Produced by Al Haines
[Illustration: Cover art]
[Frontispiece: "_The Deputy Supervisor revealed to them the thrilling
difference between a peach and an apple_." FRONTISPIECE. _See p._ 297]
The Little Gods
A Masque of the Far East
BY
ROWLAND THOMAS
Illustrated by Charles Sarka
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1909
_Copyright, 1907, by The Ridgway Company._
_Copyright, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908, by P. F. Collier & Son._
_Copyright, 1909, by Little, Brown, and Company._
_All rights reserved_
Published March, 1909.
Second Impression.
Electrotyped and Printed at
THE COLONIAL PRESS:
C. H. Simonds & Co., Boston, U.S.A.
To
MY MOTHER AND MY FATHER
The author acknowledges the courtesy of the publishers of _Collier's_
and _Everybody's Magazine_ in granting him permission to reprint the
stories which appeared in those magazines.
CONTENTS
Prologue. The Little Gods
Chapter I. Fagan
" II. God's Little Devils
" III. The Little Man
" IV. A Little Ripple of Patriotism
" V. The Superfalous Man
" VI. The Valley Of Sunshine and Shadow
" VII. What Okimi Learned
" VIII. Where There Is No Turning
" IX. An Optimist
" X. This Fortune
" XI. McGennis's Promotion
Epilogue
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
"The Deputy Supervisor revealed to them the thrilling difference
between a peach and an apple" (_McGennis's promotion_) . . .
Frontispiece
"All I wanted was a fayah show"
Fagan and Patricia
"_Adiós_, Señor Don Augusto"
"Fought with--dishes and--knives and forks"
"Dolores gazed down on her little world as it went to sleep"
"With loose reins rode off to his house"
THE LITTLE GODS
PROLOGUE
THE LITTLE GODS
_For the life of me, as I was sitting here this sunny, late-October
morning, I could not write, a distressing condition, truly, for one
who lives by writing._
_Outside the windows of this quiet country house lay the lean fields
of New England, soberly beautiful enough in their fading autumnal
colorings, but somehow yielding no inspiration--forgive the
pretentious and convenient word--no inspiration for my pen._
_All around me my neighbors were busy; soberly engaged, each man of
them, in safe-guarding himself, his body, soul, and his possessions,
against the accidents of life and death. They too, somehow, failed
to inspire that sluggish bit of pointed gold. Neither do your sober
neighbors, friend, as I think of them. In all essentials they might
be my own. For we are all a care-worn people, we of this young West,
moving always circumspectly, hedging ourselves round with a tenfold
wall against surprises, with creeds and codes and philosophies
innumerable, all warranted Hell-proof and Heaven-kissing._
_We count him wisest who lives and loves and dies most by rule. And
the rule is that rule of our Tory Grecian forbears, "Never too much."
"We may be a wise people and a happy people," said I to myself, "but
we are quite too prudent to be counted young, in anything but years."
And so that bit of gold hung uninspired as when it left the shop. It
waited for livelier, more zestful topics than the daily grind of
sober middle age._
_Then all at once, it seemed, familiar voices called to me from that
East we deem so old, and I was back there. A street stretched
beneath me, such a street as only the Far East knows, and there only
in one enchanted city. It was a wide street, and a long one, all
aquiver with hot, stinging sunlight. It was walled with solid,
four-square houses, and above them roofs and pinnacles rose in a
hundred fantastic, airy shapes for which our Western architecture has
no names, and the fronts of the houses flashed with decorations of
barbaric red and gold. The street flamed with them. And all down
the spacious, sun-flooded length of it, filling it from brim to brim,
like a river, poured a current of tumultuous life._
_From out the crowd eyes met mine, just as they used to do. Eyes of
men intent on conquest, of goods, perhaps, or power, or pleasure, the
eyes of men who sought, not soberly. Mocking, inviting, smiling,
fathomless, straightforward eyes of women, who, forgetting, or
unknowing Heaven and Hell, still knew that they were women,
mistresses of a woman's joys and sorrows. Eyes of losers at the
game, unhopeful but uncowed. Thousands of eyes glanced up at me, and
not one solitary pair of them were like the eyes that look out
soberly from your neighbor's head, or mine._
_As my eyes questioned theirs, it seemed to me again, just as it used
to do, that there in the old East, where life began, it still throbs
most strongly, tingles most with the hot blood of youth; that there
men, eternally young, are still most unafraid, grasp with least
hesitation all life offers them, and accept the outcome of their
choice with most sincerity._
_As I was thinking that, it seemed to me that I went down into the
life and stinging sunshine of the street, and mingled with it, till
at last my steps led me down an alley and across a drawbridge that
spanned a green and pestilential moat, and I approached the low
gateway of a gray Walled City which was old when History was young.
