Vinton's fleet had reached Manila. A third expedition had coaled at
Honolulu and gone on its way. More transports were coming, and still
there lingered in this lovely land of sun and flowers--lingered for a
time 'twixt life and death--Vinton's stricken aide-de-camp, Lieutenant
Stuyvesant.
Of his brutal antagonist no trace had been found. The shrill cries of
the Kanaka boat-boy, supplementing the young officer's stentorian shout
for the police, had brought two or three Hawaiian star-bearers and
club-wielders to the scene of that fierce and well-nigh fatal struggle.
All they found was the gallant victim writhing in pain upon the dock,
his hand pressed to his side and covered with the blood that poured from
his wounds.
It was half an hour before a surgeon reached them, rowed in with the
general from the Vanguard. By that time consciousness had fled and,
through loss of the vital fluid, Stuyvesant's pulse was well-nigh gone.
They bore him to the Royal Hawaiian, where a cool and comfortable room
could be had, and there, early on the following morning, and to the care
of local physicians, the general was compelled to leave him.
With the brakeman to aid them, the police searched every nook and corner
of the Miowera, and without result. Murray, _alias_ Spence, _alias_
Sackett, fugitive from justice, could not be aboard that ship unless he
had burrowed beneath the coal in the bunkers, in which event the stokers
promised he should be shovelled into the furnaces as soon as discovered.
Every sailor's lodging in the town was ransacked, but to no purpose:
Murray could not be found.
For a fortnight Stuyvesant's fate was in doubt. Officers of the third
expedition could carry with them to Manila only the hope that he might
recover. Not until the ships of the fourth flotilla were sighted was the
doctor able to say that the chances were now decidedly in his favor.
He was lifted into a reclining chair the day of the flag-raising--that
pathetic ceremony in which, through tear-dimmed eyes, the people saw
their old and much-loved emblem supplanted by the stars and stripes of
their new hope and aspirations. He was sitting up, languid, pallid, and
grievously thin, when the tidings reached him that the transport with
six troops of the --th Cavalry among others had arrived, and the doctor,
with a quizzical grin on his genial face, informed his patient that some
Red Cross nurses were with the command, and that two very nice-looking
young women, in their official caps, aprons, and badges, were at that
moment inquiring at the office if they could not see the invalid officer
and be of some service to him.
Sore in body and spirit, wrathful at the fate that robbed him of a share
of the glory he felt sure awaited his comrades at Manila, Stuyvesant was
in no humor for a joke and plainly showed it. He gave it distinctly to
be understood that he needed no coddling of any kind and preferred not
to see the ladies, no matter what they belonged to. Not to put too fine
a point upon it, Mr. Stuyvesant said he didn't "wish to be bothered,"
and this was practically the reply that reached two very earnest,
kind-hearted young women, for the attendant, scenting the possible loss
of a big fee if he should be supplanted by superior attractions,
communicated the invalid's exact words to the Red Cross nurses, and they
went back, wounded, to their ship.
Stuyvesant's room was on the ground-floor in one of the outlying
cottages, and its Venetian blinds opened on the broad and breezy
veranda. It was far more quiet and retired than apartments in the main
building, the rooms overhead being vacant and the occupants of that
which adjoined his having left for San Francisco within a day or two of
his coming.
"I feel too forlorn to see anybody," was his explanation to the doctor.
"So don't let anybody in." But several officers from the transport got
leave to come ashore and take quarters at the Hawaiian. The rooms above
had to be given to them, and their resounding footsteps made him wince.
"There's two ladies to take this next-door room," said his garrulous
attendant that afternoon, and Stuyvesant thought opprobrious things.
"They'll be giggling and talking all night, I suppose," said he
disgustedly when the "medico" came in late that afternoon. "I wish you'd
move me, if you can't them."
The doctor went and consulted the head of the house. "Certainly," said
that affable Boniface. "If Mr. Stuyvesant is well enough to be carried
up one flight I can give him a larger, airier room with bath attached,
where he'll be entirely isolated. It was too expensive for our visitors
from the transports, but--I believe you said Mr. Stuyvesant--wouldn't
mind"--a tentative at which the doctor looked wise and sagely winked.
