THE LITTLE MAN
It would be hard to say whether the porter or I was most bewildered
by our meeting, for I, mind you, had made a long journey on the
mountain with Fermin Majusay, looking for a certain butterfly you
wouldn't be interested in, and had spent a whole night by the fire
which Fermin made, while the porter had only to go to the other end
of the courtyard of the temple of Tzin Piaôu with his water-jug. Yet
we returned from our respective errands at the same moment, and met
at the door of my heathen tutor's cell! The porter came within an
ace of letting the jug fall, and I dare say I should have done the
same thing, if I had had a jug.
The old gentleman looked up at Nang and me, and into us, and through
us, with eyes that smiled into vacancy, and at that moment, I think,
I first began to entertain some doubts of his complete benevolence.
"Well, Nang," purred the old gentleman from his slab, "what's the
matter with you?"
"Holy One," stammered the porter, "not two pipes ago I let this
gentleman out to go on a long journey. And here he is. And he has
not come back, for I barred the gate behind him."
"Oh, well, Nang, what difference does that make?" purred the Holy
One, soothingly. "You may go now."
The porter went away, shaking his head and muttering, and my heathen
priest and I were left alone together.
"And have you had," said he, raising himself a little on his hollowed
slab, "an easy and a pleasant journey?"
"I did not go for pleasure," I answered sulkily, for I felt that he
was mocking me.
"Ah, yes," he answered quickly, "it was for instruction. I forgot.
And did you gain instruction from my Little Gods?"
"This time you sent me," I reminded him, "to see some Little Devils."
The spark in his eyes flickered into flame again. "Did I!" he
murmured, purringly as a cat. "How I keep forgetting. But after
all, it's merely a matter of names. Did you like what you saw?"
"No," I answered bluntly, "I did not. Your Little Gods, or your
Little Devils, whatever you choose to call them, seem to me the
veriest fiends. And cowardly fiends, at that. They catch men like
rats, in traps, and drown them, helpless, as men drown rats."
"My son," purred my old heathen priest, "I wouldn't call them
cowards, if I were you. They might not like it."
"Like it or not," said I, hotly, "they are cowards, if what I've seen
of them is a fair sample of their ways. Do they never give a man a
fair chance, in the open, to fight for his life, and for things
dearer to him than life?"
"For life and things dearer than life," echoed my old heathen priest,
and yawned, ever so slightly, and stretched his old legs out on his
slab. "Dear me, I don't see why they shouldn't. Though of course I
know nothing about it. Suppose," he suggested, "you look that up for
yourself. I dislike to seem selfish, but really this is an hour
which I invariably devote to a nap."
He made a little imperative, dismissing gesture with his hand, and--
"An' this," says big Terry Clancy, reaching over and getting a grip
on the little man's collar, "this is our Scuts, the married man."
I never served in a company yet--and I've served in so many, first
and last, that I'll never do anything else--I never served in a
company yet that didn't have a bully and a fool in it. You can
always tell them. No one ever dares to cuss out the bully, and
somebody is all the time cussin' out the fool. In the old company
the bully was Clancy, relieving me, as Special Orders says. We had
some argument about it at first, being about of a size and the
biggest men there, but Terry was younger than me, and he relieved me.
The fool was a poor little yellow dog that we called Scuts. I don't
even remember his name. He was the most helpless, discouraged,
weak-eyed little _hombre_ the sun ever dodged behind a cloud to keep
from shining on. Worse than that, he had cold feet. All through the
China campaign he was so scared he needn't have been afraid at all.
A bullet couldn't hit such a little wrinkled, pinched-up thing as he
was, even if it wanted to. But of course he got it worse than if
he'd been just plain fool. The company don't stand for cold feet.
Even the officers got to jollyin' about him. "The little man," the
Captain always called him. "H'm," grunts the Captain, the day we was
getting it so bad in front of Tientsin. One of them club-footed
Chinese bullets had just bored through his leg, and it looked like
he'd bleed to death before the Doctor could fix him up. "H'm.
Artery gone, you say? Where's the little man? He's just about the
size to crawl in and hang onto it till you're ready to tie it. H'm."
It was the boys telling that to each other, and the Old Man's sending
down the line afterwards to know if anybody had the makings of a
cigarette, that kept the company from breaking that day, I reckon.