I passed under the cavern of the gate--and my feet rang on the worn
flagstones as I passed--and came into a narrow street between low,
sombre houses without windows, and so presently to a temple which in
that city bears an unpleasant reputation. Not that scandal hangs
about it--it takes Christian tongues to make libertines and guzzlers
of Christian priests. But it is said that for some few centuries
experiments in--in Psychical Research, let us say--have been going on
in that old temple of Tzin Piaôu, with results that are not always
reassuring to a lay beholder. I was in too careless a mood to care
for that, that morning, and the porter let me pass, barbarian that I
was, and I crossed the great courtyard and came to a little cell
built in the thickness of the walls._
_Inside the cell I saw an old, old man, a priest, though but a
heathen one, half reclining on a hollowed slab of stone._
_He was a very gaunt old man, but a very tall and strong one, and his
face was like a mask of yellow parchment, seamed with a multitude of
tiny wrinkles, and his eyes were two slits set slantwise in it. But
as he heard my step and looked up, they widened, and the spark of a
smile glimmered in them._
_"It is you again, my son?" said that old heathen priest to me in
greeting, though I did not remember having seen him before that day.
"What is it now?"_
_Suddenly I knew why I had come. "My father," I said, though he was
but a heathen, "I want to see Life through your eyes."_
_He looked into me, and through me, and beyond me into vacancy, and
as he looked the spark of laughter in his eyes danced, and flickered
up into a tiny fire. "You are older now," said he. "Sit down. I
will tell you first of the Game of the Little Gods, and then you
shall see Life through my eyes."_
_"The Little Gods?" I asked, squatting on the floor. It was the only
seat he had to offer me._
_"The Great God," my heathen priest explained, unheeding me and
smiling into vacancy, "the Great God created us men in his own
image--and soon found us, as objects of His constant contemplation,
distinctly wearisome. If He could have laughed, it would not have
mattered much, but Amusement is beneath the ken of a Great God.
Therefore our inconsistencies, our pettinesses, our hopeless
contradictions, quickly wearied Him, as they would us if we had to
take them seriously, forever. And so," drawled my heathen tutor,
"the Great God, at last, in self-defense, created some Little Gods to
take charge of the everyday affairs of men. So far as they are Gods,
of course, these Little Gods are Eternal and Impartial, far raised
above Love and Aversion, Pity and Scorn, Admiration and Derision, and
all our other small emotions. To them all things are equal. But so
far as they are Little, and not Great, they are capable of Amusement.
And so," said he, "those lucky Little Gods while away Eternity by
playing games, wherein we men are counters. But we men too," he
added, smiling through me into vacancy, "if we are wise, can gain
amusement by looking on at the games we're part of."_
_"I," said I, "have never noticed anything which looked like games--"_
_"No?" he said, half mockingly. "You never watched a strong man
strive his utmost and grasp at last what he strove for, a handful of
ashes and dry leaves? Never saw a woman love with all her heart,
till she broke it, loving? Never saw Tragedy or Comedy or Farce
wherein the players were not actors? Have all Life's
contradictions--"_
_"But they've always taught me," I objected, "that in those seeming
contradictions, an inscrutable Wisdom was working for the ultimate
good of those--"_
_"My son," said my old heathen priest, stretching his old legs out on
his stony slab, "go and see for yourself. This is the hour when I
take one of my naps. See for yourself."_
CHAPTER I
FAGAN
I found myself "up the railroad," as we used to say, in a
well-remembered town. It had not changed since I saw it last. The
railroad still ran through it, straight as a pencil-stroke ruled
across the flat lands, and the rails, on their embankment, shimmered
in the sun like two unending bars of white-hot metal. The cart road
still wallowed into it, and out of it, for the town is set on an
island in the marshy level of the paddies. The crazy huts of nipa,
and crazier, decaying houses, still stood thick on either side of the
one street.
And brown women in skirts of gaudy calico still sat under the shadow
of wide shutters, dispensing such goods as Poverty can buy, while
their babies and their pigs rolled comfortably together in the dust.
The shaggy thatch still rustled in the sultry breeze, and a few
dejected palm-trees clicked their branches as of old. And, very far
away across the waveless green sea of the half-grown rice, the same
dark and threatening mountains towered into the clouds. It was all
unchanged. The merciless sun struck down just as hotly. The very
smells were smells I had often smelled before.
Suddenly there was a stir of excitement in the town. The women
crawled from the litter of their wares. The men, lighting fresh
cigarettes from the remnants of their old ones, stood up to gaze.
For down the street was coming, with the curious in-toeing shuffle of
a barefoot mountaineer, a squat, huge-muscled, naked man.
He carried a long, broad-bladed spear in his right hand, and a
head-axe was thrust through his belt, and at his back a bag, swollen
as if it held something big and round, bobbed and dangled heavily,
and something dripped from it slowly, thickly, in the dust. The
man's broad, sweat-streaked face was all agrin with excitement and
good-nature, but the natives of the town shrank back from him as he
passed. "Donde 'Mericanos?" he kept asking eagerly.
A bystander pointed to a house, one a little taller than the others,
where a flag of dingy white, barred with dingier red and blue, hung
drooping, and a group of tall, lean, sun-bronzed men dressed in
frayed shirts of blue flannel, and breeches of stained and faded
khaki, and battered campaign hats, were lounging in the dusty shade.
