The situation of John Spurrier, who was Jack Spurrier to every man in
that command, standing under the monstrous presumption of having
murdered a brother officer, called for a reaccommodation of the
battalion's whole habit of thought. It demanded a new and unwelcome
word in their vocabulary of ideas, and against it argued, with the hot
advocacy of tested acquaintance, every characteristic of the man
himself, and every law of probability. For its acceptance spoke only
one forceful plea--evidence which unpleasantly skirted the actuality
of demonstration. Short of seeing Spurrier shoot his captain down and
toss his pistol through the open window, Major James could hardly have
witnessed a more damaging picture than the hurriedly opened door had
framed to his vision.
Within the close-drawn cordon of a post, held to military accountability,
facts were as traceable as entries on a card index--and these facts
began building to the lieutenant's undoing. They seemed to bring out
like acid on sympathetic ink the miracle of a Mr. Hyde where his
comrades had known only a Doctor Jekyll.
The one man out of the two skeleton companies of infantry stationed
in the interior town who remained seemingly impervious to the
strangulating force of the tightening net was Spurrier himself.
In another man that insulated and steady-eyed confidence might have
served as a manifest of innocence and a proclamation of clean
conscience. But Spurrier wore a nick-name, until now lightly
considered, to which new conditions had added importance.
They had called him "The Plunger," and now they could not forget the
nickeled and chrome-hardened gambling nerve which had won for him the
sobriquet. There had been the _coup_ at Oakland, for example, when a
stretch finish had stood to ruin him or suddenly enrich him--an
incident that had gone down in racing history and made cafe talk.
Through a smother of concealing dust and a thunder of hoofs, the field
had struggled into the stretch that afternoon, tight-bunched, with its
snapping silks too closely tangled for easy distinguishing--but the
cerise cap that proclaimed Spurrier's choice was nowhere in sight. The
bookmakers pedestalled on their high stools with field glasses glued
to their eyes had been more excited than the young officer on the
club-house lawn, who put away his binoculars while the horses were
still in the back stretch and turned to chat with a girl.
Three lengths from the finish a pair of distended nostrils had thrust
themselves ahead of the other muzzles to catch the judges' eyes, and
bending over steaming withers had nodded a cerise cap.
But the lieutenant who had escaped financial disaster and won a
miniature fortune had gone on talking to the girl.
Might it not be suspected in these circumstances that "Plunger"
Spurrier's refusal to treat his accusation seriously was only an
attitude? He was sitting in a game now with his neck at stake and the
cards running against him. Perhaps he was only bluffing as he had
never bluffed before. Possibly he was brazening it out.
It was not until the battalion had hiked back through bosque and over
mountains to Manila that the lieutenant faced his tribunal: a court
whose simplified methods cut away the maze of technicalities at which
a man may grasp before a civilian jury of his peers.
If, when he actually sat in the room where the evidence was heard, his
assurance that he was to emerge clean-shriven began to reel under
blows more powerful than he had expected, at least his face continued
to testify for him with an outward serenity of confidence.
Doctor James told his story with an admirable restraint and an
absolute absence of coloring. He had meant to go to Comyn, because he
read in his eyes the signs of nerve waste and insomnia; the same
things that had caused too many suicides among the men whose nervous
constitutions failed to adapt themselves to the climate.
Before he had carried his purpose to fulfillment--perhaps a half hour
before--he had gone to look in on the case of Private Grant, who was
suffering from just such a malady, though in a more serious degree.
That private, a mountaineer from the Cumberland hills of Kentucky, had
been to all appearances merely a lunatic, although it was a case which
would yield to treatment or perhaps come to recovery even if left to
itself. On this night he had gone to see if Grant needed an opiate,
but had found the patient apparently sleeping without restlessness,
and had not roused him. At the door of the place where Grant was
under guard, he had paused for a word with Private Severance who
stood there on sentry duty.
It had been a sticky night following a hot day, and in the _calle_
upon which lay the command in billets of nipa-thatched houses, no one
but himself and the sentries were astir during the twenty minutes he
had spent strolling in the moonlight. On rounding a corner he had seen
a light in Comyn's window, and he had gone around the angle of the
adobe house, since the door was on the farther side, to offer the
captain a sleeping potion, too. That was how he chanced on the scene
of the tragedy, just a moment too late for service.
"You say," began Spurrier's counsel, on cross-examination, "that you
visited Private Grant about half an hour before Captain Comyn was
killed and found him apparently resting naturally, although on
previous nights you had thought morphia necessary to quiet his
delirium?"
