The policy of splitting the command into bits, and leaving one platoon
to carry on the seeming of the full force, had brought both disaster and
success. The main body had taken a middle course upon which the smaller
details might--theoretically--fall back, and on either side squads had
scouted. While the men under Falkins were being misled and trapped,
another detachment had slipped fortuitously upon a scouting party of the
enemy, and, being less fatigued by reason of an easier course, they were
stealing through the _bosque_ with unabated caution, and not one of that
scouting party escaped alive except two who were captured. The
detachment rejoined the platoon, and in view of the spirit in which the
main command received these prisoners, they finally laid aside their
show of sullen stubbornness and talked volubly.
Not only did they talk, under the effective persuasion of their captors,
but they acted. They agreed to lead the _Americanos_ to the camp of
General Rosario, which they said was pitched in a particularly
inaccessible part of the mountains only a day's march away. Then the
command, which had for so long been following a fox-fire, rose up,
invigorated by the prospect of final success, and all day they slipped
forward through trails which they could not have found alone. They
marched with the swiftness of the final spurt, and at nightfall lay
under cover, feasting their eyes on a column of smoke which rose from a
canyon where the enemy lay in fancied security. The captives had done
their work well, once they had undertaken it, but the onslaught must be
sudden. There must be no time given to slaughter the American prisoners
whom Rosario was carrying north with him as a present for Aguinaldo.
They could but admire the sagacity with which the enemy had selected his
lair. They must attack through two high-walled gorges where machine-guns
waited to mow them down. But the _Americanos_ meant to reach those guns
before they were discovered, and after that the impregnable strong-hold
would become a trap without exits.
The column had therefore divided, each section taking a guide. The
guides, with bayonets at their backs as reminders of their mission, had
gone forward and with passwords bespoken the sentries, whose voices had
been choked off in the pitchy darkness before they could give outcry.
Then came the mountain yell, but it came only from the narrower gorge,
and it was accompanied by musketry which the steep walls echoed and
re-echoed. The flood of flight surged into a wave of disorganized rout
toward the other opening--where it fell back in broken spray from volley
and bayonet. Useless now were the machine-guns; worse than useless the
impregnable walls of rock. The insurgent forces, remembering their red
iniquities, asked no terms or quarter, but hurled themselves on the
bayonets and went down in the close chaos of bolo and clubbed musket.
"And luckiest of them that fell, were those of them that died."
It was a little keyhole picture of red and black inferno, while it
lasted, but it did not last long.
Yet, of General Rosario and his white prisoners there was no trace. That
wily leader had gone on with a small escort before nightfall, and no one
was left to tell what direction he had taken.
So it happened that when the two survivors of the ambuscade came
tottering into the camp which they had hoped to reach much sooner, they
found the main detachment just leaving. Had it not been belated by the
delay of the successful expedition into the hills, it would have passed
this point twenty-four hours ago, and the half-dead refugees would have
been too late.
It had taken Henry Falkins and Newt Spooner two days instead of one to
cover that ten miles of _bosque_. They had come staggering, sometimes
gibbering, and rarely were both of them sane. Sometimes they raved in
duet, but during the first day Newt kicked and pummeled his superior
forward as long as he could walk. After that, he carried, dragged and
rolled the limp figure, obsessed only by the fixed idea that he had a
package to deliver somewhere "over yon." Frequently he forgot that the
package was a thing of life. Frequently, too, he madly beat it and swore
at it, but always he worked it forward, falling time after time to rise
again and stumble ahead. Then Newton Spooner became a thing without
consciousness, and a faint spark of realization flickered back into the
murk of the major's brain, and laid on his sick soul the same necessity.
That day, or part of it, he dragged and carried and kicked. At last,
with neither fully conscious, they linked arms about each other's
shoulders, gazed at each other with wild, agonized eyes, mumbled at each
other with swollen tongues, and shambled, crawled and hitched along
together.
* * * * *
Between two cots in the village at the mountains' edge the wife of Major
Falkins vibrated like a pendulum for several days, and when the
commanding officer's tongue became again a thing which he could lift and
command he told her of his rescue by the boy who had taken a blood-oath
against him, but he told nothing of the episode in which the sergeant
had debated the fulfilment of his vow.
