At sunset that evening the regiments destined to embark with the
expedition commanded by General Vinton were paraded for inspection in
full marching order, while a dozen other commands less fortunate looked
enviously on. The day had been raw and chilly. The wind blew salt and
strong, sending the fog in dripping clouds sailing in at the Golden
Gate, obscuring all the bold northern shore, and streaming up the sandy
slopes and over the wide wastes south of Sutro Heights. Men who owned
overcoats were few and far between, so while the designated battalions
stood and shivered in the wet grass, the mass of spectators hovered
about in ponchos or wrapped in blankets, the down-turned brims of their
campaign hats dripping heavily and contributing much to the weird and
unmilitary look of the wearers. Officers had donned Mackintoshes and
heavy boots. Badges of rank, except in cases of those provided with the
regulation overcoat, were lost to sight. Only among the regulars and one
or two regiments made up from the National Guard were uniforms so
complete that in their foul-weather garb it was possible to distinguish
colonel from subaltern, staff sergeant from private.
In front of the guard-house at the Presidio a dozen cavalrymen armed
with the new carbine and dressed throughout for winter service, this
being San Francisco June, had formed ranks under command of a sergeant
and stood silently at ease awaiting the coming of the officer of the
day. The accurate fit of their warm overcoats, the cut of their trooper
trousers, the polish of their brasses and buttons, the snug, trim "set"
of their belts, all combined to tell the skilled observer that these
were regulars.
As such they were objects of interest and close scrutiny to the little
knots of volunteers who had sauntered in to pick up points. To the
former it looked odd and out of gear to see the forage-caps and broad
white stripes of commissioned officers mingling with the slouch hats and
ill-fitting nether garments of the rank and file.
It was too early in the campaign for "the boys" to have settled down to
realization of the subtle distinction between their status as soldiers
of the Nation and citizens of a sovereign State. To private A of the far
Westerners his company commander was still "Billy, old boy," or at best
"Cap.," save when actually in ranks and on drill or parade.
To the silently observant volunteer, on the other hand, it was just as
odd to note that when a gray-haired veteran sergeant, issuing from the
guard-house, caught sight of a trig, alert little fellow, with beardless
face and boyish features and keen, snapping dark eyes, hastening towards
him in the garb of a lieutenant of cavalry, the veteran was suddenly
transformed into a rigid statue in light blue, standing attention and at
the salute--a phenomenon that extracted from the infant officer only a
perfunctory touch of finger to cap visor and not so much as a glance.
How could the "boys" from far Nebraska be supposed to know that the
little chap had spent his whole life in the shadow of the flag, and had
many a time in baby days been dandled on the very arm that was now so
deferentially bent and uplifted in soldier homage? What was there in the
manner of the youngster to betray the fact that he dreaded old Sergeant
Rigney's criticism even more than that of his commanding officer?
Then came another phenomenon.
At a brief, curt "Sergeant, get out your prisoners," from the beardless
lips, there was instant fumbling of big keys and clanking of iron from
the hidden recesses of the guard-house.
The dismounted troopers sprang suddenly to attention. The guard split in
two at its middle, each half facing outward, marched half a dozen paces
away like the duellists of old days from the back to back position,
halted, faced front once more, and stood again at ease, with a broad gap
of a dozen paces between their inner flanks.
Into this space, shuffling dejectedly in some cases, stalking defiantly
in others, slinking, shivering, and decrepit in the case of two or three
poor wrecks of the rum fiend, a stream of humanity in soiled soldier
garb came pouring from the prison door and lined up under the eyes of
vigilant non-commissioned officers in front of the young lieutenant in
command.
