Produced by David Garcia, Katherine Ward, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Kentuckiana Digital Library)
THE LAW OF HEMLOCK MOUNTAIN
BY HUGH LUNDSFORD
Frontispiece by DOUGLAS DUER
New York
W. J. Watt & Company
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
W. J. WATT & COMPANY
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
BROOKLYN, N.Y.
[Illustration: "I am sorry," declared Spurrier, humbly. "I didn't know
they were pets. They behaved very much like wild birds."]
CHAPTER I
The officer whose collar ornaments were the winged staff and serpents
of the medical branch, held what was left of the deck in his right
hand and moistened the tip of his thumb against the tip of his
tongue.
"Reenforcements, major?" he inquired with a glance to the man at his
left, and the poker face of the gentleman so addressed remained
impervious to expression as the answer was given back:
"No, I'll stand by what I've got here."
If the utterance hung on a quarter second of indecision it was a
circumstance that went unnoted, save possibly by a young man with the
single bars of a lieutenant on his shoulder straps--and Spurrier gave
no flicker of recognition of what had escaped the others.
Between the whitewashed walls of the room where the little group of
officers sat at cards the Philippine night breeze stirred faintly with
a fevered breath that scarcely disturbed the jalousies.
The pile of poker chips had grown to a bulkiness and value out of
just proportion to the means of army officers below field rank--and
except for the battalion, commander and the surgeon none there held
higher grade than a captaincy. This jungle-hot weather made men
irresponsible.
One or two of the faces were excitedly flushed; several others were
morosely dark. The lights guttered with a jaundiced yellow and sweat
beaded the temples of the players. Sweat, too, made slippery the
enameled surfaces of the pasteboards. Sweat seemed to ooze and simmer
in their brains like the oil from overheated asphalt.
These men had been forced into a companionship of monotony in a
climate of unhealth until their studied politeness, even their forced
jocularity was rather the effort of toleration than the easy play of
comradeship. Their arduously wooed excitement of draw-poker, which had
run improvidently out of bounds, was not a pleasure so much as an
expedient against the boredom that had rubbed their tempers threadbare
and put an edgy sharpness on their nerves.
Captain Comyn, upon whose call for cards the dealer now waited, was
thinking of Private Grant out there under guard in the improvised
hospital. The islands had "gotten to" Private Grant and "locoed" him,
and he had breathed sulphurous maledictions against Captain Comyn's
life--but it was not those threats that now disturbed the company
commander.
Of late Captain Comyn had been lying awake at night and wondering if
he, too, were not going the same way as the unfortunate file. Horribly
quiet fears had been stealing poisonously into his mind--a mind not
given to timidities--and the word "melancholia" had assumed for him a
morbid and irresistible compulsion. No one save the captain's self
knew of these secret hauntings, born of climate and smoldering fever,
and he would not have revealed them on the torture rack. For them he
entertained the same shame as that of a boy grown too large for such
weakness, who shudders with an unconfessed fear of the dark. But he
could no more shake them loose and be free of them than could the
Ancient Mariner rid himself of the bird of ill-omen tied about his
neck. Now he pulled himself together and tossed away a single card.
"I'll take one in the place of that," he commented with studied
carelessness, and Lieutenant John Spurrier, with that infectious smile
which came readily to his lips, pointed a contrast with the captain's
abstraction by the snappy quickness of his announcement:
"If I'm going to trail along, I'll need three. Yes, three, please,
major."
"When Spurrier sits in the game," commented a player who, with a
dolorous glance at the booty before him, threw down his hands, "we at
least get action. Myself, I'm out of it."
The battalion commander studied the ceiling with a troubled furrow
between his brows which was not brought there by the hazards of luck.
He was reflecting that whenever a game was organized it was Spurrier
who quickened its tempo from innocuous amusement to reckless
extravagance. Spurrier, fitted for his life with so many soldierly
qualities, was still, above all else, a plunger. That spirit seemed a
passion that filled and overflowed him. Temperate in other habits, he
played like a nabob. The major remembered hearing that even at West
Point Jack Spurrier had narrowly, escaped dismissal for gambling in
quarters, though his class standing had been distinguished and his
gridiron record had become a tradition.
This sort of game with "the roof off and deuces wild," was not good
for the _morale_ of his junior officers, mused the major. It was like
spiking whisky with absinthe. Yes, to-morrow he would have Spurrier at
his quarters and talk to him like a Dutch uncle.
There were three left battling for the often sweetened pot now, with
three more who had dropped out, looking on, and a tensity enveloped
the long-drawn climax of the evening's session.
Captain Comyn's cheek bones had reddened and his irascible frown lines
deepened. For the moment his fears of melancholia had been swallowed
up in a fitful fury against Spurrier and his smiling face.
At last came the decisive moment of the final call and the show-down,
and through the dead silence of the moment sounded the distant
sing-song of a sentry:
"Corporal of the guard, number one, relief!"