Later, when the company had marched back to its headquarters in the town
with the church, Mrs. Falkins drew a glowing picture of heroism in a
letter which she wrote home to the States. The colonel, her father, in
due time received it, and it found its way into news column and
editorial, and was duly read by many persons.
"Clem's gal," no longer at the mountain college, but studying at the
State University in Lexington with the scholarship that she had won, was
one of the many. She read in the little dormitory room overlooking the
quiet campus. She had come here to prepare herself for a return to the
mountain school as a teacher, and when next she went back to the
Cumberlands the paper went with her, that the prophet might have honor
at home.
It was October, and she had been summoned by the illness of her
step-mother. Now, as the girl rode along the creek-bed roads, the hills
were flaunting their watch-fires of autumn, and the horizon wore its
veil of Indian-summer softness. Clem had met her in Jackson with his
nag, and she was riding, mountain-fashion, on a pillion behind him. Her
father was battered and disheveled, and about his clothes clung the
smoke-house odor of the windowless cabin with its log fire, but there
also clung about the vaulting slopes and ruggedly beautiful ravines the
fragrance of the fall, and the girl could not find it in her heart to
feel gloomy, even though she was exchanging the wholesome life of the
university for the squalor of the cabin. Thanks to Newt, she had her
room, where she could withdraw as into her own castle. She felt almost
gay, and, as she thought of the room which a rude, sullen-eyed boy had
reared for her with his calloused hands, her eyes grew soft like the
horizons. That boy, too, had been away into the world, and had become a
hero. Presumably he was mending his broken life.
The old horse plodded slowly and sometimes the girl slipped down and
walked alongside. Clem had little conversation after he had told how
"porely" the step-mother was. "He reckoned hit all come about from
gittin' dew-pizened." But, as they made the trip, the girl recited to
him the news from the far-away islands.
The man listened stolidly, and at the end inquired:
"Did I onderstand ye rightly, M'nervy? War Henry Falkins ther feller he
saved?"
When the information was confirmed, he ejaculated in wonderment:
"Well, doggone my ornery skin! Hit seems like jest yestiddy thet Newty
lit out acrost these-hyar hills, hell-bent on lay-wayin' Henry Falkins
fer a-penitensheryin' him."
Then Minerva remembered the lad's face when she had told of Henry
Falkins awarding her medal, and for the first time she understood.
* * * * *
Back in the town with the church the months went by with routine of
garrison duty and periods of fevered activity.
The energetic Rosario had for a time lain dormant after the paralyzing
blow which had obliterated so large a portion of his command, but as the
natives began to evince a growing confidence in the protecting hand of
the American government, the general bestirred himself, and once more
tidings of his atrocities drifted into headquarters. During these months
there passed between Sergeant Newton Spooner and his major no reference
to the morning in the jungle when the last echo of the old threat had
found expression.
It was as though, on this subject, the lips of each were sealed by oath,
but Sergeant Spooner went about his work with a smart and soldierly
alacrity that kept the men of his company always on their toes. When
there was trying work to do the commanding officer found himself
instinctively turning to that company, and since the company responded
to its top-sergeant like a muscle to a nerve, that meant that he turned
to Newton Spooner.
Then came an epidemic of outrage.
Villages with _Americanista presidentes_ went up in smoke. Haciendas of
loyal Spaniards and Ilacanos were raided, and their people put to the
bolo. With the wild stories of Rosario's activity that drifted in, there
came persistently the fame of a white man who stood at the Filipino's
right hand, giving him counsel. The rumor added that this man was a
deserter from the American army. The truth or falsity of that allegation
did not particularly interest the 26th Volunteer Infantry. The 26th from
its Shirt-tailed beginnings had been stainless of the reproach of
desertion. If other commands had been less fortunate it was not their
affair. But it was very much their affair that, when they ran down a
band of guerillas and closed with them, they encountered more numerous
casualties, because someone had been teaching the brown men how to fight
and shoot as they had never in their lives fought and shot before.
It very closely concerned the 26th Volunteer Foot that the game of war
was being taught their foes by a renegade who had learned it under
their own colors.
But the insult, set upon injury, came one day with a grim humor that was
to have an even grimmer sequel.
The telegraph operator at a near-by village was passing the time of day
with the S. C. man at the headquarters key. Suddenly the instrument went
dead with a splutter, and, while the headquarters operator tested and
cursed, it remained stubbornly dumb. The line had been cut again.