The major nodded, then qualified slowly:
"Grant had not, of course, been continuously out of his head nor had
he always slept brokenly. There had been lucid periods alternating
with exhausting storm."
"You are not prepared to swear, though, that this seeming sleep might
not have been feigned?"
"I am prepared to testify that it is most unlikely."
"Yet that same night he did make his escape and deserted. That is
true, is it not?"
The major bowed. "He had sought to escape before. That was symptomatic
of his condition."
"And since then he has not been recaptured, though he was in your
opinion too ill and deranged to have deceived you by feigning sleep?"
"Quite true."
"Have you ever heard Grant threaten Captain Comyn's life?"
"Never."
"Whether he had made such threats to your knowledge or not, he did
come from that hill county of the Kentucky mountains commonly called
Bloody Brackton, did he not?"
"I believe so. His enlistment record will answer that."
"You do know, though, that the man on guard duty--the man with whom
you spoke outside--was Private Severance, also from the so-called
Kentucky feud belt and a friend of the sick man?"
"I can testify of my own knowledge only that he was Private
Severance and that he and Grant were of the same platoon--Lieutenant
Spurrier's."
The defense advocate paused and carefully framed a hypothetical
question to be answered by the witness as a medical expert.
"I will now ask you to speak from your knowledge of blood tendencies
as affected or distorted by mental abnormalities. Suppose a man to
have been born and raised under a code which still adheres to feudal
violence and the private avenging of personal grievances both real and
fancied. Suppose such a man to have conceived a bitter hatred against
his commanding officer and to have brooded over that hatred until it
had become a fixed idea--a monomania--a determination to kill; suppose
such a man to have known only the fierce influences of his retarded
hills until he came into the army and to have encountered there a
discipline which seemed to him a tyranny. I will ask you whether such
a man might not be apt to react to a homicidal mania under nervous
derangement, and whether such a homicidal mania might not develop its
own craftiness of method?"
"Such," testified the medical officer, "is a conceivable but a highly
imaginative possibility."
Then Private Severance was called and came into the room, where he
stood smartly at attention until instructed to take the witness chair.
This dark-haired private from the Cumberlands looked the soldier from
crown to sole leather, yet his features seemed to hold under their
present repose an ancient stamp of sullenness. It was an intangible
quality rather than an expression, as though it bore less relation to
his present than to some unconquerable survival from generations that
had passed on; generations that had been always peering into shadows
and searching them for lurking perils.
In his speech lingered quaintly remnants of dialect from the laureled
hills that army life had failed to eradicate, and in his manner one
could note a wariness of extreme caution. That was easy to understand,
because Private Severance, too, stood under the charge of having
permitted a prisoner to escape, and his evidence would confront him
later when he in turn occupied the dock.
"I didn't have no speech with Bud Grant that night," he testified,
"but I'd looked in some several times through the window. It was a
barred window, an' every time I peeked through it I could see Bud
layin' there asleep. The moon fell acrost his cot so I could see him
plain."
"When did you see him last?"
"After Major James had been in and come out--a full fifteen minutes
later. I'm able to swear to that, because I noticed the moon just as
the major went out, and, when I looked in through the window the last
time, the moon was a full quarter hour lower down to'rds settin'."
After a moment's pause the witness volunteered in amplification:
"Where I come from we don't have many clocks or watches. We goes by
the sun and moon."
"Then you can swear that if Private Grant fired the shot that killed
Captain Comyn, he must have escaped and eluded your sight; armed
himself, crossed the plaza; turned the corner; accomplished the act
and gotten clean away, all within the brief period of five minutes?"
"I can swear to more than that. He didn't get past me till _after_ the
pistol went off. There wasn't no way out but by the one door, and I
was right at that door all the time until I left it."
"When did you leave?"
The witness gave response without hesitation, yet with the same
serious weighing of his words.
"I was standing there, sorter peerin' up at the stars an' beginning to
feel right smart tired when I heard the shot. I heard the shout of the
corporal of the guard, too, an' then it was that I made my mistake."
He paused and went on evenly. "I hadn't ought to have stirred away
from my post, but it seemed like a sort of a general alarm, an' I went
runnin' to'rds it. That was the first chanst Bud had to get away.
When I got back he was gone."
"You are sure he was still there when the shot sounded?"
"As God looks down, I can swear he was!"
Then the defense took the witness.
"When does your enlistment expire?"
"Two months, come Sunday."
"You know to the day, don't you? You are keenly anxious for that day
to come, aren't you?"
"Why wouldn't I be? I've got folks at home."
"Haven't you and Grant both been malcontents throughout your entire
period of service?"