When that able practitioner returned to the cottage two young women with
Red Cross badges were seated on the veranda, just in from a drive,
apparently, and a dark-eyed little chap in the uniform of a subaltern of
the cavalry was with them. They had drawn their chairs into the shade
and close to the Venetian blinds, behind which in his darkened room
reclined the languid patient.
"That will drive him simply rabid," said the doctor to himself, and
prepared a professional smile with which to tell the glad tidings that
he should be borne forthwith to higher regions.
He had left Stuyvesant peevish, fretful, but otherwise inert, asking
only to be spared from intrusion. He found him alert, attent, eager, his
eyes kindling, his cheeks almost flushing. The instant the doctor began
to speak the patient checked him and bent his ear to the sound of soft
voices and laughter from without.
"I've fixed it all," whispered the medical man reassuringly. "We'll move
you in a minute--just as soon as I can call in another man or two," and
he started for the door, whereat his erratic patient again uplifted a
hand and beckoned, and the doctor tip-toed to his side and bent his ear
and looked puzzled, perturbed, but finally pleased. Stuyvesant said
that, thinking it all over, he "guessed" he would rather stay where he
was.
And then, when the doctor was gone, what did he do but take a brace in
his chair and bid the attendant go out and say to the officer on the
veranda, Lieutenant Ray, that Mr. Stuyvesant would be very glad to speak
with him if he'd be so kind as to come in, whereat the soft laughter
suddenly ceased.
There was a sound of light footsteps going in one direction and a
springy, soldierly step coming in the other. Then entered Mr. Sanford
Ray, with outstretched hands, and the attendant, following and peering
over his shoulder, marvelled at the sudden change that had come over his
master.
Three days later, when the City of Sacramento was pronounced ready to
proceed, and the officers and Red Cross nurses _en route_ to Manila were
warned to rejoin the ship, Lieutenant Stuyvesant "shook," so to speak,
his civil physician, persuaded the army surgeons with the fleet that a
sea-voyage was all he needed to make a new man of him, and was carried
aboard the Sacramento and given an airy stateroom on the upper deck,
vacated in his favor by one of the ship's officers,--consideration not
made public, but Claus Spreckles & Co., bankers, had never before
received such a deposit from this very able seaman in all the years he
had been sailing or steaming in and out of Honolulu harbor.
And now retribution overtook the invalid. The Red Cross had made a
marvellous name for itself in San Francisco, and was already organized
and doing wonders at Honolulu. Its ministrations had been gladly
accepted by the scores of officers and men among the volunteers, to whom
the somewhat bare and crude conditions of camp hospitals were doubtless
very trying. Women of gentlest birth and most refined associations
donned its badge and dress and wrought in ward, kitchen, or refectory.
It was a noble and patriotic purpose that inspired such sacrifice.
It was a joy to the embryo soldiery to be fed and comforted day by day
with the delicacies of the Red Cross tables; but there were military
magnates and martinets who dared to question the wisdom of such
preparation for the stern scenes of campaigning ahead of the volunteers,
and who presumed to point out to the officers of this great and
far-reaching charity that, while they were most grateful for such
dainties for the invalids of their command, the daily spectacle of
scores of lusty, hearty young heroes feasting at the tables of the Red
Cross, to the neglect of their own simple but sufficient rations,
prompted the query as to what the boys would do without the Red Cross
when they got into the field and couldn't have cake and pie and cream
with their coffee.
The Red Cross, very properly, took umbrage at such suggestions and
branded the suggesters as horrid. The Red Cross had done such widespread
good and was ready to do so much more that criticism of its methods was
well-nigh unbearable. And now that it had obtained the sanction of the
government to send out to Manila not only supplies and dainties of every
possible kind, but dozens of its members to serve as nurses to the sick
and wounded, it scored a triumph over rival organizations, notably the
Patriotic Daughters of America, whose vice-president, the austere Miss
Perkins, first bombarded the papers in vain protest and denunciation,
the Red Cross being her main objective, and with abuse of the commanding
officers in camp; then called in person on the same officers to demand
transportation to Manila with the next expedition.