The bystander pointed to them, and the naked man, his face stretching
in a wider grin, broke into a clumsy trot and ran to them.
"Me got," he said, and pulled the heavy, bobbing bag from his
shoulders, and thrust it at them. They fell back hastily. "It's
something, all right," said one of them judicially. "Something
plenty dead. Sergeant," he called, "I reckon it's your deal. Here's
an Igaroot with another dead-head lookin' for you." And the others
laughed.
At that an oldish man with a long, drooping, gray moustache, and gray
eyes that were bright below their sun-burned lids, stepped from the
door. The naked man cried out again, "Me got," and held out his
dripping bag. And the saturnine old sergeant fell back, as the men
had done.
"You open it, Johnnie," he commanded. "It's too dead for me.
_Patay, sabe?_ Me no likum thataway. _Icao abieria_."
So the man undid the string that bound his bag, and opened it, and
the sergeant took one peep inside. "It's a big American nigger, all
right," he announced. "And he's sure dead. It might be him. Better
call the Captain over here, some one; I don't reckon he wants _that_
in his quarters. Where you catch him, hombre?"
The little man jerked his chin over his shoulder at those distant
mountains. "You buy?" he asked anxiously.
"You'll get the reward all right, if it's him," said the sergeant
reassuringly. "But you'll have to wait till it's identified.
There've been a lot of duplicates brought in, _sabe_."
Presently other men in khaki and flannel, who in spite of their
undress showed, somehow, as officers, came down the street, and they,
and the sergeant, and the man with the bag, went into the house.
After a long wait, an orderly came out, pale and shaken, and turned
toward the military telegraph station. "It's him," he said briefly,
to his waiting fellows. "That Contract Dentist in there knowed him
by his teeth. God! I'm plumb glad I ain't no kind of medico."
The men looked at each other, silently, for a long minute. The
spirit of jesting seemed to have left them. The judicial one spoke
first. "Well, he got _his_ good and hard at last," said he. "But he
sure got a run for his money."
Then I understood what it was all about. I wrote of that thing in
the bag once, not knowing it then for a pawn in the Game of the
Little Gods. There was a time when men called it Fagan.
While Fagan was still a kinky-haired youngster, clad only in the
traditional shirt, a question forced itself on his attention. "Why
ain't I got a pappy?" he asked his mother, and the great,
deep-bosomed woman laughed the deep, melodious laugh of her race.
"Lawszee, honey, I raickon you has," she replied. "Mos' chillen has."
"Who is my pappy?" the child persisted.
The woman laughed again. "Lawszee, chile, how you spaik me to
'maimber that? I'se got other things to 'maimber, I raickon."
We couldn't expect much of a Fagan, born of that race and class, and
he learned not to expect much of us. A bit of food, a bit of
clothing, and a chance to roll around on the levee with the other
pickaninnies, and bask in the sunshine and sniff the sweety-sour
smells from the sugar-ships, sufficed him. For many years these
pleasures were his for the taking. And as he grew older they still
sufficed, with the addition of a little cheap tobacco and cheaper
gin, and he found that a modicum of labor and a care never to offend
one of the heaven-born white race would procure them. The labor was
easy, for the son of the deep-bosomed, supple-limbed woman had grown,
as the rank, free growth of a swamp shoots up, into a great, broad,
graceful man to whom the toil of others was mere play. And he was of
a nature so easy-going and joyous and childishly obliging that the
heaven-born pointed him out with approval as "a nigger like we had
before the war."
He might have lived on thus indefinitely, but one day, over a lazy
roll of the dice, another black man took advantage of his known good
nature. And Fagan, the kindly, felt a sudden, blinding impulse to
strike. The huge black fist shot out like lightning under the
impulse of the supple, writhing muscles, and the other man dropped
with a broken neck.
Then Fagan came to the Army, and the Army received him with joy. The
surgeon's eye glistened with an artist's fervor as he thumped and
kneaded the great, perfect animal, and a wise old recruiting sergeant
guided the pen for him to sign his name. Thus he was made welcome in
that most catholic of societies, which cares not a whit for your
past, your present, or your future, so long as you have mind and body
sufficient to obey orders.
But even this slight requirement was much for Fagan. His careless,
soapless, buttonless existence was a poor training for the rigid
minutiæ of military life. And he was unfortunate in his immediate
commander. Most of the officers of the Fifty-fourth were of the
South, able to deal firmly yet kindly with the big black children
committed to their charge. But Sharpe was new to the Army, the son
of a small tradesman in the North, and had an exalted reverence for
the Regulations, and his own rank. So when he saw that the buttons
of Fagan's blouse were uncleaned, one morning at guard-mounting, he
did not announce the fact impersonally, as an officer should.
And Fagan, in serene ignorance of any law against immediate
explanation, replied with boyish, surprised chuckle, "Lawszee,
Lootenant, I raickon I plumb forgot them buttons."
"That's enough," snapped the officer. "Sergeant, put this man under
arrest."