There they stood, their eyes shifting nervously from group to group of
huddling spectators, their shoulders hunched up to their ears--the
riff-raff of the garrison--the few desperate, dangerous characters from
the surrounding camps, an uncouth, uncanny lot at any time, but looking
its worst in the drip of the floating fog-wreaths and the gloom and
despond of the dying day. The boom of the sunset gun from Alcatraz fell
sullenly on the ear even as the soft trumpets of the cavalry, close at
hand, began sounding the "Retreat." At its last prolonged note the sharp
crack of an old three-inch rifle echoed the report from Alcatraz, and
from the invisible, mist-shrouded top of the staff the dripping folds of
the storm-flag came flapping down in view, limp and bedraggled, and the
guard sprang again to attention as a burly, red-faced, hearty-looking
soldier, with a captain's insignia in loop and braid on the sleeves of
his overcoat, broke a way through the group of lookers-on and, barely
waiting for the salute and report of the young lieutenant commanding,
began a sharp scrutiny of the prisoners before him.
Down along the line he went, until at the fourth man from the left in
the front rank he stopped short. A bulky, thick-set soldier stood there,
a sullen, semi-defiant look about his eyes, a grim set to the jaws
bristling with a week-old beard of dirty black. Then came the snapping
colloquy.
"Your name Murray?"
"That's what they call me."
"What was your name before that?"
"Jim."
Whereat there was a titter in the ranks of prisoners. Some of the guard
even allowed their mouths to expand, and the groups of volunteers,
chuckling in keen enjoyment, came edging in closer.
Instantly the voice of the officer of the guard was heard ordering
silence, and faces straightened out in the twinkling of an eye.
The elder officer, the captain, grew a trifle redder, but he was master
of himself and the situation. It is with school-boys as with soldiers,
their master is the man whom pranks or impudence cannot annoy. The
officer of the day let no tone of temper into his next question. Looking
straight into the shifting eyes, he waited for perfect silence, and then
spoke:
"Jim what? I wish the name under which you served in your previous
enlistment."
"Never said I'd served before."
"No. You declared you had not. But I know better. You're a deserter from
the Seventh Cavalry."
The face under the shrouding campaign hat went gray white with sudden
twitch of the muscles, then set again, rigid and defiant. The eyes
snapped angrily. The answer was sharp, yet seemed, as soldiers say, to
"hang fire" a second.
"Never seen the Seventh Cavalry in my life."
The officer of the day turned and beckoned to a figure hitherto kept
well in the background, screened by the groups of surrounding
volunteers. A man of middle age, smooth shaven and stout, dressed in
business sack-suit, came sturdily forward and took position by the
captain's side.
At sight of the new-comer Murray's face, that had regained a bit of its
ruddy hue, again turned dirty white, and the boy lieutenant, eying him
closely, saw the twitch of his thin, half-hidden lips.
"Point out your man," said the captain to the new arrival.
The civilian stepped forward, and without a word twice tapped with his
forefinger the broad breast of Prisoner Murray and, never looking at
him, turned again to the officer of the day.
"What was his name in the Seventh?" asked the latter.
"Sackett."
The captain turned to the officer of the guard. "Mr. Ray," said he,
"separate Murray from the garrison prisoners and have him put in a cell.
That man must be carefully guarded. You may dismiss the guard, sir."
And, followed by the stranger, Captain Kress was leaving the ground when
Murray seemed to recover himself, and in loud and defiant voice gave
tongue,--
"That man's a damned liar, and this is an outrage."
"Shut up, Murray!" shouted the sergeant of the guard, scandalized at
such violation of military proprieties. "It's gagged you'll be, you
idiot," he added between his set teeth, as with scowling face he bore
down on the equally scowling prisoner. "Come out of that and step along
here ahead of me. I'll put you where shoutin' won't help." And slowly,
sullenly, Murray obeyed.
Slowly and in silence the groups of spectators broke up and sauntered
away as the last of the prisoners dragged back into the guard-house, and
the guard itself broke ranks and went within doors, leaving only the
sentry pacing mechanically the narrow, hard-beaten path, the sergeant,
and at the turn of the road, the young lieutenant whom Captain Kress had
addressed as Mr. Ray. This officer, having silently received his
superior's orders and seen to it that Murray was actually "behind the
bars," had again come forth into the gathering twilight, the gloaming of
a cheerless day, and having hastened to the bend from which point the
forms of the officer of the day and his associate were still faintly
visible, stood gazing after them, a puzzled look in his brave young
face.