The Red Cross held its head very high, and with reason. It ruffled its
feathers and resented any slight. It sometimes mistook courteous
protest against its lavish gifts to such soldiers as were in no wise
needy as vicious and unhallowed criticism, and occasionally--_only_
occasionally--it grievously enlarged and exaggerated alleged slights
received at the hands of luckless officials. And then even those soft
and shapely hands could develop cat-like claws, and the soothing
voices take on an acid and scathing intonation, and the eyes, so ready
to moisten with pity and sympathy at the sight of suffering, could
shoot spiteful little fires at the objects of such divine displeasure,
and poor Stuyvesant's petulant words, wrung from him in a moment of
exasperation and never intended to reach the fair band of sisters of
the Cross, were piled high with additions, impolitic, impolite,
discourteous, impudent, intolerable, yes, even profane and
blasphemous.
Eleven of the twelve Red Cross nurses, packed three in a room aboard the
Sacramento, swore they would not have anything to do with Mr.
Stuyvesant. The twelfth, the one soldier's daughter in the band, said
nothing at all.
"Well, now, Miss Ray, _don't_ you think it was most discourteous, most
ungentlemanly, in him to send such a message?" demanded a flushed and
indignant young woman, one of the most energetic of the sisterhood, as
they stood together on the promenade deck in the shade of the canvas
awnings, shunning the glare of the August sun.
"Are you sure such a message was sent?" was the serious reply.
"Sure? Why, _certainly_ he did! and by his own servant, too!" was the
wrathful answer. "Didn't he, Miss Porter?"
And Miss Porter, the damsel appealed to, and one of the two nurses who
sent in their message from the office, promptly assented. Miss Ray
looked unconvinced.
"Servants, you know, sometimes deliver messages that were never sent,"
she answered with quiet decision. "We have seen quite a little of that
in the army, and it is my father's rule to get all the facts before
passing judgment. My brother thought Mr. Stuyvesant's attendant
garrulous and meddlesome."
"But I asked him if he was sure that was what Mr. Stuyvesant said,"
persisted Miss Porter, bridling, "and he answered they were just the
very words."
"And still I doubt his having sent them as a message," said Miss Ray,
with slight access of color, and that evening she walked the deck long
with a happy subaltern and added to her unpopularity.
There were several well-informed and pleasant women, maids and matrons
both, in the little sisterhood, but somehow "the boys" did not show such
avidity to walk or chat with them as they did with Miss Ray. She sorely
wanted a talk with Sandy that evening, but the Belgic had come in from
'Frisco only six hours before they sailed and huge bags of letters and
papers were transferred from her to the Sacramento.
There were letters for Maidie and Sandy both,--several,--but there was
one bulky missive for him that she knew to be from her father, from
far-away Tampa, and the boy had come down late to dinner. They had seats
at the table of the commanding officer, a thing Maidie had really tried
to avoid, as she felt that it discriminated, somehow, against the other
nurses, who, except Mrs. Doctor Wells, their official head, were
distributed about the other tables, but the major had long known and
loved her father, and would have it so. This night, their first out from
Honolulu, he had ordered wine-glasses on the long table and champagne
served, and when dinner was well-nigh over, noticed for the first time
that Ray had turned his glass down.
"Why, Sandy," he cried impulsively, "it is just twenty-two years ago
this summer that your father made the ride of his life through the
Indian lines to save Wayne's command on the Cheyenne. Now, there are
just twenty-two of us here at table, and I wanted to propose his health
and promotion. Won't you join us?"
The boy colored to the roots of his dark hair. His eyes half filled. He
choked and stammered a moment and then--back went the head with the old
familiar toss that was so like his father, and through his set lips
Sandy bravely spoke:
"Can't, major. I swore off--to-day!"
"All right, my boy, that ends it!" answered the major heartily, while
Marion, her eyes brimming, barely touched her lips to the glass, and
longed to be on Sandy's side of the table that she might steal a hand to
him in love and sympathy and sisterly pride. But he avoided even her
when dinner was over, and was busy, he sent word, with troop papers down
between-decks, and she felt, somehow, that that letter was at the bottom
of his sudden resolution and longed to see it, yet could not ask.
At three bells, half-past nine, she saw him coming quickly along the
promenade-deck, and she stopped her escort and held out a detaining
hand.
"You'll come and have a little talk with me, won't you, Sandy?" she
pleaded. "I'll wait for you as long as you like."
"After I've seen Stuyvesant awhile," he answered hurriedly. "He isn't so
well. I reckon he must have overdone it," and away he went with his
springy step until he reached the forward end of the promenade, where he
tapped at the stateroom door. The surgeon opened it and admitted him.
His eyes were grave and anxious when, ten minutes later, he reappeared.
