At a place where they came upon the ashes of a dead fire, Henry Falkins
halted the command, and, accompanied by a lieutenant and Sergeant Newton
Spooner, undertook some investigations of his own. It was Sergeant
Spooner, led by an inborn instinct which became a compass in the woods,
who discovered the thing they sought. He returned in grim silence to the
officers, and led them to a small clearing in the _bijuca_ tangle.
There, roped upright to a tree, was a body wearing the uniform of a
first lieutenant of United States Infantry. Newt Spooner had found the
"memento." The dead man bore no bolo gashes, and the wound which had
disabled him had been only a bullet through one shoulder. Yet, as the
officers came near, they realized that he had not been dead when he was
placed here. He had stood up, lashed against a slender palm bole, and
died on his feet. Yet even that failed to account for the hideous twist
of acute agony frozen on the dead features. No ordinary torture would
have so stamped the dying visage of such a stoic. The large brown ants
were crawling everywhere, but the full meaning of their presence was to
pass unrealized until Newton Spooner attracted attention. He silently
led them closer and pointed to an amber smear about the lips and
nostrils of the dead man.
"Honey, sir," he said briefly, in a voice that rasped like a file; "wild
honey. They put that stuff in his nose and mouth, sir. The ants did the
rest."
The officers turned away, sickened, and after a moment Falkins ordered
briefly.
"Bring a burial detail, sergeant--and, sergeant," he added, as a vicious
note crept into the timbre of his utterance, "when we come up with these
fellows, we take no prisoners. You understand, no prisoners!"
For ten days after that, a company of United States Volunteers drove
their way through the mountains and _bosques_ of eastern Luzon,
with the hammer-blows of forced marches. Their faces were the bristling,
unshaven visages of half-wild men, and their eyes bore the inky
cancellation-marks of a fatigue which, in such climates, is courtship of
death. They had been bearing a noonday steam-like heat that parboiled
them and wasted them in floods of sweat. They had marched and slept in
wet khaki when sudden rains drenched the land and the jungle simmered
afterward. A demoniacal desire for a reckoning in full with one Jose
Rosario sustained them. The chase had resolved itself into a hellish
adaptation of hare and hound, for always ahead of them lay clews and
information, and evidences of recent departures. Always, the wily
guerilla was just out of grasping and crushing distance. In lonely
villages, they found marks of his recent occupancy--with prisoners. In
the hills, they found the ashes of his fires, but himself they never
found. And, as he taunted them, they followed, "as dust-blown devils
go": followed with an artificial and superhuman endurance engendered of
mountain hate and an unassuaged thirst for vengeance. In many brains
queer nightmare shapes rose and had to be brushed aside with a conscious
effort, and in many veins the blood ran hot and feverish. The pursuit
had carried them in a long circle like the flight of a fox, and brought
them back to a point not so many miles from where they had entered the
hills, but as far as ever from their quarry. The pursuing force was too
large. The rest of the way they would rake _bosque_ and hill in
scattered segments, each acting for itself and seeking to fall upon the
enemy while he watched the decoy of the largest detachment.
Major Falkins and a dozen men, including First Sergeant Newton Spooner,
were working their way through a jungle which seemed impervious to human
progress. For days they had been so working. Step by step they moved
lethargically, and in single file. No military order of formation can be
kept unbroken where men are weaving their tired bodies in and out
through a matted growth of rank _bijuca_ and jungle tangles. Besides,
they moved as men half-asleep and indifferent to consequences, dragging
leaden feet. The course they had taken had yielded never a sign, never
an indication that they had chosen wisely. It led them through an
unpeopled country where the valleys were mosquito-infested and
malaria-ridden, and where drenching rains brought chill to their aching
bones. They forced themselves forward with their hair matted and their
brains dull. Clouds of mosquitoes moved with them. They were steadfast
and resolute men, but they were also half-insane.
In this fashion, they came to a small, ravine-like channel, which for a
little way ran in the direction they wished to go. Through it they could
walk upright without fighting vines and cane. Experience had taught the
danger of easy ways, but weariness had overcome caution, and for a
furlong they plodded silently.
Ahead of them, the dry stream-bed, which was giving them momentary
comfort as a roadway, twisted at an angle. Even in their lethargy they
observed one rule of military caution. They walked in file with an
interval of several yards between each two. Eleven of them had passed
out of sight around the turn. Major Falkins, who was number twelve, was
just turning the point, and behind him trailed one other. It was
Sergeant Spooner, who rarely lagged in the rear. Then the heavy
stillness broke into the old familiar thunder, and four men lurched
forward and crumpled down on their faces, as useless henceforth to the
United States of America as burst bubbles.