Fagan followed to the guard-house, mildly expostulant. "He suah'd
orter give me a fairah show," he said to the sergeant. "I was jus' a
gwine to tell him. I didn't mean no hahm. All I wanted was a fayah
show."
[Illustration: "_All I wanted was a fayah show._"]
Thus began a series of petty persecutions. Fagan, with his good
nature, tried his best, but the Lieutenant would not be pleased. He
was not a bad sort in intent, simply a common, weak, official bully.
Such men usually resign early, or if they linger on in the service,
learn to shun getting in front of their men when there is firing.
By the time the regiment was ordered to the Philippines Fagan's
record loomed black with five trials. But the campaigning brought
relief. A man was required only to have his rifle in good condition,
and be on hand to use it. The regiment spent weary days, dragging
about like a slow snake under the burning sun, soaking and shivering
in the mists of evening, till men began to sicken. But not Fagan.
His melodious bellow would ring triumphant along the lines each
night, "I'se been wo'okin' on the ra'alroad," and cheer the drooping
men, till the voices of the company wits were demanding, "Who's dat
ar white man got a ra'alroad?"
And then, one day, the scouts reported that the main body of the
enemy was near, that elusive body for which the regiment had been
groping so long. After a little the snake broke out into a fan, and
went crawling across a muddy rice-paddy toward a cane-brake. Then a
flight of strangely drawling insects sang overhead, and as always,
when firing is wild and high, some men in the reserve, 'way in the
rear, lay down very suddenly.
The merry bugles rattled, and the fan dissolved into a thin brown
line of men who advanced swiftly to the edge of the brake, firing as
they went. And then, all at once, the brake was alive with dizzily
flashing steel. A little brown man rose in front of Fagan, and a
flash darted straight at his head. Instinctively his muscles
reacted, and he ducked backward like a boxer. So the bolo missed his
head, but the sharp point, tearing downward, ripped through shirt and
flesh on his breast.
Fagan stared stupidly at the dripping red edges of the blue cloth
till the sharp tingle of the flesh stirred him. As before, he felt a
blinding impulse to strike, and whirled his heavy rifle in one hand,
as a boy might a stick. He looked down at the quivering, moaning
thing before him, and a mad joy of strength surged over him. A
little way apart a struggling group was weaving in and out with darts
of steel and quick flashes of rifles, and hoarse gruntings and
cursings. He ran toward it, swinging his broken rifle round his
head. "Give 'em heyell, boys," he shouted. "Kill the damn niggers."
From that day he was called Wild Fagan, and Fagan the Nigger-Killer,
and as the campaign progressed, his renown passed beyond his
regiment. "Heard about that wild nigger in the Fifty-fourth?" asked
the Cavalry, borrowing a pinch of Durham and a pit of paper from the
Mountain Battery. "Don't sabe fire his rifle. Just butts in and
swats 'em with it, like he was wantin' to play gollf." The story
grew till the Marines, returning from shore service, told the Fleet,
half-seriously, of a wild regiment come straight from Africa, "what
only knew how to fight with war-clubs." And jacky, ever ready to
believe, swore softly in admiration, and spat over the rail, and
dreamed of having a little go with that regiment, some night in
Nagasaki, when every one had had about seven drinks all round.
Even the officers began to boast. "Oh, you mean our man Fagan," the
Colonel would say to guests at mess. "Yes, he's a good man.
Expensive--a rifle lasts him about a day when things are lively;--but
efficient. Yes, highly efficient. The natives are beginning to
dodge the regiment. Yes, I'll let you see him after dinner. Finest
build of a man you ever laid eyes on. Like a cat, you know, like a
cat and a grizzly rolled into one."
And Fagan through it all was unchanged, good-natured, childlike as
ever. He was even a bit ashamed of his strength. "That little scrap
down by the bridge?" he would say to a group of admirers. "Oh, that
all wa'n't nothin'. That big Fillypeeno? Oh, yes, I hit him. Yes,
I raickon I smashed him some," he would muse with his slow smile. "I
broke my gun on him. Anybody got any tobacca? I nevah can keep no
tobacca."
It was after the fighting was done and the regiment went into
stations of companies in the villages that the change began to come.
The men, keyed to exertion and excitement, found the idleness of
barrack life first pleasant, then irksome. And they were at home in
these sunny islands, far more at home than ever in the States. They
read the freedom of the land in the burning sky, and the clicking
palms, and the lazy air. More than anywhere else, they read it in
the dark, admiring eyes of the brown, slim, soft-moving girls. The
men began to be absent at check roll-call at Taps.
Then all the wisdom and tact of an officer was needed. Too great
easiness meant loss of control, harshness meant desertions. For a
time Lieutenant Sharpe did very well. He overlooked what he could,
and was unangered in his firmness when he must be firm. But nature
and fixed habit overcame him, and Fagan was naturally the chief
sufferer, for the officer had grown into the belief that Fagan was
the probable cause of every misdemeanor in the company. So it was a
reprimand, and then another sharper, and then the summary
court--where the Lieutenant was prosecutor and jury and
judge--sentenced Fagan to the loss of a month's pay for attempting to
run the guard at some unearthly hour of the night. Within a week he
repeated the offence, and Lieutenant Sharpe, with the fear of God and
the Regulations in his heart, and wondrous small understanding in his
head, sentenced him to a "month and a month." A month of confinement
will give any man much time for reflection, and the Lieutenant hoped
it might prove salutary.
