stopped beside Vincent. “Another week ought to see us
in the capital,” he said slowly. “But I don’t like this business,
general. These beggars don’t amount to anything. Why did you order
them shot?”
A barefoot girl of some ten years crept around the corner of the
sunbaked wall. She picked her way over the sand, darting hot glances
fearfully at the two officers. Suddenly she stooped over the crooked
body of one of the motionless ones. She tugged at the sleeve of a
shirt, and as the face turned slightly upward to her effort, she
fell to beating on the ground with both hands, and sobbed in the
heat, dry-eyed.
Vincent strode over to her, and gently picked her up. Her quick sobs
did not cease as he carried her into the shade, his own face drawn
and white. He looked over at the major, who stood gnawing on his
stubby mustache. He did not reply to the question until the major
repeated it angrily. “It was because ... they deserved it....”
Vincent stopped, and then went on, almost inaudibly, “God knows why
I did it, and then there’s ... the----” He stopped once more, for
the girl’s hard sobs had ceased, and her lithe hand had darted from
the folds of her scanty gown to the young general’s throat, and the
major saw him set the burden softly down, and then fall forward, the
blood pouring around the blade of a knife deep in his throat.
With an oath the major leaped over to him and lifted his head.
Vincent’s eyes looked clearly into his. Then the wounded man looked
over at the little girl, poised for flight, a dozen feet away. He
nodded at her with an air of absolute comprehension, and then died.
THE BLOOD OF A COMRADE
By Neil Gillespie
“A short, severe war is less cruel than a long drawn-out fight,”
said the captain, easily. “Of course it is! Everybody knows it! So
why do the people at home criticise us, and libel and court-martial
us because we use every means in our power to prevent further
rebellion?”
“They ought to be thankful we don’t use Spanish methods,” said
Wilcox, the junior member of the mess. He was only six weeks out of
his cadet gray, and a new arrival at Camp Chicobang.
The captain smiled, pleasantly. “No?” he said. “Haven’t we a
_reconcentrado_ system similar to theirs? Haven’t we a blockade?
We’re merely taking up affairs where they left them, and following
Spanish methods in our own way. When this rebellion began, we tried
to treat the natives as civilized creatures, but, thank heaven,
we’re learning sense at last.”
The subaltern flushed to the roots of his close-cropped hair. “Do
you mean to say that any measure, however cruel, is justifiable in
war?”
“About that,” said the captain, amused at the boy’s interest in a
subject which was a stale one to the rest of the mess. “This
business has got to be straightened out, and that’s exactly what you
and I are here for. War is wrong; therefore it is cruel and
brutalizing. ‘Benevolent assimilation’ talk is all rot, and as for
civilized warfare, there’s no such thing. The measures used are
adopted as circumstances arise, and must be cruel or barbarous, as
the necessity calls for.”
Wilcox was staring at him, half in horror, half in fascination. “And
men can talk that way in the twentieth century,” he murmured.
The captain smiled again. “The only way to carry on war with this
people is to do to them as they first did to us. As long as we spare
them, they’re going to think we’re weaklings, and grow bolder by
result. They haven’t any honor; you can’t treat them as white men.
Their own methods are what they expect, and their own methods are
the only means by which this fighting will ever be stopped. It may
involve an awful lot of suffering for non-combatants, but we can’t
help that. When the people cry out ‘Enough!’ then the insurgents
will lose their support and the rebellion will be at an end--for a
while.”
Wilcox was playing nervously with his fork, and biting his lips as
if to keep back words he would not speak. He was young, and his high
ideals of the calling he had chosen had made him blind to the hard
facts with which he was now brought face to face. It was impossible
to believe that his own countrymen--officers of the United States
army--could be so cruel, so barbarous. He did not care what the
captain said; bloody treatment must serve only to alienate this
struggling people. If the rebellion had once been handled
differently, what was the cause of this reversion to the savage? Had
the lust of blood so crazed the white men that they forgot their
race, their civilization, their upbringing? Wilcox pitied the
Filipinos; they, at least, were fighting for their liberty.
“By the way,” said the captain, “did any of you fellows hear that
the general expects to catch Luiz Maha, who killed our policeman
down at Binaran, and tried to murder the port commander?”
“Been wounded?” asked some one.
“No, but his wife had a baby recently, so he probably won’t move his
quarters so easily. They’ll shoot him on sight.”
“Well, I hope they see him soon,” said the medico. “He’s made more
trouble for us than any other _insurrecto_ in that part of the
island.”
A sudden sound of running feet was heard through the din of the rain
outside. The door of the mess-hall rasped open, and a dripping
figure appeared on the threshold.
“The colonel’s compliments to the commanders of K and O Troops, and
will they please report to him immediately? Outpost No. 2 has been
cut up by _insurrectos_, and Lieutenant Ellard and men at No. 4 have
been captured.”
* * * * *