Two general officers were eye-witnesses to that river crossing; they
chatted about it over the cable with the government at Washington. Major
Falkins, too, who had conceived the plan and crossed in the first barge,
before the mortar got the exact range of the loop-holed breast-works,
was also mentioned in these despatches. Later, both the major and
corporal were given the Medal of Honor, and Newt became Sergeant
Spooner, whereat the Deacon, now battalion sergeant-major, patted him
approvingly on the back. But fate sometimes indulges in satiric
contrasts. One afternoon, when the rush on a trench was over, and had
been so mild an affair that the men felt like a fire company turning out
to a false alarm, the last straggling volley from the routed enemy
dropped both the major and the new sergeant in the stubble.
Newt's hurt was a shattered arm, but the superior officer had an ugly
hole torn through one lung, over which the field surgeons shook their
heads and whispered things about grave complications. Both were jolted
back in wagons to the railroad.
Sergeant Spooner knew that his trouble was simply a matter of hospital
inactivity and waiting, but in Manila, as in the field, surgeons talked
anxiously about the battalion chief. Every day an orderly from division
headquarters clattered up to the hospital to inquire after his health,
and the ladies who had followed their soldier husbands as far as Manila
sent flowers. It was finally decided that Major Falkins could only
complete his recovery, if at all, in a more temperate climate, and so he
was invalided back to the States. Newton did not know he was gone until
the transport had sailed, and, when a hospital orderly brought the news,
he said nothing, though his face set itself as he gazed at the whitewash
of the ward wall, and sniffed the antiseptic odor of carbolic acid.
There were days of convalescence when with his arm in a splint the
mountain boy wandered about the town, which he had, until now, had so
little opportunity to investigate. Each day he would stroll to the north
bank of the Pasig River, where it cut the city in half, and wander among
the strange many-colored sights and pungent reeks of the Chinese bazaars
in the _Escolta_. If these explorations brought him any sense of
wonderment or interest, it was denied expression in his brooding eyes.
Sometimes he would cross the ancient stone bridge, and wander at random
into the walled Plaza de Manila, which had been the town of three
hundred years ago. Late afternoon usually found him on the _paseo_ along
the bay, and there, with the tepid water heaving drowsily at his front,
he would lean until darkness fell, thinking of two things. Somehow, the
face of "Clem's gal" rose often and insistently into his reflections,
and the set of his jaw slackened almost to a smile. Then the thought of
his old grudge would come, and the jaw muscles would stiffen again,
crowding out the softness.
The grip of the service was strong upon him, and he could salute his
superior without a wince, and stand as respectfully at attention as any
other of his comrades; but he knew that this was only because he had
learned to dissociate the personal self from the military self. His
hatred and the resolve born of it were undying. Generations of Spooners
had made a virtue of hating until it coursed as an instinct with their
blood. He knew now that simply to kill Henry Falkins would be no revenge
at all. True punishment must involve the torture of dread, and for the
major death would fail to attain that purpose. He must, therefore,
devise something more exquisitely painful, and now, having leisure for
reflection, he let his mind run on ways and means.
The Islands are not a good place for one to brood upon a fixed idea. On
every transport he saw men, backward-bound, whose faces wore the imprint
of melancholia and morbid derangements; men who were climate-mad.
Yet, the sergeant had another idea at the back of his head to which he
never referred, and while he was waiting to be sent back to his regiment
he might often have been seen sitting on one of the paseo benches, deep
in the study of a spelling book, or arithmetic.
While these things were going on in Luzon, Henry Falkins was fast coming
back to health. This was natural enough, for each morning the breeze
stirred the chintz curtains of his window in the old mansion near
Winchester, and the breeze was freighted with the heavy sweetness of
honey-suckle. Each morning as he came down to breakfast, he would meet
on the old colonial stairway a girl whose eyes sometimes danced
mischievously and sometimes deepened into sweet serenity. Then in the
dining-room, where Jouett portraits of men in blue and buff gazed down,
this girl would pour his coffee from the old silver pot that these same
ancestors had brought out of Virginia. And the colonel would fall
pleasantly into reminiscences of days when he, too, wore a uniform,
though it was gray, and rode with Morgan's men.