"Norris is with him," he said in low tone, as he looked down into the
sweet, serious, upturned face. "He shouldn't have tried it. He fooled
the doctors completely. I'll tell you more presently," he added, noting
that Mrs. Wells, with two or three of the band, were bearing down upon
him for tidings of the invalid, and Sandy had heard,--as who had
not?--the unfavorable opinions entertained by the sisterhood of his
luckless, new-found friend.
"The doctor says he mustn't be both--I mean disturbed--wants to get him
to sleep, you know," was his hurried and not too happy response to the
queries of the three. "Matter of business he wanted to ask me about,
that's all," he called back, as he broke away and dodged other
inquiries. Once in the little box of a stateroom to which he and a
fellow subaltern had been assigned, he bolted the door, turned on the
electric light, and took from under his pillow a packet of letters and
sat him down to read. There was one from his mother, written on her way
back to Leavenworth, which he pored over intently and then reverently
kissed. Later, and for the second time, he unfolded and read the longest
letter his father had ever penned. It was as follows:
"I have slipped away from camp and its countless interruptions and
taken a room at the hotel to-night, dear Sandy, for I want to have
a long talk with my boy,--a talk we ought to have had before, and
it is my fault that we didn't. I shrank from it somehow, and now
am sorry for it.
"Your frank and manful letter, telling me of your severe loss and
of the weakness that followed, reached me two days ago. Your
mother's came yesterday, fonder than ever and pleading for you as
only mothers can. It is a matter that has cost us all dear
financially, but, thanks to that loving mother, you were promptly
enabled to cover the loss and save your name. You know and realize
the sacrifices she had to make, and she tells me that you insisted
on knowing. I am glad you did, my boy. I am going to leave in your
hands the whole matter of repayment.
"A young fellow of twenty can start in the army with many a worse
handicap than a debt of honor and a determination to work it off.
That steadies him. That matter really gives me less care than you
thought for. It is the other--your giving way to an impulse to
drink--that fills me with concern. You come up like a man, admit
your fault, and say you deserve and expect my severe censure.
Well, I've thought it all over, Sandy. My heart and my arms go out
to you in your distress and humiliation, and--I have not one word
of reproach or blame to give you.
"For now I shall tell you what I had thought to say when your
graduation drew nigh, had we been able to master mechanics and
molecules and other mathematical rot as useful to a cavalry
officer as a binocular to a blind man, and that I ought to have
told you when you started out for yourself as a young _ranchero_,
but could not bring myself to it so long as you seemed to have no
inclination that way. Times, men, and customs have greatly changed
in the last forty or fifty years, my boy, and greatly for the
better. Looking back over my boyhood, I can recall no day when
wine was not served on your grandfather's table. The brightest
minds and bravest men in all Kentucky pledged each other day and
night in the cup that sometimes cheers and ofttimes inebriates,
and no public occasion was complete without champagne and whiskey
in abundance, no personal or private transaction considered
auspicious unless appropriately 'wet.'
"Those were days when our statesmen revelled in sentiment and
song, and drank and gambled with the fervor of the followers of
the races. I was a boy of tender years then, and often, with my
playmates, I was called from our merry games to join the gentlemen
over their wine and drain a bumper to our glorious 'Harry of the
West,' and before I went to the Point, Sandy, I knew the best, and
possibly the worst, whiskeys made in Kentucky,--we _all_ did,--and
the man or youth who could not stand his glass of liquor was
looked upon as a milksop or pitied, and yet, after all, respected,
as a 'singed cat,'--a fellow who owned that John Barleycorn was
too much for him, and he did not dare a single round with him.
"Then came the great war, and wars are always in one way
demoralizing. West Point in the early sixties was utterly unlike
the West Point of to-day, and no worse than a dozen of our
greatest colleges. The corps still had its tales and traditions of
the old time Fourth-of-July dinners at the mess hall, when
everybody made a dash for the decanters and drank everything in
sight. It was the only day in the year on which wine was served.
It was in my time the invariable custom for the superintendent to
receive the Board of Visitors on the day of their arrival at his
quarters and to invite the officers and the graduating class to
meet them, and to set forth, as for years had been the fashion at
Washington, wine and punch in abundance, and the very officers
detailed as our instructors would laughingly invite and challenge
the youngsters so soon to shed the gray and wear the blue to drink
with them again and again. I have seen dozens of the best and
bravest of our fellows come reeling and shouting back to barracks,
and a thoughtless set of boys laughing and applauding.