Fagan received his sentence with ominous lack of his former
protestations, and went quietly to the guard-house. But being
neither an accomplished thinker nor an expert in moral theory, he did
not reflect. He merely sat there and brooded. "All I'm lookin' for
is jus' a fayah show," he told himself, over and over again. "He use
me right, an' I'll use him right. Ain't I the bes' fightin' man in
the regiment, ain't the Kuhnel done said so, a whole plainty o'
times? When they's fightin', I'll be there. But that little
Lootenant--Lawszee, couldn' I smash him--all I want is jus' a
straight deal."
Fagan emerged at the end of his month still a child, but a sullen
child now, moping over a bitter sense of injustice. "I ain' nevah
gwine to stay in theah anothah night," he told his friend the
Sergeant. "All I want is a fayah deal, an' I'll use ev'rybody
straight. But no one ain't gwine to keep me in theah again." The
Sergeant, wise as most old soldiers, made no answer. If the
Lieutenant and Wild Fagan were to fight it out, it was no affair of
the Sergeant's.
But Fagan, over the drinks, repeated his ultimatum to other men, who
waited joyously for the clash, and were surprised and disappointed
when Fagan went quietly to the guard-house once again, placed there
to await the sitting of a general court martial. The quietness was
only because he was learning to plan. When the silence of midnight
came, he stole over to an inner window, braced a shoulder and a knee,
and the rusted bars yielded noiselessly. He crept up-stairs to his
squad-room and took the rifle and the belt, heavy with two hundred
rounds of ammunition, from the head of his bunk, and crept as
silently down. He tried to steal by the guard at the gate, but the
man turned and leveled his rifle, hardly six feet away.
"Halt! Who goes theah?" he challenged, with the mechanical lilt of
the sentry.
"You min' you' business, Sam, an' I'll ten' to mine," Fagan growled.
But the man persisted, though with a tremor in his voice. "Yo' halt,
Fagan. Ah've got to fin'--"
Fagan gripped his rifle by the muzzle, and stepped swiftly toward the
leveled one. "You git out o' heah, Sam," he ordered. "Git, or I'll
smash you."
The sentry dropped his rifle. "Ah ain' nevah troubled you all,
Fagan," he whined. "Ah'm a frien' o' you all's. You lait me alone."
He sank to his knees. "You lait me alone. Don' you touch me, don'
you touch--" His voice rose to a shriek, but he was talking to empty
air. Fagan had picked up the extra rifle and slipped away toward the
town.
"Ah couldn' he'ep it, sah. He done come up out o' the dahk, with his
eyes a buhnin', an' he sa-ays, 'Ah'll maash you, Sam.' Ah couldn'
he'ep mase'ef. Ah've seen him maash these yere Fillypeenos." Thus
the sentry to the Lieutenant next morning, with heartfelt
earnestness. "Ah wouldn' cared if he was gwine to shoot, but he
comes a grinnin', an' he sa-ays, 'Ah'll maash you, Sam.' That's what
he sa-ays, an' he'd a done it," he explained later, to a group of
sympathizing men. "Ah don' min' gettin' shot, but Ah suah don'
wantah git maashed. So Ah dropped ma rifle. Ah've seen him maash
these yere Fillypeenos. He ain' no man, he's a plumb bawn devil,
tha's what he is," and Sam wiped the sweat drops from his throat with
the back of his big, shaking hand.
Then ensued many tentative pushings at the bars, to prove that no two
mere men could spring them back into position, and many side-long
glances at Fagan's ownerless cot and the chest which stood beside it,
closed and mysterious. When the men turned in, no one objected that
Sam placed a lighted candle on it. "They don' come roun' wheah it's
light," he explained vaguely to the room, and every one knew what
"they" meant. Even the old Sergeant, coming through at roll-call,
apparently did not see the forbidden light.
And now the United States Army lapsed into a state of hysteria which
often amused and puzzled those who witnessed it. It became haunted
by a big black man who mashed people instead of shooting them
decently. There happened to be a recrudescence of fighting, and the
Army imputed it to Fagan. That stupid, brooding, grown-up child
became a tactician, a strategist, a second De Wet of guerilla warfare.
"I have the honor to report," wrote young Shavetail to the
A.G.O.--through proper channels--"a sharp engagement wherein the
enemy hindered the development of my flanking movement by--unusual
brilliancy for native leaders--honor to suggest--deserter Fagan
rumored to be in vicinity."
"Scouts report," wired Major Oakleaf, "two hours' ride southeast of
camp, huge negro. Request description renegade Fagan."
"We're out gunnin' fer that big buck nigger answers to the name of
Fagan," remarked Mountain Battery to Cavalry, borrowing back the
"makings" and a match to boot. "He's seen up back here in the
foot-hills last night."