"Back here, boys!" yelled Falkins, leaping out of his lethargy into
sudden life.
"Git behind this twist--damn ye! Git into ther la'rel!" shrieked
Sergeant Spooner in echo, forgetting that the natural cover of the
Islands was not the laurel of the Cumberlands. Falkins, standing at the
turn, became an instant target, and the sergeant saw his campaign hat
fly off spinning; saw the officer set his feet farther apart as one who
braces himself, and heard the spiteful bark of his revolver. The
sergeant himself was unseen, and it suddenly occurred to him that he
might be more effective by remaining so. He saw the men who were still
on their feet falling back on the protecting angle with its steep banks,
firing doggedly as they came, and one by one he saw them drop short of
their goal, except two who reached it only to lie down at the margin of
shelter. He saw the major stand for a moment, shaking his head as the
voices of the Krags died away and only the Remingtons of the enemy broke
the silence.
Then the major, who no longer had a command, stepped back around the
angle, and sat down on the ground. He laid his pistol on his knees and
wiped blood from his eyes, but, after a moment, as though that posture
were not comfortable enough, he stretched quietly out, with one elbow
under his cheek, and drew up his knees as a child might lie in a crib
when its mother has kissed it good-night. Spooner realized that he alone
of that detail remained an efficient. There was no one to save except
himself--and Falkins. To save himself was easy. He had not yet been
seen.
Cautiously, the sergeant crawled over and possessed himself of all the
firearms that lay in reach, without revealing himself; then again he
crawled back, burrowing under the overhanging bank. He laid the four
Krags in a row with their muzzles roughly trained above the major's
body, and waited. At his back rose a bank which would confuse and
multiply with echoes any sound.
Finally, the cautious brown heads appeared, and brown bodies flitted
among the dead, collecting their spoils. Then Newt cupped both hands at
his lips, and let out the mountain yell, a yell which had grown famous
in Luzon. At the same instant, as fast as he could work the triggers
lying grouped before him, he made the rifles speak from their magazines,
as it seemed in unison, and the four reports were magnified by the rocks
into a seeming of volley-fire. Instantly and in frenzied consternation,
the brown men disappeared, and Newt Spooner worked his way forward,
firing as fast as he could until he could peer into the channel. But the
white men there would require no attention, and could benefit by none
save the impossible courtesy of burial. As for the brown men, they were
gone.
In one body, however, there was still life, and that happened to be the
body of the battalion commander.
Newton Spooner strapped as many cartridge-belts about himself as he
could carry. Then he pressed his canteen to the lips of Major Falkins,
and began a slow and tedious journey back toward a point ten miles to
the east, where if all went well and every chance favored him, he might
possibly strike the camp of the main detachment to-morrow afternoon.
To-morrow afternoon! For once in his life, Newton Spooner laughed.
* * * * *
That night, Major Falkins did not die, but lay raving with a delirium of
fever in the seclusion of the jungle whither the "non-com" had borne
him. And, while he lay tossing, a dark figure sat huddled near-by,
lethargically slapping at mosquitoes and bringing himself back with
heart-breaking effort out of the heavy-lidded temptation of sleep. The
man who so sat, grinned from time to time, and there was the queer,
distorted quality of madness in the grin.
When Henry Falkins at last opened his eyes, he saw about him only the
dense tangle of the forest, and heard only the bird-voices in the trees.
Slowly a recollection of yesterday came to his mind. He tried to rise on
his elbow, and discovered his feet were tight-bound. Evidently he had
been captured and was now being carried off by the ingenious Rosario to
be filed away for future torture. Then he heard a sound like a strained
chuckle, and turned his eyes, to find himself gazing into a grinning,
lunatic face, which was the face of Sergeant Newton Spooner.
"Where are we, sergeant?" he inquired with forced composure. "Why am I
tied up?"
The sergeant's reply was a hyena-like laugh, under which his gums were
exposed beyond his teeth.
"I reckon," he suggested slowly, "ye mout es well drop the sergeant part
of hit. Thar's jest the two of us left, and hit won't be long twell
thar's jest one."
The wounded battalion commander settled back on the ground and said
nothing. The demoniacal face of the other was not a face that could be
reasoned with. It was the face of a man whose unhinged reason was
capable of anything but sanity.
"Ye penitentiaried me oncet," went on the sergeant in dead-voiced
reiteration of an old theme. "Ye sent me thar when ye didn't have
nothin' erginst me. In the penitensherry--" he talked on
half-coherently, half-ramblingly--"a feller jest studies 'bout things
and gits meaner--and hyar hit 'pears like he kin git meaner yit."
