The red eye of the lighthouse on Corregidor Island blazed out
through the darkness as a Pacific steamer felt her way cautiously
into Manila harbour.
Although it was nearly midnight, a woman--one of the passengers on
the steamer--was still on deck, and standing well up toward the bow
of the boat was peering into the darkness before her as if she could
not wait to see the strange new land to which she was coming. Surely
it would be a strange land to her, who, until a few weeks before
had scarcely in all her life been outside of the New England town in
which she had been born.
People who had seen her on the steamer had wondered sometimes that
a woman of her age--for she was not young--should have chosen to
go to the Philippine Islands as a nurse, as she told them she was
going. Sometimes, at first, they smiled at some of her questions,
but any who happened to be ill on the voyage, or in trouble, forgot
to do that, for in the touch of her hand and in her words there was
shown a skill and a nobleness of nature which won respect.
The colonel of a regiment stationed near Manila was sitting in his
headquarters. An orderly came to the door and saluted.
"A woman to see you, sir," he said.
"A woman? What kind of a woman?"
"A white woman, sir. Looks about fifty years old. Talks American. Says
she has only just come here. Says her name is Smith."
"Show her in."
The man went out. In a few minutes he came back again, and with him
the woman that had stayed out on the deck of the Pacific steamer when
the boat came past the light of Corregidor.
The Colonel gave his visitor a seat. "What can I do for you?" he said.
"Can I speak to you alone?"
"We are alone now."
"Can't that man out there hear?" motioning toward a soldier pacing
back and forth before the door.
"No," said the officer. "We are quite alone."
The woman unfolded a sheet of paper which she had been holding,
and looked at it a moment. Then she looked at the officer. "I want
to see Heber Smith, of Company F, of your regiment," she said. "Can
you tell me where he is?"
In spite of himself--in spite of the self possession which he would
have said his campaigning experience had given him, the Colonel
started.
"Are you his--?" he began to say. But he changed the question to,
"Was he a relative of yours?"
"I am his mother," the woman said, as if she had completed the
officer's first question in her mind and answered it.
"I have a letter from him, here," she went on. "The last one I have
had. It is dated three months ago. It is not very long." She held up
a half sheet of paper, written over on one side with a lead pencil;
but she did not offer to let the officer read what was written.
"He tells me in this letter," the woman said, "that he has disgraced
himself, been a coward, run away from some danger which he ought to
have faced; and that he can't stand the shame of it." "He says," the
woman's voice faltered for the first time, and instead of looking the
Colonel in the face, as she had been doing, her eyes were fixed on the
floor--"he says that he isn't going to try to stay here any longer,
and that he is going over to the enemy. Is this true? Did he do that?"
"Yes," said the officer slowly. "It is true."
"He says here," the woman went on, holding up the letter again,
"that I shall never hear from him again, or see him. I want you to
help me to find him."
"I would be glad to help you if I could," the man said, "but I
cannot. No one knows where the man went to, except that he disappeared
from the camp and from the city. Besides I have not the right. He was
a coward, and now he is a deserter. If he came back now he would have
to stand trial, and he might be shot."
"He is not a coward." The woman's cheeks flamed red. "Some men shut
their eyes and cringe when there comes a flash of lightning. But that
don't make them cowards. He might have been frightened at the time,
and not known what he was doing, but he is not a coward. I guess
I know that as well as anybody can tell me. He is my boy--my only
child. I've come out here to find him, and I'm going to do it. I
don't expect I'll find him quick or easy, perhaps. I've let out our
farm for a year, with the privilege of renewing the trade when the
year is up; and I'm going to stay as long as need be. I'm not going
to sit still and hold my hands while I'm waiting, either. I'm going
to be a nurse. I know how to take care of the sick and maimed all
right, and I guess from what I hear since I've been here you need
all the help of that kind you can get. All I want of you is to get
me a chance to work nursing just as close to the front as I can go,
and then do all you can to help me find out where Heber is, and then
let me have as many as you can of these heathen prisoners the men
bring in here to take care of, so I can ask them if they have seen
Heber. My boy isn't a coward, and if he has got scared and run away,
he's got to come back and face the music. Thank goodness none of the
folks at home know anything about it, and they won't if I can help it."
The woman folded the letter, and putting it back into its envelope sat
waiting. It was evident that she did not conceive of the possibility
even of her request not being granted.
The officer hesitated.
"You will have to see the General, Mrs. Smith," he said at last,
glad that it need not be his duty to tell her how hopeless her
errand was. "I will arrange for you to see him. I will take you to
him myself. I wish I could do more to help you."
"How soon can I see him?"
"Tomorrow, I think. I will find out and let you know."
"Thank you," said the woman, as she rose to go. "I don't want to lose
any time. I want to get right to work."
The next day the young soldier's mother saw the General and told
her story to him. In the mean time, apprised by the Colonel of the
regiment of the woman's errand, the General had had a report of
the case brought to him. Heber Smith had been sent out with a small
scouting party. They had been ambushed, and instead of trying to fight,
he had left the men and had run back to cover.
"But that don't necessarily make him a coward," the young man's mother
pleaded with the General. "A coward is a man who plans to run away. He
lost his head that time. Wasn't that the first time he had been put
in such a place?"
The officer admitted that it was.
"Well, then he can live it down. He has got to, for the sake of his
father's reputation as well as his own. His father was a soldier,
too," she said proudly. "He was in the Union army four years, and had
a medal given to him for bravery, and every spring since he died the
members of his Grand Army Post have decorated his grave. When Heber
comes to think of that, I know he will come back."
The General was not an old man;--that is he was not so old but that,
back in her prairie home in a western state, there was a mother to
whom he wrote letters, a mother whom he knew to value above his life
itself his reputation. The thought of her came to him now.
"I will do what I can, Mrs. Smith" he said, "to help you find your
boy. I fear I cannot give you any hope, though, and if he should be
found I cannot promise you anything as to his future."
"Thank you," said the woman. "That is all I can ask."
And so it came about that Mrs. Hannah Smith was enrolled as a nurse,
and assigned to duty as near the front in the island of Luzon as any
nurse could go.
Six months passed, and then another six came near to their
end. Mrs. Smith renewed the lease of the farm back among the New
England hills for another year, and wrote to a neighbor's wife to see
that her woolen clothes and furs were aired and then packed away with
a fresh supply of camphor to keep the moths out of them.
In this year's time Mrs. Smith had picked up a wonderful smattering
of the Spanish and Tagalog languages for a woman who had lived
the life she had before she came to the East. The reason for this,
so her companions said, was her being "just possessed to talk with
those native prisoners who are brought wounded to the hospital." The
other nurses liked her. She not only was willing to take the cases
they liked least--the natives--but asked for them.
And sometime in the course of their hospital experience, all
Mrs. Smith's native patients--if they did not die before they got
able to talk coherently--had to go through the same catechism:
Was there a white man among the people from whom they had come;
a white man who had come there from the American army?
Was he a tall young man with light hair and a smooth face?
Did he have a three-cornered white scar on one side of his chin,
where a steer had hooked him when he was a boy?