OUTCAST
A stretch of yellow ground broken here and there by black-green foliage
patches and gray rocks. Above, a blazing white sun in a copper sky; the
hot expanse broken by an occasional buzzard that hung moveless on broad
serrated wings between earth and heaven.
And alone--almost infinitesimal in the boundless expanse--over the
baking area of plain and rolling ground moved a dark blue speck.
On nearer observation this speck of blue resolved itself into a man. A
man whose tangle of hair was covered by the discarded straw sombrero of
some peon, whose face was haggard and unshaven, whose body was
whimsically draped in the tatters of what had once been a United States
army uniform, whose feet had by long tramping worn apart the soles and
uppers of a once-spruce pair of cavalry boots.
More than a second glance would have been needed for any of the man’s
former fellow-officers to recognize in the military scarecrow the
faultlessly groomed Lieutenant-Colonel Brinton of General Zachary
Taylor’s personal staff.
East and northeast he had plodded; at first in a daze and guided only by
the homing instinct.
Leaving General Scott’s headquarters, he had delayed not a minute in
beginning his homeward march. Afoot in a land where all save the meanest
rode, he had shaped his course without conscious effort.
Dawn had found him far beyond the American lines. After that, for a
time, dawn and noon and sunset had been one to him. Thirst--the terrible
thirst that follows upon a _pulque_ debauch--had gripped him with
agonizing pains.
And he had found himself stopping at cisterns and even at roadside
puddles.
Late at night his legs had given way as he breasted a hill. He had
fallen forward and slept where he fell; to stagger stiffly onward at
dawn. From a peon vender he had bought a great stack of _tortillas_ and
a bundle of _tamales_ on the second day, and had stuffed them into all
his pockets; munching now and then when he chanced to think of it.
The purchase had been half-involuntary; some latent campaigning instinct
leading him to buy the food for future use. In payment he had given a
five-dollar gold piece; the only coin he chanced to have in his pocket;
and it had not occurred to him to ask for change.
Somewhere along the road he had seen the broad-brimmed straw hat lying;
its frayed brim and a hole in the crown testifying to its uselessness to
a former owner. He had picked it up and put it on, in exchange for his
shelterless military cap, as a better shield against the sun’s broiling
heat.
For several days Brinton continued his blind progress northeastward.
He had met few people. And at these he had not so much as glanced.
Such of them as were Mexicans noted appraisingly his ragged state (for
cactus spines and rocks had claimed their full toll of cloth-scraps in
the blundering journey), and decided he was not worth molesting and had
let him go in peace.
A stray American soldier, here and there, had taken him for a deserter
and, out of pity, had looked the other way. The war was practically at
an end. They saw no reason for dragging back to punishment a man who
seemed so anxious to get home; nor to report seeing him.
At last the numbness lifted, bit by bit, from Brinton’s mind. And he
knew it had not been the numbness of drink, but of shock.
He came to his senses to find himself repeating mechanically, for the
thousandth time:
“Dishonorably--dismissed--from the service you have--disgraced!”
The odd repetition of the prefix “dis” in the three pregnant words of
the sentence stood out in his memory. He could shut his eyes and see
Scott’s rage-bloated face, as the general had flung the phrase at him.
“Dishonorably dismissed from the service you have disgraced!”
That was it. And the torn-off epaulets had dangled from Scott’s gnarled
fists as the sentence was spoken. “Dishonorably dismissed!”
Brinton, like a child who bites on a sore tooth, fell to recalling his
own father--veteran of the war of 1812.
The grandfather whom he dimly remembered as a bent, withered giant--the
once herculean captain who at the battle of Saratoga had with a single
backhand stroke of his cavalry saber sliced off the head of a British
dragoon.
At home hung the musket--the “Queen’s Arm” gun--that his
great-grandfather had carried in the French and Indian War, and later,
as a very old man, at Concord and Lexington.
“Three generations of them,” he mumbled, half-aloud. “Fighters all. And
I don’t know how many generations before that. One in every one of our
wars. And I was the fourth. I guess it meant more to me than to any of
them.