"I was stationed at the Point soon after graduation, and the men
who drank were the rule, not the exception. Social visits were
rarely exchanged without the introduction of the decanter. The
marvel is that so many were 'temperate in our meat and drink,' as
my father and grandfather used to plead when, regularly every
morning, the family and the negro servants were mustered for
prayers. At every post where I was stationed, either in the East
or where I was most at home,--the far frontier,--whiskey was the
established custom, and man after man, fellows who had made fine
records during the war, and bright boys with whom I had worn the
gray at the Point, fell by the wayside and were court-martialled
out of service.
"In '70 and '71 we had a Board that swept the army like a seine
and relegated scores of tipplers to civil life, but that didn't
stop it. Little by little the sense and manhood of our people
began to tell. Little by little the feeling against stimulant
began to develop at the Point. It was no longer a joke to set a
fledgling officer to taste the tempter--it was a crime. Four years
after I was commissioned we had only one total abstainer out of
some fifty officers at the mess, and he was a man whose life and
honor depended on it. Three years ago, when I went to see you,
there were dozens at the mess who never drank at all, and only
eight who even smoked. Athletics and rifle-practice had much to do
with this, I know, but there has gradually developed all over our
land, notably in those communities where the custom used to be
most honored in the observance, a total revulsion of sentiment.
"Quarter of a century ago, even among many gently nurtured women,
the sight of a man overcome by liquor excited only sorrow and
sympathy; now it commands nothing less than abhorrence. I and my
surviving contemporaries started in life under the old system.
You, my dear boy, are more fortunate in having begun with the new.
Among the old soldiers there are still some few votaries of
Bacchus who have to count their cups most carefully or risk their
commissions. Among those under forty our army has far more total
abstainers than all the others in the world, and such soldiers as
Grant, Crook, Merritt, and Upton, of our service, and Kitchener of
Khartoum, are on record as saying that the staying powers of the
teetotaller exceed those even of the temperate man, and staying
power is a thing to cultivate.
"As you know, I have never banished wine from our table, my boy.
Both your mother and I had been accustomed to seeing it in daily
use from childhood, yet she rarely touches it, even at our
dinners. But, Sanford, I sent John Barleycorn to the right about
the day your blessed mother promised to be my wife, and though I
always keep it in the sideboard for old comrades whose heads and
stomachs are still sound, and who find it agrees with them better
than wine, I never offer it to the youngsters. They don't need it,
Sandy, and no more do you.
"But you come of a race that lived as did their fellow-men,--to
whom cards, the bottle, and betting were everyday affairs. It
would be remarkable if you never developed a tendency towards one
or all of them, and it was my duty to warn you before. I mourn
every hour I wasted over cards and every dollar I ever won from a
comrade more than--much more than--the many hundred dollars I lost
in my several years' apprenticeship to poker. It's just about the
poorest investment of time a soldier can devise.
"Knowing all I do, and looking back over the path of my life,
strewn as it is with the wrecks of fellow-men ruined by whiskey, I
declare if I could live it over again it would be with the
determination never to touch a card for money or a glass for
liquor.
"And now, my own boy, let me bear the blame of this--your first
transgression. You are more to us than we have ever told you. You
are now your sister's guardian and knight, for, though she goes
under the wing of Mrs. Dr. Wells, and, owing to her intense desire
to take a woman's part we could not deny her, both your mother and
I are filled with anxiety as to the result. To you we look to be
her shield in every possible way. We have never ceased to thank
God for the pride and joy He has given us in our children. (You
yourself would delight in seeing what a tip-top little soldier
Will is making.) You have ever been manful, truthful, and, I say
it with pride and thankfulness unutterable, _square_ as boy could
be. You have our whole faith and trust and love unspeakable. You
have the best and fondest mother in the world, my son. And now I
have not one more word to urge or advise. Think and decide for
yourself. Your manhood, under God, will do the rest.
"In love and confidence,
"Father."
When Marion came tapping timidly at the stateroom door there was for a
moment no answer. Sandy's face was buried in his hands as he knelt
beside the little white berth. He presently arose, dashed some water
over his eyes and brows, then shot back the bolt and took his sister in
his arms.