Not yet a month in possession of his commission, here was a lad to whom
every iota of the routine of a lieutenant's life was as familiar as
though he had drawn the pay for a decade.
Born and bred in the army, taught from early boyhood to ride and shoot,
to spar and swim, spending his vacation in saddle and his schooldays in
unwilling study, an adept in every healthful and exhilarating sport,
keen with rifle and revolver, with shotgun and rod, with bat and
racquet, with the gloves and Indian clubs, the nimblest quarter-back and
dodger, the swiftest runner of his school, it must be owned that Mr.
Sanford Ray was a most indifferent scholar. Of geography, history, and
languages he had rather more than a smattering because of occasional
tours abroad when still at an impressionable age. Yet Sandy "took more
stock," as he expressed it, and "stawk," as he called it, in Sioux and
the sign language than he did in French or German, knew far more of the
Rockies and Sierras than he did of the Alps, studied the European
cavalry with the eye of an accomplished critic, and stoutly maintained
that while they were bigger swells and prettier to look at, they could
neither ride nor shoot to compare with the sturdy troopers of his
father's squadron.
"As to uniforms," said Sandy, "anybody could look swagger in the lancer
and huzzar rig. It takes a man to look like a soldier in what our
fellows have to wear."
It wasn't the field garb Sandy despised, but the full dress, the blue
and yellow enormity in which our troopers are compelled to appear.
It had been the faint hope of his fond parents that Master Sandy would
grow up to be something, by which was meant a lawyer, an artist,
architect, engineer,--something in civil life that promised home and
fortune. But the lad from babyhood would think of nothing but the army
and with much misgiving, in Sandy's fifteenth year, his father shipped
him to Kentucky, where they were less at home than in Kansas, and gave
him a year's hard schooling in hopes of bracing up his mathematics.
Sandy was wild to go to West Point, and at the bottom of his heart Major
Ray would have rejoiced had he thought it possible for Sandy to pull
through; but ruefully he minded him how hard a task was his own, and how
close he came to failure at the semi-annual exams. "Sandy hates Math.
even more than I did," said he to Marion, his devoted wife. "It was all
I could do to squirm through when the course was nowhere near as hard as
it is to-day, so don't set your heart on it, little woman."
The appointment was not so hard to get, for Major Billy had a host of
friends in his native State, and an old chum at the Point assured him he
could coach young Sandy through the preliminary, and indeed he did.
Sandy scraped in after six months' vigorous work, managed to hold his
own through the first year's tussle with algebra and geometry, which he
had studied hard and faithfully before, was a pet in his class, and the
pride and joy of his mother's and sister's heart in yearling camp, where
he blossomed out in corporal's chevrons and made as natty and active a
first sergeant as could be found while the "furlough class" was away.
But the misery began with "analytical" and the crisis came with
calculus, and to the boy's bitter sorrow, after having been turned back
one year on the former and failing utterly on the latter, the verdict of
the Academic Board went dead against him, and stout old soldiers thereon
cast their votes with grieving hearts, for "Billy Ray's Boy" was a lad
they hated to let go, but West Point rules are inexorable.
So too were there saddened hearts far out on the frontier where the
major was commanding a cavalry post in a busy summer, but neither he nor
Marion had one word of blame or reproach for the boy. Loving arms, and
eyes that smiled through their sorrow, welcomed him when the little chap
returned to them. "Don't anybody come to meet me," he wrote. "Just let
mother be home." And so it was settled.
He sprang from the wagon that met him at the station, went hand in hand
with his father into the hall, and then, with one sob, bounded into
Marion's outstretched arms as she stood awaiting him in the little army
parlor.