"Wire through this mornin'," jeered Signal Corps, overhearing,
"reportin' him up Cagayan way. An' yesterday he was down in
Batangas. He sure must hike light."
"Well, he's a lively nigger, from all I hear," said Cavalry
judicially. "Some one'll likely get hurt 'fore they get him."
"He'll maybe get hurt a little bit himself, just a shade, if this old
girl falls on him," laughed Mountain Battery, patting the nose of the
vicious little gun in the packsaddle. "Ho' still, you old
mule-horse, you! Think I'll stand for you kickin' me?"
So the little armies marched and sweated, and the wires carried
bulletins to every little post: "Inform troops and natives--renegade
Fagan, deserter Fifty-fourth--very big black negro, age twenty-one,
large bolo scar on breast--five hundred dollars, gold, alive or dead."
And all the while Fagan was living quietly with the girl who had been
the chief cause of all his insubordination, in a little mountain
village not fifty miles from the place where his ghost first rose and
called for lighted candles.
The reports of his evil fame brought him no joy. "Why can't they let
us alone," he complained to Patricia. "I never hurt them, and if
they don't trouble us we won't trouble them. Eh, Patsí?" and he
swept the slender girl up to his shoulder.
"Pooh," cried Patricia disdainfully, from her height. "What do we
care for them! You will kill them all, won't you?" She pinched the
great supporting arm with a sigh of satisfaction. "Hola, there's
Enrique's cock fighting with Juan's. Let's go and watch them." And
as they walked down the narrow grassy street, the people stepped
aside with cheerful smiles, for all the world like the dusty
pickaninnies on the levee when one of the heaven-born passes by.
For a long time Fagan and Patricia lived on in the village, till the
man was becoming a myth. A dozen enterprising hunters had brought in
his head, and the papers in Manila had ceased to give circumstantial
accounts of his capture even when news was short. But at last an
American prisoner came to the town, the only white man who saw Fagan
alive after his desertion. By a strange chance he was an officer of
the Fifty-fourth, and Fagan received him with sober joy.
"I'se right glad to see you, Lootenant," he said. "I raickoned
they'd bring you up heah, when I hea'd you was done capchuhed. They
kind brings mos' ev'ything up to me, these days."
The white man was not joyous, though undismayed. "What are you going
to do with me, now you've got me?" he demanded.
"Don' you worry, Lootenant," Fagan answered. "I wouldn' huht you.
No, sir, you nevah troubled me. You jus' set down an' have a smoke.
I'se a gwine to send you down, jus' as soon as I can."
They sat and smoked in silence, the giant negro, the prisoner in his
draggled uniform, the little brown guards with their naked bobs. At
last Fagan said, "I raickon we could talk bettah if these yere guards
was away. You git," he pointed to them. "Course you give you' wohd,
Lootenant, you won't try to 'scape."
The officer nodded, and fell to watching the great, quiet, unshapen
black face. It roused his curiosity for a certain non-offensive air
of self-reliance which he had never seen in a black face before.
"Fagan," he asked suddenly, "why did you do it?"
"Do what, Lootenant?"
"Desert, and lead the natives against us, and all that."
The negro clenched his great fist. "This yere fool talk makes me
plumb riled," he said. "I ain' nevah fought the 'Mericans. I'se a
'Merican myse'f, ain't I? An' what would I want to go yampin' roun'
the country for, anyway? I'se got all I want right heah, chickens,
an' yams, an' a good dry house, an'--" He reached out his hand and
grasped Patricia's little one, and they smiled at each other. "No,
sir, I don' want no moah fightin'. I'se got a good home, an' I goes
to sleep when I wants to, an' I gits up when I wants to, an' I has
clean clo'es ev'y day. You tell the Kuhnel, Lootenant, you tell him
Fagan nevah went to huht no 'Mericans, an' nevah will, less'n they
goes to huht me first. You believe that, don' you, Lootenant?" And
the officer gravely nodded "Yes."
"Bout that desertin', now. I'se thought a whole lot about that, an'
I raickon I done it jus' because I had to have mo' room. I'se some
big, I raickon--" he let his eyes travel slowly down his body and
chuckled--"seems like I has to have a whole plainty o' room. Seems
like they wahn't room fo' me an' Lootenant Sha'ap in one ahmy. No,
sir. An' then, I dunno, Lootenant, maybe you nevah felt how a woman
can make you 'shamed of youse'f? This Patricia lady, maybe she don'
seem like much to you, but she's a heap to me--yes, sir,--an' she
kep' sayin', 'What for you go calabozo, Fagan? Kill the little pig
of a teniente,' she says. 'Kill ev'rybody. You'se big enough.' An'
then she laughs at me. 'Is you 'fraid, big man?' she says. 'Lend me
youah revolvah, then. I'se little, but I ain't afraid.' She jus'
made me plumb scairt of myse'f, an' we come away, 'cause Patsí an' me
needed more room 'n what Lootenant Sha'ap could give us. 'Pears like
you couldn' understan' it, but that's the way it was, I raickon. I
jus' had to desert or huht somebody bad."