“‘Dishonorably dismissed from the service you have disgraced’--‘Herewith
degraded from rank,’” he added, another sentence of the fearful
condemnation flashing into his thoughts.
He did not know how long he had traveled. He knew--some sixth sense told
him--he was moving in the right direction for home.
Home! The lively little Ohio town through whose main street he had
ridden so proudly, at the head of his company, not two years before!
What would his return be like?
The fancy stung Brinton to new anguish. He halted; and was minded to
shift his course for some refuge where his name and his disgrace would
not be known; where he could begin all over again.
Then came the thought--not of his stay-at-home son, but of the grandson
he had never seen. And into the man’s burning hot eyes came a mist of
unbidden tears.
His baby grandson--and Brinton plodded along his former course.
He expected little sympathy from his severely correct if unwarlike son;
the worthy youth who had so smugly refused to join his father in going
to the front on the plea that the business would suffer if both senior
and junior partner were away for so long a time. But the grandson--
Brinton passed his hand over the unshaven stubble of his chin; and
sought to gauge by its length the time his march had lasted. He seemed
to have been tramping for an eternity on swollen and tender feet under a
murderous hot sun. Yet for days he continued; once bartering his watch
for another batch of _tortillas_.
At last nature gave out.
For nearly a day he had found no water. His lips were fevered, his
tongue unduly large and as dry as parchment. There was but the fragment
of one crumbling and greasy _tortilla_ left in his pocket.
He dared not eat it, faint though he was, lest it add to his already
unbearable thirst.
He noted, too, that he was lurching and reeling in his walk. It appeared
to him that the buzzards that floated above him had begun to take a new
and personal interest in his movements. They were more numerous than on
earlier days, and they seemed to follow him; flying very low.
So had he seen them track a sick cavalry horse.
Before him, as dusk fell, rose a low ridge. Beyond it, evidently, was a
dip in the rolling ground, and beyond that rose a higher ridge.
At sight of the two prospective climbs, Brinton’s heart turned sick
within him. Then he set his teeth and breasted the first rise. After an
interminable time he gained its low summit and stood, panting loudly, to
rest.
In the gulch just below he saw a fire twinkling through the gloom.
Brinton took a step forward. His awkward foot trod on a rolling stone.
Losing his balance and too weak to recover it, he pitched helplessly
forward, fell headlong, and rolled down the steep little slope.
As he lay at the bottom, breathless and half-stunned, unseen hands
lifted him none too gently to his feet. A glare of light was in his
eyes.
He stood there, swaying, blinking, supported by the two men who had
picked him up.
Then he saw that he had rolled to the very edge of a campfire. Around
the fire lounged a dozen or more men in army uniforms, while one of
their fellow soldiers roasted, over a bed of coals, to one side of the
blaze, a whole kid. Farther on, a short line of cavalry horses were
picketed.
Brinton knew he had stumbled upon an American scouting party. And he
would have turned and fled, but for the hands that held him.
A beardless young lieutenant strolled forward, drawn by the exclamations
of his troopers. He eyed the tattered, disreputable fugitive in strong
contempt; taking in, by the uncertain glow of the fire, Brinton’s
general aspect of vagrancy and the fact that he wore what had once been
a cavalry uniform.
“Deserter,” at length announced the lieutenant. “What regiment?”
Brinton made no reply.
“What regiment, I said?” repeated the lieutenant sharply.
But shame and shock held Brinton speechless.
“You wear a cavalry uniform!” accused the lieutenant. “In what regiment
are you a private?”
“It is a colonel’s uniform,” involuntarily answered Brinton.
But so thick was the utterance of his thirst-swollen tongue that his
words were unintelligible.
“Come nearer to the light!” ordered the lieutenant, leading the way to
the fire from whose glare Brinton had been edging away.
While the supposed deserter was under interrogation by their officer,
the two men who had held him had released their grasp on his feeble
arms. Now, as the lieutenant moved away, Brinton turned and bolted.
He made for the steep gulch-side down which he had just rolled. But
before he could take a half-dozen tottering steps the cavalrymen were
upon him.