We got it hard. If the Old Man had been with us after that, Scuts
would sure have had to go. But he being in hospital, the Lieutenant
just took the whole outfit with him, the part that could walk,
anyway, and Scuts went back to Manila with us, and down to Samar.
"An' this," says Terry, picking Scuts off the bench and shaking him
careless, like he was a rag baby, "is the idol of his company, the
bold bad soldier lad that won the heart an' tuba-stand of the
prettiest little brown girl in Samar. Boys," says he, spinning the
little man round with a thumb and finger in the back of his neck,
"let me present the husband of the beauteous Marie. Bow to the
gentlemen, Scutsy."
"Aw, lemme go, Terry," says Scuts, blushing pink inside of his yellow
skin, and grinning like a puppy that's just been kicked. "Aw, you
lemme go."
"You set down, Scuts," says Terry, spinning him round again and
laying him on the bench. "Set down an' tell us all about it. Give
us a tip. We're all wantin' to know how you did it. We might want
to get married ourselves some day."
"Aw, you gwan," says Scuts, twistin' round, with that little damp
grin of his. "You're joshin' me."
"Man," says Terry, "'tis no josh. Honor bright, we're all envyin'
you gettin' a fine pretty little girl like that. Eh, Casey?" he says
to me.
"Straight goods," says I. "The little man pulled down a cold hand
that deal."
"Hear that, Scutsy?" says Terry. "Come on, now, and tell us about
it."
"Aw," says Scuts, throwing a chest as big around as my arm, and
twisting a few white hairs on his upper lip, which was his way of
wagging his tail, "Aw," he says, "Marie, aw--I kind of helped her
keepin' her books, y' know, showin' her how to spell the boys' names
an' all that business, an' we got to be pretty good friends. An' one
day she says to me, 'Scuts, all the girls but me has got American
man, an' they laugh at me,' she says. 'Scuts, I want a 'Merican man
myself.' 'All right,' I says, never thinkin' of myself, 'I'll tell
the boys.' 'Scuts,' she says, 'I got plenty _dinero_ sellin' _tuba_
to the boys, an' I likes you. You be my man.' Aw," says Scuts,
twistin' the hairs, "I looked at her, an' I seen she was pretty
fair-lookin', so I says, 'All right, Marie.' An' I ain't ashamed of
it, neither," says Scuts, looking round with his big blue eyes, as
the crowd begins to laugh. "She's 'bout th' nicest girl in this
town, I reckon," Scuts says.
"Scuts, you gobble the pot," says Terry, twisting him off the bench.
"You run along to Marie right now, an' tell her to be sure and wrap a
blanket round you before she puts you to bed. Wouldn't that beat
hell, now," he says to us, watching the little man trot off
down-town. "They're all alike," he says. "Give a white one fifty
plunks to buy a dog, an' she'll come back with a blear-eyed,
knock-kneed pug, and give a brown one a chance at th' company, an'
she picks out Scuts. Marie's a good, girl, too. That's th' worst of
it. Th' better they are th' less they know," says Terry, "an' by th'
time they get all th' _sabe_ they need, nobody'd take th'm for a
gift. Who's comin' over in th' grove an' drink a cocoanut?"
This was along before Balangiga, and things were running easy, the
Old Man being still in hospital, and the Lieutenant being only a boy.
A straight boy he was, but not sure yet how he ought to take us. The
country was quiet and the people friendly as bugs, and we got
careless. About half the boys was sleepin' out of quarters off and
on, and the Top didn't say anything. I don't blame him. Of course
me and Terry and a lot of other old-timers didn't go in for that way
of doing business, but it's different with a boy. The only home he
has while he's in the service is the kind he can make by hanging up
his hat and ordering the drinks, and he takes it pretty rough if you
don't let him have that in a place like the Philippines. So we went
drifting along with only two sentries posted, and the quarters half
empty every night, never looking for any trouble.
But one afternoon Scuts came trotting in, looking as yellow as
Durham, and had a _hablar_ with the Top, and then they both went
across to the Lieutenant's quarters. They didn't come out till just
before Assembly went for Retreat, and we smelled something. Sure
enough, orders was read to keep magazines loaded, carry two hundred
rounds in the belt, and not be absent from quarters between sunset
and sunrise. Soon as we were dismissed, we got after Scuts.