He stopped, and the woman began to speak to him. The white man
watched her, and a great light burst upon him. She was glorious,
this slim, soft brown thing with the dusky hair and the straight,
slender neck, and--"I'se little, but I ain't afraid." Ages of
civilization dropped from the man as he gazed, and with a graceless
pity he compared the pale fettered women he had known with this free,
wild, perfect thing whose feeling was her life. She was talking with
her tongue and eyes and hands, and Fagan answered a few words and
laughed, and she laughed, too, a sound as natural and sweet as the
ripple of a stream, and then her great eyes lighted with earnestness
as she went on. The Lieutenant felt a pang of something almost
jealousy. He could never bring fire to those eyes, he was not a man
to her, only a thing, not to be compared with that black giant.
Fagan turned to him with an amused chuckle. "She's full o' ginger,"
he said. "I raickon it's lucky I was heah when you come. She's jus'
been askin' when I was goin' to kill you. 'You must,' she says, 'or
else he'll lead soldiers up heah.' That's all right, Lootenant," he
said, as the officer moved uneasily. "That's you' duty, an' it's all
right, only she don' understand that. 'Le's kill him now,' she says.
'You keep a talkin' with him, an' I'll put the knife into him from
behin'. It won' be no trouble at all.' Lawszee," he chuckled
admiringly, "I raickon she'd a done it, too. She's got moah ginger!"
The Lieutenant smiled with him, but he soon rose, unobtrusively, and
seated himself with his back to the solid corner-post of the house.
Patricia watched the manoeuvre with unfathomable eyes, and the men
burst into laughter; then she hung her head like a child caught in
some mischief. The gesture was adorable, and suddenly sadness
stifled the white man's laughter.
"I'm sorry about reporting your presence here," he said. "I
understand, I think, and I believe you don't want to make trouble,
but--"
"Don' you worry about that," Fagan broke in. "I'se a gwine to send
you down to the ra'alroad this afternoon. An' now Patsí's goin' to
get you some dinner."
"Fagan," said the Lieutenant, yet more earnestly, while his guard
waited for him to mount, "I'm right sorry about this. But--why don't
you come down with me now and surrender?" he asked impulsively.
"That will help, and I can explain some things to the court, and
you'll only get six months or so, for desertion. Only six months,
and then--you can come back to Patricia," he ended almost enviously.
The negro seemed to swell before the white man's astonished eyes.
"I'se sorry, too. It's been mighty pleasant, livin' heah," he said
simply. "An' thank you fer askin' me to come down. I know you means
it straight. But you can't see it like I do. Down theah I'se a
niggah soldier. Up heah I'se-- Nobody ain't got any right to try
me," he burst out. "I nevah troubled _them_. You tell the Kuhnel
that, I want he should understan'. I don' want to huht no one, but
I'se nevah gwine into no gahd-house again. Good-by, Lootenant, an'
luck. I don' raickon we all'll evah meet up again."
[Illustration: _Fagan and Patricia_.]
So Fagan and Patricia must needs leave the snug little house at the
end of the sleepy, grass-grown street, and go out on the High Trail,
the unknown of the people of the plains, a broad highway to things
with hoofs and claws and wings, and to men little less wild than
they, the men of the hills. At times the brown thread of the Trail
was twined amid the giant roots of trees, and they wandered in a cool
twilight, alone with the long creepers and the ferns and the bright
birds which played about some opening in the matted roof, far above
their heads, where the sun dropped through for a brief hour.
Sometimes it clung to the massive walls of a cañon, where a river
boiled so far below that the sound of its torment came to their ears
like the babble of a brook. Sometimes it shot upward to the realm of
the clouds, and from the bare, grassy heights they peered out through
shifting mist wreaths over all the cities and fields of the plains to
the blue hint of the distant sea.
Fagan and Patricia followed the Trail steadily but leisurely, day
after day. There was no call for haste, no white pursuer knew that
road. So they laughed and played, and lay for hours beside some cool
spring, basking in the warm sunshine and the thin, sharp air, and
camped at night in little valleys under a pall of cloud. Once Fagan
shot a deer, and they delayed for days, drying the meat over pungent
wood-smoke. But as their muscles hardened to the Trail, they
insensibly made greater progress, in spite of their dallying.
Two weeks brought them to the land of the Unknown, had they but known
it. The mountains were higher and wilder, the cloud-caps more
frequent. Often the forest on some huge hill, towering black above
the Trail, was thin and pointed at the top, as if it had been torn,
and there, unseen of them, was a village perched high on the trunks
of trees, whence keen-eyed men watched their progress. But they were
children of the plains and could not know, so they walked undismayed.