Over the window sill a tiny green lizard slithered quietly and
hesitated, pressing itself flat against the whitewash.
Then the major's cards came down face upward--and showed a queen-high
straight.
"Not quite good enough, major," announced Comyn brusquely as his
breath broke from him with a sort of gasp and he spread out a heart
flush.
But Spurrier, who had drawn three cards, echoed the captain's words:
"Not quite good enough." He laid down two aces and two deuces, which
under the cutthroat rule of "deuces wild" he was privileged to call
four aces.
Comyn came to his feet and pushed back his chair, but he stood
unsteadily. The fever in his bones was playing queer pranks with his
brain. He, whose courtesy had always been marked in its punctilio,
blazed volcano-fashion into the eruption that had been gathering
through these abnormal days and nights.
Yet even now the long habit of decorum held waveringly for a little
before its breaking, and he began with a queer strain in his voice:
"You'll have to take my IOU. I've lost more than I can pay on the
peg."
"That's all right, Comyn," began the victor, "Pay when----" but before
he could finish the other interrupted with a frenzy of anger:
"No, by God, it's not all right! It's all wrong, and this is the last
game I sit in where they deal a hand to you."
Spurrier's smiling lips tightened instantly out of their infectious
amiability into a forbidding straightness. He pushed aside the chips
he had been stacking and rose stiffly.
"That's a statement, Captain Comyn," he said with a warning note in
his level voice, "which requires some explaining."
The abrupt bursting of the tempest had left the others in a tableau of
amazement, but now the authoritative voice of Major Withers broke in
upon the dialogue.
"Gentlemen, this is an army post, and I am in command here. I will
tolerate no quarrels."
Without shifting the gaze of eyes that held those of the captain,
Spurrier answered insistently:
"I have every respect, major, for the requirements of discipline--but
Captain Comyn must finish telling why he will no longer play cards
with me."
"And I'll tell you _pronto_," came the truculent response. "I won't
play with you because you are too damned lucky."
"Oh!" Spurrier's tensity of expression relaxed into something like
amusement for the anticlimax. "That accusation can be stomached, I
suppose."
"Too damned lucky," went on the other with a gathering momentum of
rancor, "and too continuously lucky for a game that's not professional.
When a man is so proficient--or lucky if you prefer--that the card table
pays him more than the government thinks he's worth, it's time----"
Spurrier stepped forward.
"It's time for you to stop," he cautioned sharply. "I give you the
fairest warning!"
But Comyn, riding the flood tide of his passion--a passion of
distempered nerves--was beyond the reach of warnings and his words
came in a bitter outpouring:
"I dare say it was only luck that let you bankrupt young Tillsdale,
but it was as fatal to him as if it bore an uglier name."
The sound in Spurrier's throat was incoherent and his bodily impulse
swift beyond interference. His flat palm smote Captain Comyn's cheek,
to come away leaving a red welt behind it, and as the others swept
forward to intervene the two men grappled.
They were torn apart, still struggling, as Major Withers, unaccustomed
to the brooking of such mutinies, interposed between them the bulk of
his body and the moral force of his indignantly blazing eyes.
"I will have no more of this," he thundered. "I am not a prize-fight
referee, that I must break my officers out of clinches! Go to your
quarters, Comyn! You, too, Spurrier. You are under arrest. I shall
prefer charges against you both. I mean to make an example of this
matter."
But with a strange abruptness the fury died out of Comyn's face. It
left his passion-distorted features so instantly that the effect of
transformation was uncanny. In a breathing space he seemed older and
his eyes held the dark dejection of utter misery. His anger had flared
and died before that grimmer emotion which secretly haunted him--the
fear that he was going the way of climate-crazed Private Grant.
When they released him he turned dispiritedly and left the room in
docile silence. He was not thinking of the charges to be preferred.
They belonged to to-morrow. To-night was nearer, and to-night he must
face those hours of sleeplessness that he dreaded more than all the
penalties enunciated by the Articles of War.
Spurrier, too, bowed stiffly and left the room.
Though it was late when Captain Comyn entered his own quarters, he did
not at once throw himself on the army cot that stood against the
whitewashed wall.
For him the cot held no invitation--only the threat of insomnia and
tossing. His taut nerves had lost the gracious art of relaxation, and
before his thoughts paraded hideously grotesque memories of the few
faces he had ever seen marred by the dethronement of reason.
Already he had forgotten the violent and discreditable scene with
Spurrier, and presently he dropped himself inertly into the camp chair
beside the table at the room's center and opened its drawer.
Slowly his hand came out clutching a service revolver, and his eyes
smoldered unnaturally as they dwelt on it. But after a little he
resolutely shook his head and thrust the thing aside.
He sat in a cold sweat, surrounded by the silence of the Eastern
night, a comprehensive silence which weighed upon him and oppressed
him.