"The natives had it fixed to rush us at night," he says. "Marie
tipped me off. She told me not to be out of quarters to-night, an'
th' Top, he figured out the rest," says Scuts, shortsighting, you
might say, out into the underbrush as if he expected to see a gang of
bolomen, and holding tight to his rifle.
"An' th' lady, she had another friend," sings out Piggy O'Neil. The
crowd laughs, and Scuts turns a dirty pink again.
"Aw," he says, "she wouldn't tell me no lie. She's a good straight
girl."
Then we began to debate it, the way we always do in the Army, if it's
only a question of how far it is from New York to the moon, and
finally everybody called everybody else a liar and we went to sleep.
In the morning everything was quiet and peaceful, so after drill the
crowd was beginning to jolly Scuts for fair, when the operator stuck
his head out of the window.
"Come up here, some of you, for God's sake," he says, and we didn't
stop to ask questions. He was bending over his ticker, white as a
sheet. "I'm a fool, all right," he says, "but this is sure gettin'
on my nerve. There was a message started to go through from
Balangiga ten minutes ago, and all to once-- Hear that!" he says.
The machine gave a jerky little chatter. "It's like a man sendin' in
his sleep," says the operator. "For ten mortal minutes that thing
has been stuttering halves of words."
"Who is it?" asks Terry.
"Murphy's sendin'," says the operator.
"Then he's jokin' with ye," says Terry. "Billy always was a great
hand for his--"
"Huh?" grunts the operator, bending over, as she begun to stutter
again.
"What's he saying?" somebody asked, but the operator didn't seem to
hear him. Then all at once he began to talk in a voice that didn't
belong to him.
"Balangiga," he read, "seven-ten A.M. Company--attacked
by--bolomen--while at--breakfast. Rifles in quarters. Fought
with--dishes and--knives and forks--but--no good--"
[Illustration: "_Fought with--dishes and--knives and forks._"]
"God!" says somebody, and a dozen say, "Shut up."
But the operator didn't seem to mind. "Look out for--yourselves," he
read. And then he begun to call out a list of names, very slow, and
between each one you could hear the crowd draw a long breath.
"Sullivan--Brewster--Fleishart--Nickerson--"
"Is that Tommy Nickerson?" says somebody.
"Shut up," says Terry.
"But Tommy was my bunky for three--"
"--Slavin--" reads the operator--"Kelly--Hunt--" and so he goes on,
Terry checking off till we thought he never would stop.
"Fourty-five, fourty-six, fourty-seven, fourty-eight," he says. Then
the machine stopped talking. "That's all," says Terry.
"Fourty-eight good men that they've killed--"
"Huh?" grunts the man again, and then the machine began to click very
slow, and the operator's eyes bulged out of his head. "Murphy!" he
says. "Christ," he says, "it can't be Murphy. Murphy's sendin'.
Billy," he says, jabbing at his key and then listening. The machine
clicked once or twice and then stopped. The operator turns round to
us. "It's Billy," he says. "Billy's been sendin' this, an' he's
dead." The big fellow just dropped down on his table and cried.
We looked at him and we looked at each other, and then we went
down-stairs on tiptoe, like there was a dyin' man in the house.
"Fourty-nine," says Terry, whispering like--"fourty-nine men of the
regiment killed at breakfast, with no show to help themselves. God!
And we might a got the same thing only--Scuts," he says, "where's
that little woman o' yours?"
"Warn't she straight?" says Scuts, throwing his chest.
"You poor fool," Terry shouts, "go and get her up here before those
devils suspect she told us. Take your rifle, damn you," he says, as
the little man trotted off. "Fourty-nine o' them killed fightin'
with their mess-kits. God!"
Just as we was getting into our kits, Scuts comes back. "I can't
find her," he says. "I ast her mother, an' she just grinned at me,"
he says, staring out of the window as if he expects to see her there.
"I can't find her," he says. "Terry, do you s'pose--"
"Scuts," Terry yells at him, "you get ready to go out on this patrol
with us. Do you hear, or have I got to bat you?" he says, like he
meant it.