And the keen-eyed men walked with them, unseen, frisking along above
them over ground where others would have crept--short, huge-limbed
men, whose stiff black hair flowed over their shoulders, and was tied
out of their eyes with fillets, men who squatted naked in the mists
of evening and did not shiver, men who brought their sweethearts
hideous dowries of human heads. They hung about the Trail, watching
these strange creatures who walked openly and undismayed in the land
of Fear. Often, when the camp-fire was lighted, they stole up with
their muscles twitching like a cat's before she springs, and then
halted as a great voice rang over the forest--"I'se been wo'okin' on
the ra'alroad"--and they clawed their way up the slopes to the
long-legged villages, and took counsel together in the queer
fire-shadows.
One evening as they camped, Patricia missed a little bundle of
venison and strolled back along the Trail to look for it. Fagan
kindled the fire and then strolled back, too. "Hoy, Patsí," he
called. The forest was silent. He turned a bend in the Trail, and
there--Fagan gazed at it stupidly. Then the blind impulse of wrath
swept over him again. But there was naught to strike. The long
shadows of the trees lay across the Trail, the creepers swayed lazily
in the evening breeze; far up, a crow called petulantly to her
belated mate. Fagan swung his arm helplessly at the forest.
"Come out," he moaned, "come out wheah I can see you. Come out, you
cowards, you sneakin' dogs that kills women from behind. I'se not
afraid of you. Oh, I'll mash _you_! Come!" With a soft chug, a
lance stuck quivering in the tree beside him. Otherwise all was
silent; even the crow had ceased to scold. He looked down. A darker
shadow was stealing among the lengthening ones on the Trail. The
spirit of the forest gripped Fagan with an icy hand, the spirit of
Dread. He ran blindly to the fire, seized his rifle, and took up the
Trail alone.
For three days and nights he hurried on. The empty pain of his
stomach, the dizzying, numbing lack of sleep, could not hold him
against the dread of his unseen escort. It gave little sign, simply
the rustling of a fern now and then, the swaying of one creeper when
others were still, but he felt its presence and staggered on. On the
evening of the third day, he stepped suddenly from the forest into a
little theatre among the hills. A clear brook bubbled over golden
gravel; the turf beneath a great solitary tree was thick and soft.
Wild cocks in the wood were crowing their families to roost.
Everything was quiet and peaceful, and Fagan, as he gazed, became
peaceful and quiet, too. He flung himself on the soft turf, and
drank his fill from the little brook. As always, when he sought to
rest, the forest became vague with life. A covey of jungle-fowl,
flushed by a sudden fright, whirred across the opening. A stone
rolled somewhere close at hand, dislodged by a purposely careless
foot. But this time Fagan merely grinned, and shook off his clinging
cartridge-belt. "You can' bluff me no moah," he said to the forest,
a trick he had learned of late. A fern swayed not a dozen yards
away, and he clicked a cartridge into his Krag and fired. "You git
out," he chuckled. "I'se a gittin' tired of you' company."
When he was rested a little, he kindled a fire and toasted a bit of
venison. Then he lay back lazily and twisted his last bit of tobacco
into a cigarette. Between puffs he bellowed his evening song, and
the rude melody took on the sweetness of a ballad. "Don' you heah
the bugle callin'?" Fagan sang, and tossed the butt of the cigarette
into the fire. It was quite dark now in the hollow, and he sat in a
little circle of dancing light. He looked at the wall of blackness
with quiet, unfrightened eyes that presently began to close with the
pressure of a mighty drowsiness.
"I'se po'owful sleepy now," he announced at length, "an' I'se a gwine
to bed. I was hopin' to set up an' meet some of you all, but I can't
do it. When you all wants me, you all can wake me up." The fire
flickered, and he pillowed his head on his arm, and watched the dance
of the shadows grow shorter. "Lawszee," he murmured, drowsily, as
the great numbness of sleep overcame him, "I raickon Patricia'd think
I was scairt again. She'd a sat up an' waited foh them, but I can't.
That little girl did have the po'owf'les' lot o' ginger in her." He
threw his great arm protectingly over the empty ground beside him.
"Good night, Patsí," he murmured.
In that well-remembered town among the paddies, a squat and naked
man, huge-muscled, came out of the door of the quarters. In his hand
he carried a broad-bladed spear. A head-axe, bright as only
speckless steel can be in sunlight, flashed in his girdle. And at
his back a bag, plumply round, bobbed heavily, and as it bobbed it
gave out a dull jingle, as of coined metal.
"Got his money, all right," said one of the group that watched him.
The savage halted, and grinned widely at each in turn. "Me got," he
announced proudly. "_Mucho dinero_. _Mucho mucho dinero_. Me got."
He could scarcely contain his joy.
One of the watchers growled. "I'm not in favior," said he, "of
payin' gu-gus for killin' white men, no matter whether they're white
or black. It's a catchin' habit." It was the judicial soldier. He
swung his lean bulk toward the grinning little man. "Now you've got
it," he commanded, "git!"
The savage, half-comprehending, turned and passed down the path they
opened for him, and down the sun-beaten, dusty street, where the
silent people fell away before him as if he carried pestilence. And
so they saw the last of him, making for those distant, cloud-hung
hills of his, moving clumsily but swiftly across the paddies at his
shuffling trot, while the price of a man's rebellion bobbed, and
jingled dully at his back.