In the thatching of the single-storied adobe building he heard the
rustling of a house snake, and from without, where moonlight seemed to
gush and spill against the cobalt shadows, shrilled the small voice
from a lizard's inflated, crimson throat.
It was all crazing him, and his nails bit into his palms as he sat
there, silent and heavy-breathed. Then he heard footsteps nearer and
louder than those of the pacing sentries, followed by a low rapping of
knuckles on his own door. Perhaps it was Doctor James. He had the
kindly habit of besetting men who looked fagged with the offer of some
innocuous bromide. As if bromides could soothe a brain in which
something had gone _malo_!
"Come in," he growled, and into the room stepped not Major James, but
Lieutenant Spurrier.
Slowly and with an infinite weight of weariness, Comyn rose to his
feet. He might be afraid of lunacy, but not of lieutenants, and his
lips smiled sneeringly.
"If you've come to ask a retraction," he declared ungraciously, "I've
none to offer. I meant all I said."
The visitor stood inside the door calmly eyeing the man who was his
own company commander.
"I didn't come to insist on apologies," he replied after a moment's
silence with an off-hand easiness of tone. "That can wait till you've
gotten over your tantrum. It was another thing that brought me."
"I want to be left alone."
"Aside from the uncomplimentary features of your tirade," went on
Spurrier placidly and he strolled around the table and seated himself
on the window sill, "there was a germ of truth in what you said. We've
been playing too steep a game." He paused and the other man who
remained standing by his table, as though he did not wish to encourage
his visitor by seating himself, responded only with a short, ironic
laugh.
"See here, Comyn," Spurrier's voice labored now with evident
embarrassment. "What I'm getting at is this: I don't want your IOU for
that game. I simply want you to forget it."
But the captain took an angry step forward.
"Do you think I'm a charity patient?" he demanded, as his temper again
mounted to storm pressure. "Why, damn your impertinence, I don't want
to talk to you. I don't want you in my quarters!"
Spurrier slipped from his seat and an angry flush spread to his cheek
bones.
"You're the hell of a--gentleman!" he exclaimed.
The two stood for a few moments without words, facing each other,
while the lieutenant could hear the captain's breath rising and
falling in a panting thickness.
Surgeon James returning from a visit to a colic sufferer was trudging
sleepily along the empty _calle_ when he noted the light still burning
in the captain's window, and with an exclamation of remembrance for
the officer's dark-ringed and sleepless eyes, he wheeled toward the
door. Just as he neared it, a staccato and heated interchange of
voices was borne out to him, and he hurried his step, but at the same
instant a pistol shot bellowed blatantly in the quiet air and into his
nostrils stole the acrid savor of burned powder.
The door, thrown open, gave him the startling picture of Comyn sagged
across his own table and lying grotesque in the yellow light; and of
Spurrier standing, wide-eyed by the window, with the green and cobalt
background of the tropic night beyond his shoulders. While he gazed
the lieutenant wheeled and thrust his head through the raised sash,
under the jalousy.
"Halt!" cried James excitedly, leaping forward to possess himself of
the pistol which Comyn had taken from his drawer and thrust aside.
"Halt, Spurrier, or I'll have to fire!"
The other turned back and faced his captor with an expression which it
was hard to read. Then he shook his shoulders as though to disentangle
himself from an evil dream and in a cool voice demanded:
"Do you mean to intimate, James, that you suspect me of killing
Comyn?"
"Do you mean to deny it?" countered the other incredulously.
"Great God! I oughtn't to have to. That shot was fired through the
window. The bullet whined past my ear while my back was turned. That
was why I looked out just now. Moreover, I am, as you see, unarmed."
"God grant that you can prove these things, Spurrier, but they will
need proof." The doctor turned to bend over the prostrate figure, and
as he did so voices rose from the _calle_ where already had sounded
the alarm and response of running feet. "Or, perhaps," added the
doctor with stubborn suggestiveness, "you acted in self-defense."
Presently the door opened and the corporal of the guard entered and
saluted. His eyes traveled rapidly about the room and he addressed
Spurrier, since James was not a line officer.
"I picked this revolver up, sir, just outside the window," he said,
holding out a service pistol. "It was lying in the moonlight and one
chamber is empty."
Spurrier took the weapon, but when the man had gone James suggested in
an even voice: "Don't you think you had better hand that gun to me?"
"To you? Why?"
"Because this looks like a case for G. C. M. It will have a better
aspect if I can testify that, after the gun was brought in, it wasn't
handled by you except while I saw you?"
"It seems to me"--a belligerent flash darted in the lieutenant's
eyes--"that you are singularly set on hanging this affair around my
neck."
"You were with him and no one else was. If I were you, I'd go direct
to the major and make a statement of facts. He'll be getting reports
from other sources by now."
"Perhaps you are right. Is _he_ dead?"
The surgeon nodded, and Spurrier turned and closed the door softly
behind him.