They dragged him back to the fire, yanking him roughly from side to side
as though shaking a naughty child. Part of his torn clothing came away
in their grasp.
Brinton swayed dizzily and unresistingly at every haul and jerk.
“Tie him up!” snapped the officer. “I’ll talk to him in the morning.”
Brinton was thrown down, and his legs and arms were trussed with leather
bearing reins whose knots cut deeply into the chafed skin of wrists and
ankles. Then he was rolled to one side and left there while the troopers
gathered around the now roasted kid.
Even in his stark misery, the victim’s military training disgusted him
with the needless cruelty of his treatment and the carelessness
wherewith his captors were maintaining their camp.
In the darkness he lay, helpless, sore in every joint and tortured by
thirst. But for the time his bodily agony was as nothing to him by
comparison with the anguish wherewith his present plight filled his
mind.
He foresaw that he would be carried to the regimental headquarters of
this scouting party. Probably to General Taylor’s own headquarters, or
possibly even to those of General Scott.
There the whole truth must come to light. And the shameful flight must
begin all over again!
Nor could he, by explaining the situation to his jailers here, hope to
win their credence.
They had evidently been on a more or less prolonged scouting trip. They
could not know the story of his degradation. Nor could they be expected
to credit so improbable a tale. He could not expect them to believe that
Lieutenant-Colonel James Brinton--of whom they might or might not have
heard--of General Taylor’s personal staff, was the scarecrow prisoner
they had seized as a deserter.
He tugged at his bunglingly tied wrist-bonds. But he could not loosen
them. Almost he could draw one hand out from the leather strap. But he
could not quite release it.
Supper over, a trooper, at the lieutenant’s command, brought a shallow
little tin dish of water and a piece of hardtack to where Brinton lay
and set it beside him.
The sight of the water set the prisoner well-nigh insane. Yet, by an
effort that called for all his strength of mind, he refrained from
drinking it.
Instead, he lay still, looking up at the big southern stars until
sentries were posted for the first watch and the other troopers rolled
into their blankets. Then, cautiously, he stretched forth his bound
hands and laid his wrists in the shallow tin dish of water.
The touch of the cool liquid brought on another mad craving to drink.
But Brinton, after a second battle of will, conquered, and forebore to
waste the precious water in the mere quenching of thirst.
For ten minutes he let his wrists and their leathern thongs soak in the
dish. Then he drew them out and exerted all his weak force to pulling
his close-fastened wrists asunder.
The leather, as he had foreseen, had softened and stretched from
immersion. A desperate tug that scraped off most of the skin of one
wrist--and his right hand was free.
It was a simple matter to double over and to reach the bonds that tied
his ankles. The knot was soon untied. And Brinton lay unbound and half
fainting.
For hours he lay thus. Then, at a change of sentries, he began to
wriggle noiselessly away from the camp.
Giving the drowsy sentry a wide berth, he crept on hands and knees
through the darkness until the camp lay a furlong behind him and the
sides of the farther and higher ridge loomed directly above him.
An hour later, at first glimmer of dawn, Brinton gained the ridge’s
summit and lay resting for a time on its crest. After which he rose and
looked ahead. In front of him, far below, and a few miles beyond the
ridge, something broad and silvery lay glittering in the dawn light.
With a hoarse cry, Brinton recognized it.
“The Rio Grande!” he croaked. “The Rio Grande! Yonder to the left is the
ford we crossed! And--beyond, lies God’s country!”
At noon, Brinton reached the river’s bank. Hope had replaced strength
and had made the last stage of the journey possible. Waist deep he
waded into the stream, crouching down and rolling over in the tepid
water; sucking in pints of it as he assuaged his thirst.
To his feet once more and floundering on, across the ford; then he fell
on his face at full length, on the northern bank; his hands digging
deeply into the soil.
“My country!” he sobbed, hysterically. “My own, _own_ country!”
Then, as an echo, chilling his wild joy, he found himself murmuring
incoherently:
“Dishonorably--dismissed!”