Before a detachment could be despatched to follow the wire to the break,
the instrument set up a buzz, and the buzz became Morse code. As the
astonished operator read the dots and dashes this message was clicked
out to him: "General Jose Rosario, in passing, presents his compliments
and hopes to report other mementos in near future."
Obviously the wire had been grounded and the message sent by the enemy
himself at some point where he had tapped it with a field-transmitter.
That must be the work of the renegade--presumably a Signal Code
deserter, and yet though the _bosque_ was combed for days by peeved and
eager soldiery, no sign of a hostile force was found. Newton Spooner and
a squad of scouting men came upon a muddy spot in the _bijuca_ tangle
where a number of feet had trod, and, though the top-sergeant noted the
print of a service boot, he said nothing of the circumstance--at the
time.
But while Newt said nothing he thought much. Keeping to himself, he was
fighting a battle which one way or the other must prove decisive in his
nature. He knew that he was facing a conclusion which could not be
lightly turned aside, and which could not be met without harrowing his
soul. To fail to face a certain specter which had unexpectedly arisen
would be to brand himself in the tribunal of his own inner consciousness
as a traitor to the service. To face it and accept the consequences that
might, and probably would, arise, would be to put behind him and trample
under foot the code of the mountains, and to confess that all his
preconceived ideas of life had been distorted and without value.
Two deep-rooted impulses were wrestling with a ferocity that made the
boy's soul a battle-ground, torn, scarred and utterly miserable. The
chaplain had preached a sermon on Golgotha, and had told how the Master
had gone to the Place of a Skull, and had fought there with the spirit.
Newton Spooner was not the man for prayer or fasting, yet he fasted
because his palate revolted against the rations, in the torture of
indecision that racked him.
And as he could not eat, so also he could not sleep and the wide eyes
which stared at the walls beyond his cot were eyes that burned with
feverish misery. Whether or not one is to become an Iscariot is a
problem that must bring its agony, an agony beyond the appeasement of
thirty pieces of silver. But when the problem so complicates itself that
instead of being merely a problem it is a dilemma, and not only a
dilemma, but the dilemma of choosing between proving an Iscariot to
one's code or to one's country, the matter is one which may well
unbalance a brain already depleted and jumbled of perspective by
steaming jungles and the assaults of the tropics on one's sanity.
There was no one to whom Sergeant Spooner could go for counsel. To every
man comes one black night that tests the metal of his soul, and makes or
brands him with its result. It is a night when the furies ride
shrieking, and when the border between the man and the madman wavers. He
may not know it, but the dawn that comes at the end of such a night
breaks on a soul that has accepted its damnation or has liberated itself
and transformed itself.
About the garrison, Sergeant Newton Spooner bore a face in which the
eyes were sunken and about whose lips ran deep lines of travail. In his
duties he was prompt and smart, but that was the ingrained training,
which had reached a state where it responded automatically to routine.
As he tossed on his cot, he suffered agonies and when he fell asleep it
was not for rest, but for nightmare. His dreams were harassed with a
bitter problem and what the end was to be hung in the balance. Dreams
are precarious and lawless, yet it was in the end a dream which decided
him.
Just before he was aroused one morning he fell into a feverish slumber,
following a wakeful night, and to him, as to many men before him, a
vision came.
Minerva seemed to stand before the regimental band at dress-parade. She
waved the flag and said, in a voice which no one else heard:
"The soldier serves his colors."
It happened that about the same time the _mestiza_ girl whom
Sergeant-Major Peter Spooner had honored with his attentions, before he
had fallen into the villainous hands of Rosario, came back to the town.
She did not remain long, and her face was sad. She had come, she
confided to Mrs. Falkins, hoping to see the great, brave soldier, and,
when she was told of how he had died, her sobs tore her until the
spectacle of her grief was insupportable.
Then Newton Spooner did an unprecedented thing. Unversed as he was in
the ways of courtship, he dogged the steps of the _mestiza_ girl,
fetching and carrying for her with doglike devotion.
And, since he was willing, instead of pressing his own suit, to sing the
praises of the late sergeant-major, she let him sit at the threshold of
her nipa house, and gaze at her while she sewed. When she went away and
Sergeant Spooner asked a brief leave of absence to accompany her on a
part of her return journey, the men of the garrison shook their heads
and announced that they would be damned.