The major softly closed the door and with blinking eyes stole away to
stables. There had been another meeting a little later when Marion the
second was admitted, and the girl stole silently to her brother's side
and her arms twined about his neck. Her love for him had been something
like adoration through all the years of girlhood, and now, though he was
twenty and she eighteen, its fervor seemed to know no diminution. They
had done their best, all of them, to encourage while the struggle
lasted, but to teach him that should failure come, it would come without
reproach or shame.
The path to success in other fields was still before him. The road to
the blessed refuge of home and love and sympathy would never close.
It was hard to reconcile the lad at first. The major set him up as a
young ranchman in a lovely valley in the Big Horn Range, and there he
went sturdily to work, but before the winter was fairly on the country
was rousing to the appeals of Cuba, and before it was gone the Maine had
sunk, a riddled hulk, and the spring came in with a call to arms.
Together with some two hundred young fellows all over the land, Sanford
Ray went up for examination for the vacant second lieutenancies in the
army, and he who had failed in analytical and calculus passed without
grave trouble the more practical ordeal demanded by the War Department,
was speedily commissioned in the artillery, and, to his glory and
delight, promptly transferred to the cavalry.
Then came the first general break up the family had really known, for
the major hurried away to Kentucky to assume command of the regiment of
volunteers of which he had been made colonel. Billy, junior, a lad of
barely seventeen, enlisted at Lexington as a bugler in his father's
regiment, and swore he'd shoot himself if they didn't let him serve. The
Kentuckians were ordered to Chickamauga, the young regular to the
Presidio at San Francisco, and Mrs. Ray, after seeing her husband and
youngest son started for the South, returned to Leavenworth, where they
had just settled down a week before the war began, packed and stored the
household furniture, then, taking "Maidie" with her, hurried westward to
see the last of her boy, whose squadron was destined for service at
Manila.
The lieutenant, as they delighted in calling him, joined them at Denver,
looking perfectly at home in his field uniform and perfectly happy. They
left Maidie to spend a week with old army friends at Fort Douglas, and
as soon as Sandy was settled in his new duties and the loving mother had
satisfied herself the cavalry would not be spirited away before July,
she accepted the eager invitation of other old friends to visit them at
Sacramento, and there they were, mother and daughter, again united this
very raw and foggy evening, when Mr. Ray, as officer of the guard, stood
at the bend of the roadway east of the Presidio guard-house, gazing
after the vanishing forms of Captain Kress and the burly stranger in
civilian clothes, and wondering where on earth it was he had seen the
latter before.
So engrossed was he in this that it was only when a second time
addressed that he whirled about and found himself confronting a tall and
slender young officer, with frank, handsome blue eyes and fine,
clear-cut face, a man perhaps five years his senior in age and one grade
in rank, for his overcoat sleeve bore the single loop and braid of a
first lieutenant.
He was in riding boots and spurs, as Ray noted at first glance, and
there behind him stood an orderly holding the horses of both.
"Pardon me. I am Lieutenant Stuyvesant of General Vinton's staff. This
is the officer of the guard, I believe, and I am sent to make some
inquiry of a prisoner--a man named Murray."
"We have such a man," said Ray, eying the newcomer with soldierly
appreciation of his general appearance and not without envy of his
inches. "But he's just been locked in a cell, and it will take an order
from the officer of the day to fetch him out--unless you could see him
in there with other prisoners within earshot."
"Not very well," answered Stuyvesant, looking curiously into the dark
eyes of the youngster. "Perhaps I'd better see the officer of the day at
once."
"You'll find him at the club. He's just gone in," said Ray, mindful of
the fact that this was the captain's time for a cocktail, and with a
courteous salute the aide-de-camp hastened away.
In five minutes he was back with a pencilled scrawl from Kress to the
effect that Lieutenant Stuyvesant was to be permitted to interview the
prisoner Murray outside the guard-house, but sentries must be placed to
prevent escape.