"It's news to me, if it's true."
"Haven't you often heard Private Grant swear vengeance against Captain
Comyn?"
"Not no more than to belly-ache some little."
"Is it not a fact that since you and Grant ran amuck on the transport
coming over, and Comyn put you both in irons, the two of you had sworn
vengeance against him; that you had both taken the blood oath to get
him?"
Severance looked blankly at his questioner and blankly shook his
head.
"That's all new tidings ter me," he asserted with entire calmness.
"Don't you know that you deliberately let Grant out immediately after
the visit of Major James and slipped him the pistol with which he
fired the shot? Didn't you do that, knowing that when the report
sounded you could make it your excuse for leaving your post, and then
perjure yourself as to the time?"
"I know full well," asserted the witness with an unshaken composure,
"that nothing like that didn't happen."
Fact built on fact until even the defendant's counsel found himself
arguing against a growing and ugly conviction. The pistol had been
identified as Spurrier's, and his explanation that he had left it
hanging in his holster at his quarters, whence some unknown person
might have abstracted it, lacked persuasiveness. The defense built a
structure of hypothesis based upon the fact that the open door of
Spurrier's room was visible from the house where Grant had been
tossing on his cot. The claim was urgently advanced that a skulking
lunatic might easily have seen the glint of blued steel, and have been
spurred in his madness by the temptation of such an implement ready to
his hand. But that, too, was held to be a fantastic claim. So the
verdict was guilty and the sentence life imprisonment. It must have
been death, had the case, for all its warp of presumption and woof of
logic, been other than circumstantial.
The defendant felt that this mitigation of the extreme penalty was a
misplaced mercy. The disgrace could be no blacker and death would at
least have brought to its period the hideousness of the nightmare
which must now stretch endlessly into the future.
It was to a prisoner, sentenced and branded, that Major Withers came
one afternoon when the court-martial of Lieutenant Spurrier had run
its course as topic-in-chief for the Officers' Club at Manila. Other
matters were already crowding it out of the minds it had profoundly
shocked.
"I want to talk to you, Jack," began the major bluntly. "I want to
talk to you with a candor that grows out of the affection we all felt
for you--before this damnable thing upset our little world. My God,
boy, you had life in your sling. You had every quality that makes the
soldier; you had every social requisite except wealth. This besetting
passion for gambling has brought the whole train of disaster--as
logically as if you had killed him at the card table itself."
"You are overlooking the fact, major," interrupted the prisoner dryly,
"that I didn't kill him. Moreover, it's too late now for the warning
to benefit me. I dare say in Leavenworth I shall have no trouble
curbing my passion for gaming." He paused and added with an irony of
despairing bitterness: "But I suppose I should thank you and say, like
the negro standing on the gallows, 'dis hyar is surely g'wine to be a
great lesson ter me.'" Suddenly the voice broke and the young man
wheeled to avert his face. "My God," he cried out, "why didn't you let
them hang me or shoot me? Any man can stiffen his legs and his spine
for five minutes of dying--even public dying--but back of those walls
with a convict's number instead of a name----" There he broke off and
the battalion commander laid a hand on his heaving shoulder.
"I didn't come to rub in preachments while you stood at the edge of
the scaffold or the jail, Jack. My warning may not be too late, after
all. We've passed the matter up to the war department with a strong
recommendation for clemency. We mean to pull every wire that can
honorably be pulled. We're making the most of your good record
heretofore and of the conviction being based on circumstantial
evidence."
He paused a moment and then went on with a trifle of embarrassment in
his voice:
"You know that Senator Beverly is at the governor general's
palace--and that his daughter is with him."
Spurrier wheeled at that and stood facing his visitor with eyes that
had kindled, but in which the light at once faded as he commented
shortly:
"Neither the senator nor Augusta has made any effort to see me since I
was brought to Manila."
"Perhaps the senator thought that was best, Jack," argued Withers.
"For the daughter, of course, I'm not prepared to speak--but I know
that Beverly has been keeping the cable hot in your behalf. Your name
has become so familiar to the operators between here and Washington
that they don't spell it out any more: they only need to rap out Sp.
now--and if I needed a voice to speak for me on Pennsylvania Avenue or
on Capitol Hill, there's no man I'd pick before the senator."
When he had gone Spurrier sat alone and to his ears came the distant
playing of a band in the plaza. Somewhere in that ancient town was the
girl who had not been to see him, nor written to him, even though,
just before his battalion had gone into the bosques across the
mountains, she had let him slip a ring on her finger, and had answered
"yes" to his question--the most personal question in the world.