"You must have dragged me away from that ravine," interrupted Falkins,
realizing that they were not where he had fallen, and reasoning rather
with himself than with the other. "You saved me yesterday. Why did you
do that?"
"Because," retorted the other quickly, with a fierce up-leaping of
passion to his eyes, "because I was savin' my superior officer--not you,
but a man in that uniform--besides ye b'longed ter me. I wasn't a-goin'
ter suffer no nigger ter git ye. Thet would hev been a soldier's death.
Now thar's jest two of us--we ain't soldiers now--we're jest men."
Falkins lay of necessity outstretched, awaiting the pleasure of his
captor. About him swarmed mosquitoes, and he tossed his head in the vain
effort to shake them off, and slapped viciously at them--for with his
feet trussed there had been no necessity to tie his hands. Above him he
could see patches of blue between the waving palm fronds, and to his
fevered eyes the sky seemed to rock and ripple like a placid sea. Then
he looked at the other soldier, standing at a distance, and the soldier,
too, seemed to wave gently from head to foot as though painted on a
fluttering curtain, but he read in the glowering face that the man meant
to kill him.
"You fool!" he muttered. "You poor damned fool!"
He spoke in a voice of lassitude, as though his interest in the matter
were academic and dilute. In his brain, the tide of fever was rising
afresh, and this time it stole on him with the warmth of a comfortable
narcotic.
But Newt Spooner went on, more steadily now, though with no faltering of
determination.
"I've waited the hell of a time.... I told ye my chanst would come.... I
told ye, when ye tried ter play a damn' hero there at 'Frisco, thet I'd
git my chanst. Ef I'd kilt ye then, ye'd hev hed all ther best of hit,
but now hit's different. Now I kin make ye pray fer mercy--an' not git
none."
"Kill me, and be damned to you!" snapped the bound man, for a moment
roused out of growing stupor into a peevish irritability. "I'm no more
afraid of you now than I was then."
"I reckon," the boy spoke very deliberately and impressively, "I reckon
I knows a way ter make ye skeered." It had been a long time now since
Newton Spooner had talked in the uncouth vernacular of the hills, but
the Newt Spooner of this morning was, it seemed, a man relapsed; a man
from whom had slipped all the changes that the months had wrought. He
came slowly and unsteadily over, and squatted on his haunches above the
prostrate figure. He drew one hand from behind him, and held it out.
"I found a wild bee gum down thar," he went on in a dead, level tone.
"This hyar's wild honey. Thet-thar idee of givin' the ants a party
hain't so damned bad atter all, is it?"
The major rolled over and presented his back to his enemy. He laughed
and his tormentor did not know that it was the laughter of
uncomprehending delirium. To Newt, it seemed a misplaced sense of humor.
"Wake me up for breakfast," murmured the major. "I want to take a nap
now."
Later, Falkins awoke to a lucid interval, and saw nothing of his mad
companion. But gradually his mind began to collect scattered fragments
of memory, and the thing he had laughed at rose up to torture him. He
remembered the threat now, and he remembered the dead face of the man
they had found tied to a tree. He lay alone, shivering in weakness and
harried by a terror he would not have cared to confess. An ant crawled
over one wrist, and he leaped up, choking off a wild scream. It seemed
that he could feel them crawling and stinging in thousands through his
nostrils and nibbling at his brain. His fever would return, but for the
present he lay sane and clammy with chill.
When the cool of the evening came, Newt reappeared. But his face, too,
had lost its maniac glare. It was the face now of a man unutterably
weary--as though all day he had been in some great travail.
"I reckon we mout as well be hikin'. Kin ye walk?" he inquired curtly.
"I'm not going to walk," retorted the officer belligerently. "This is as
good a place to die as any."
"I ain't goin' ter hurt you," said Newt Spooner in a tired voice. "I
reckon the time ain't come yet, after all."
"When will it come?" demanded the other, amazed beyond belief at this
sudden change of front.
"Thet's my business. I hates you worse than pizen ... but I can't hurt
you while we're both wearin' this uniform. It beats hell how much a man
gets to thinkin' about a damn' pair of government breeches!" He stopped
off as if in embarrassment. Then he added: "Besides, I'm beholden to
your wife. She gave me a lift once on the high-road."
Two days later, just as the platoon, flushed with a success which the
others had missed, was preparing to break camp for the day's march, two
men, both gibbering foolishly, both shambling on unsteady feet,
tattered, thorn-torn and scalded with fever, dragged themselves, in the
locked embrace of drunken men, up into sight of the outposts, and
collapsed. One wore a major's uniform, and one had on his sleeve what
was left of a sergeant's chevrons.