Quickly young Ray called out the corporal and two men, warned them of
the duty demanded, stationed them up and down the road and opposite the
guard-house, but just out of ear-shot, ordered the prisoner brought
forth, and then, leaving Stuyvesant standing at the post of Number One,
stepped a dozen yards away into the mist.
A minute later out came the sergeant, marshalling Murray after him, a
sentry at his heels. Then in the gathering darkness the tall officer and
the short, thick-set soldier met face to face, and the latter recoiled
and began glancing quickly, furtively about him.
Just how it all happened Ray could never quite tell. The light was now
feeble, the lamps were only just beginning to burn. There was a moment
of low-toned talk between the two, a question twice repeated in firmer
tone, then a sudden, desperate spring and dash for liberty.
Like a centre rush--a charging bull--the prisoner came head on straight
to where young Ray was standing, heedless of a yell to halt, and in less
time than it takes to tell it, the lithe little athlete of West Point's
crack football team had sprung and tackled and downed him in his tracks.
Biting, cursing, straining, the big bully lay in the mud, overpowered
now by the instant dash of the guard, while their bantam officer, rising
and disgustedly contemplating the smear of wet soil over his new
overcoat, was presently aware of Stuyvesant, bending forward, extending
a helping hand, and exclaiming:
"By Jove, but that was a neat tackle! You must have been a joy to _your_
team. What was it?"
"West Point--last year's."
"And may I ask--the name?"
"My name's Ray," said Sandy with beaming smile, showing a row of even,
white teeth under the budding, dark mustache, and Stuyvesant felt the
warm blood surging to his forehead, just as it had before that day in
the general's tent.
"I think I should have known that," he presently stammered. "It was Miss
Ray who so skilfully treated those poor fellows burned out on our train.
I suppose you heard of it."
"Why, yes," answered the youngster, again curiously studying the face of
his tall visitor. "Then it was you she--I heard about. Wish I weren't on
duty. I'd be glad to have you over at my quarters or the club."
"I wish so too, and yet I'm lucky in finding you here, since"--and here
Stuyvesant turned and looked resentfully towards the bedraggled figure
of Murray, now being supported back to the cells--"since that fellow
proved so churlish and ungrateful. He's all wrath at being put behind
the bars and won't answer any questions."
"What else could he expect?" asked Ray bluntly. "He's a deserter."
"A deserter!" exclaimed Stuyvesant in surprise. "Who says so?"
"Captain Kress, officer of the day, or at least a cit who came with him
to identify him. They say he skipped from the Seventh Cavalry."
At this piece of information Mr. Stuyvesant whirled about again in added
astonishment. "Why," said he, "this upsets--one theory completely. I
declare, if that's true we're all at sea. I beg pardon," he continued,
but now with marked hesitancy--"you know--you've heard, I suppose,
about--Foster?"
"What Foster?"
"Why, the recruit, you know, the one we lost at Port Costa," and the
blue eyes were curiously and intently studying the face of the younger
soldier, dimly visible now that the guard-house lamps were beginning to
glow.
"I knew there was a recruit missing, and--seems to me that was the
name," answered Ray.
"And--didn't you know who he was--that it was--pardon me, the man
who--lived near you--had a ranch----"
"Great Scott! You don't mean Wally Foster! _He_ enlisted and in the
cavalry? Well, I'm----" And now Mr. Ray's merriment overcame him. "I
never thought there was that much to Wally. He was a lackadaisical sort
of a spook when I saw him. What possessed him to enlist? He's no stuff
for a soldier."
Stuyvesant hesitated. That letter of old Colonel Martindale's was shown
him in confidence. But Ray's next impetuous outburst settled it.
"Oh, by Jove! I see it,--it's----" And here the white teeth gleamed in
the lamplight, for Mr. Ray was laughing heartily.
"Yes? It's what?" smiled Stuyvesant sympathetically.
"It's--my sister, I reckon," laughed Ray. "She once said she wouldn't
marry outside of the army, and he heard it."
"Oh,--did she?" said Stuyvesant reflectively, and then he was silent.