But there was a better medicine than that for Henry Falkins: the
medicine of joy. Sundry preparations were going forward in the house.
Dress-makers were working like beavers, because when the major had
recovered sufficiently to return to the Philippines, he was not going
alone. There was to be a wedding in the meantime. The girl had been down
to "Bloody Breathitt," and stood with him on a high place in the hills.
She had breathed deep with appreciative delight as she gazed off beyond
the crests of their wooded slopes, where the patriarchal pines and oaks
stood sentinel over the valleys. And there she had ridden the trails
tirelessly, and the rude mountain folk had treated her like a young
queen come from another land, because, with her sesame of graciousness,
she had won her way into the sealed reserve of their hearts.
Together, the two had gathered the blossoms from the rhododendron, and
down in shaded recesses where the waters whispered over mossy rocks and
the elder-fringed forests closed in until only slender threads of
sunshine filtered through, they had gathered ferns and been children
together.
At last came the day when they knelt down and rose together from
cushions before an improvised altar in the wide hall, and the colonel
led them all to the wainscoted dining-room. There, in a vintage that had
lain for a generation in the cobwebbed sleep of the cellar, both the old
man from the mountains and the old man from the bluegrass toasted
them--"Even if," as the colonel chortled, "the youngster is a Yankee
soldier."
When the journey across the continent ended, they had lazy days at sea.
As Henry Falkins gazed at his wife, panama-hatted, white-clad, with the
Pacific winds stirring the one curl that, in persistent truancy, escaped
its confinement to trail across one eye, he wondered if she were really
not too delectable a vision to be real. And his brother officers seemed
to think so, too, so that she reigned on the quarter-deck.
* * * * *
But, if the testimony of so astute an observer as General Sherman is to
be accepted, war is not unbroken honeymoon, and in the Islands in 1900
the general's monosyllabic descriptive was more applicable. At least,
that was true in certain provinces, where the orders of _El Presidente_
were being carried into effect with ardor and pertinacity. Those orders
were to disperse, live outwardly as _Americanistas_, and under the
semblance of peace to harry, sting and annoy the army of occupation. The
seventy thousand troops now in the Islands were no longer marching and
bivouacking as armies, but, "split in a thousand detachments," were
scattered into garrisons from the China Sea to the Pacific.
Over beyond the mountains and across the level plantation lands of Nueva
Ecija lay a town from whose center radiated many meager _barrios_ and
villages. It was a town with a small stone church, from whose teetering
cross one arm had been shot away.
That church had a line of graves--inside its walls, with stones
identically alike--and a history. Here, for almost a solid year, a
garrison numbering at the outset fifty Spanish soldiers had held out
with heroism against a swarming horde of Insurgents equipped with
artillery. The town bore many _recuerdos_ of that long and dogged fight.
The walls of the church showed them in disfiguring scars, like those on
the face of a man who has been mercilessly pitted by small-pox. The
ruins of nipa houses showed them in fallen roof-trees and gaping
breeches. The even ranks of gravestones, within the walls, bore eloquent
testimony in successive dates of death.
In long, underscoring lines of brutally strong trenches and
transverses, went still more of the record. How snugly and safely the
besiegers had burrowed into the ground, and swept and whipped the
starving garrison inside, was easy to read.
It was in this town with its church that Henry Falkins with his
battalion was ordered to "wait in heavy harness, on fluttered folk and
wild." The way thither lay over a hundred miles of plain and mountain,
and in that hundred miles, under the extremely capable eyes of Lacuna
and Paolo Tecson, the brown hornets were buzzing with extraordinary and
tireless stinging power.