We scouted down through the town, the people smiling at us just as
friendly as ever, and never a sign of Marie could we get. So we
swung out through the paddies and circled the town, coming back
toward the quarters through the grove of cocoa-palms. The Lieutenant
was on the point, and all at once he stopped short. We pushed up,
and there, tied to a big palm-tree, was something I've tried hard to
forget. 'Twouldn't have been so bad if she had just been dead, but
all at once she--
"They cut her all to pieces an' it didn't kill her," says Scuts,
surprised like.
The Lieutenant pulls his gun. "Right or wrong, I can't stand that,"
he says, and fires.
The little man never flinched at the report. "They cut her all to
pieces, an' it didn't kill her," he says again, kind of like a
phonograph.
"You get out of here, Scuts," says Terry, grabbing him by the
shoulder and whirling him round.
"You leave me be," whines the little man. "God!" he says. "Cut her
like that, an' it didn't kill her! An' her such a soft little
thing--"
"Damn you, Scuts," says Terry, "will you cut it out, or have I got to
break your head?"
"Aw, you lemme alone," whines Scuts, meek as ever. "I'm a goin',
ain't I?" And he turns and trots back to quarters, never saying
another word.
When we told the boys, there was cursing like you won't hear often
outside the service, but after Terry had took them out in the grove
in squads of half a dozen, they just stopped talking and sat down
quiet in the sun, cleaning their rifles and looking at the town over
across the parade. All at once, a rifle cracked, and a native over
there cut for cover like a hen. The Lieutenant came running down.
"Whose gun was that?" he asks.
Old John Slattery, the oldest man in the company, with twenty-eight
years in, gets up slow and stiff, and salutes. "Mine, sir," he says.
"I was workin' the cartridges out of the magazine, an' she must've
gone off accidental."
The boy just looks at us for about a minute. "The next one of you
that fires a shot without orders," he says, "will stand up against
the convent wall there in front of a squad, if I'm the only man in
the squad. When the time comes," he says, "you'll have all the
shooting you want. Until then, you'll leave the natives alone, or
you'll have to kill me."
It was hard holding in, thinking of Marie over there among the
palm-trees, and the boys in Balangiga, and Billy Murphy making his
little speech over the wire; but the Lieutenant was right, and when
the orders did come, we didn't have any kick coming about the way he
let us carry them out. It was the roughest little old fighting I've
ever been through.
You'd naturally thought the little man would brace up and get into
it, after seeing what he'd seen. But he just got peakeder and meeker
every day. Seemed like he was half asleep, and only woke up long
enough to talk about his dreams. And his talk was enough to drive
you loco.
One night we'd just come into camp, when Terry pitched his rifle away
and dug for his boot as fast as he could. "Damn that ant," he says.
"Who'd think a little thing like that could bite worse'n a good big
horse-fly?"
"Terry," says Scuts, "how do you reckon it feels to have millions of
red ants crawlin' all over you, an' you all cut an'--"
"Damn you, Scuts," says Terry, reaching for him and cuffing him,
"will you shut up?"
At last one day we ran into them in full force in a little meadow
that was broken up with clumps of bamboo and tall grass. We started
firing in close order, for it's dangerous to get spread out in
country like that, when you're fighting men with knives. But after a
while, them rushing first one side of the line and then the other,
and us getting after them with the bayonet, we opened out. Finally
we got 'em going just like we wanted 'em, in bunches. We'd fire as
they ran till they had to drop into cover, and then we'd rush 'em
with the bayonet and butt. It was the easiest sort of going, more
like chasing rabbits than men, and when the recall blowed we had only
five men missing, Scuts among them. The Lieutenant sent out half a
dozen of us to hunt them up, and in a little hollow, 'way ahead of
where anybody else had gone, we found the little man lying curled up
on his face looking comfortable, the way a man that's been killed
quick most always does. Around him there was a heap of dead natives,
no wounded ones. Terry turned him over. He had a bolo in his hand,
and he was smiling his little weak-eyed smile.
"The son of a gun!" says Terry, gulping. "The damn little son of a
gun! What the hell are you fellers standin' there for?" he says to
us, picking up the little man and laying him over his shoulder.
"There's four other lads you've got to find before sundown."