The battalion would make the march with a mule train and an escort of
two extra companies, and when it was ensconced in the village which the
war-scarred church dominated, the escort would say farewell and return
to Manila. The extra companies would be picked up for the homeward
journey by a cruiser, which would meantime have steamed with supplies
around the north end of Luzon, through Batingtang Channel, and down the
Pacific coast. After that, from time to time other ships would come and
bring old mail, and look in to see that the garrison was still there and
on the job. It was not a place to take a bride, even though the bride
had crossed the Pacific to be with her husband and held determined views
on the subject of being left behind in her rooms at the Orient.
Possibly, Henry Falkins told her, she could follow later by sea.
For three days, the command, with its train of fifty mules pushed on
through a level country, well watered, and seemingly uninhabited. On the
fourth, it struck the mountains, and from that point crawled, scrambled
and panted. Up slopes steep and slippery with untrodden grass, where
hoofs and feet shot treacherously out, the column crept, until the mules
balked, and their burdens had to be transferred to human shoulders; a
half-dozen pack animals shot over cliff edges, and burst like balloons
in rocky gorges below.
Then, descending into a valley where the grass grew long and lush along
the waterways, and lay brownly parched a little distance back, the
column readjusted its impedimenta, and mended its pace. Sometimes the
heat over the grass simmered in misty waves, and the marching men
clamped their unshaven jaws, and set their eyes eastward. The eyes were
growing blue-circled and weary, and the infantrymen picked up each foot
with a sense of distinct and separate effort. Sometimes from the long
grass at the side broke an unwarned din of rifle-fire, as the "point"
ran into an ambuscade, and then the column closed up and in the merry
response of volleys for the moment forgot its weariness. Sometimes the
parched grass, kindled by unseen and hostile hands, burst into scorching
sheets of flame at the front, necessitating tedious detours. In this
fashion, at the end of ten days, they came to the town with the church,
and found the cruiser awaiting them. The escort returned at once, and
left the First Battalion of the 26th Regiment, United States
Volunteers, to attend to its knitting, with the Pacific Ocean in front
of it and the ragged mountains at its back.
There was much to be done, for not all of the command was to stay there.
In near-by towns smaller detachments under company officers were to
establish themselves and put the fear of God and the Eagle into
rebellious hearts. That these outlying factions might not be cut off
from headquarters, nerves of telegraph wires must be strung across the
hills and through the _bijuca_ tangles of the _bosque_. These lines
must, in places, follow bolo-cut tunnels through the jungle where the
air was hot and fetid; where one fought for breath and was blinded by
the streaming sweat, and where the stiffness of one's spine oozed out in
flaccid weariness. Also, it proved immensely diverting to the loyal
_amigos_ to creep out by night with a pair of wire-nippers and undo in a
moment what men had moiled through days to accomplish. When these wires
sputtered and fell dead it was usually a fairly good indication that
news of some fresh atrocity would finally percolate, and that a new
"punitive expedition" must fare forth.
And yet in the town itself, and even in the smaller garrisons clustered
about it, there was no overt act of rebellion--only ghastly news from
the hills and hinterland.
In these days, former top-sergeant Peter Spooner, now battalion
sergeant-major with the 26th Volunteers, became more than ever a force
in himself. The smattering of Spanish which he had picked up in old
Mexico had become a fluent stream. He was so valuable in a dozen ways
that the semi-clerical work of sergeant-major often fell to other hands,
while Black Pete was out on special detail. His scouting expeditions
were effective of such results that the name of the dark giant became
with the people of the enemy, as it had once been in the Kentucky
mountains, a word to conjure with. In short, Black Pete Spooner was such
a treasure of a "non-com" as gave his superiors food for mess-table
boasting.
"Spooner," declared his captain, "could command a battalion if called
on. He absorbs detail. He has even picked up the Morse code, and only
yesterday I found him relieving the signal-corps man at the key. That's
an example of his versatile efficiency."
In many scouting expeditions, Sergeant Newton Spooner likewise won for
himself the bitter hatred of the guerillas. These mountain men had, in
common with the enemy, the ability to become invisible, and often when
they were supposedly being stalked it was found that they were really
stalking.
So the days passed, and at last a steamer brought fresh supplies and
also Mrs. Henry Falkins, who would no longer be denied.