He turned to Braxton Bragg. "Braxton, now by God, sir, this boy is
indeed my grandson; the lost has been found, the prodigal has returned!
I knew the old Rutherford blood would redeem him yet!"
He laughed happily, still holding me to him. "Braxton, take him by the
hand, for 'by the Eternal,' as Old Hickory would say, he is the same
blood kin as you, and I am going to give him the same chance! Hey
there, Thomas! Oh, Thomas!" he called to his old body servant. "Bring
me a light, and paper and pencil! I'll drop a line to Hawthorne--to put
you on his staff as Captain. And my check book, Thomas! By God,
sir--Jack--my grandson, Jack, I'll give you a little ready money, only a
thousand dollars to see that you go like a soldier and a
Rutherford--ha-ha--damn him, I knew he'd do it!"
"I'm going as a private, Grandfather; General Hawthorne has already
offered me the rank you suggest--but--"
"You damned mooning fool, you shall not do it!" he cried. "No
Rutherford ever went to any war a private. Tut--tut--I'll fix that.
You are now my grandson, Jack."
His voice fell. He spoke through tears. "Your mother, Jack--Emily--ay,
my boy--I can see her now with her sweet dreamy eyes of poetry, the
finely chiseled half sad face of religion, the heart of romance and of
sorrow. I loved her best of them all--Jack--and you are her son--my
grandson."
"Grandfather," I said, "I thank you, and I shall try to be worthy of you
and of my mother and my father who died a gentleman. But I shall ask
only for this horse, for our General to ride, and that he shall be near
me, for I promised Eloise I would always care for him. She gave him to
me," I added.
Instantly Braxton Bragg was on his feet.
"Eloise never owned him. Why, it's what I have come by for,
Grandfather. What you had just promised me I could have when he rode
up." He came up to me, catching at the reins. "No sir, you shall never
ride him off this place, he is mine."
My grandfather rose and stood between us. "Sit down, Braxton Bragg," he
said angrily. "You've been drinking and you've not too much sense when
you are sober. Now, I had forgotten--I forget so much of late: come to
think of it, it was Eloise's horse, no one else could touch him, and the
way that girl could ride him--no--no--if she gave him to Jack he shall
have him."
"He has lied," Braxton Bragg cried, pushing the old man angrily aside to
shoulder up to me. "He is lying. She didn't give him the horse--"
My fist shut the rest of his words in his mouth. I felt the cut of his
teeth where my knuckles struck them as I sent him suddenly full length
on the ground.
He tried to rise, drawing his Colt's. But my grandfather struck it from
his hand with his crutch, knocking the weapon across the road.
Cursing he tried to rise, but I was on him, my knee on his breast, his
two arms pinned to the ground.
[Illustration: I WAS ON HIM, MY KNEE ON HIS BREAST.]
"Grandfather," I said, "I don't want to hurt him, but you heard him give
me the lie."
"I did," said the old man grimly. "I did, and I waited to see if you
would strike. If you had not, I was going to knock you down with my
crutch! Mount your horse and go to war, Jack Ballington, my grandson;
for by the living God I know now I'll have a fighter in that war worthy
the name of Rutherford when this cur turns coward and quits!"
*CHAPTER V.*
*THE FIRST TENNESSEE*
I do not know where you are, Eloise. I do not even know that you are
alive; but if you are, I have the promise of Aunt Lucretia that this
letter shall go to you; and Aunt Lucretia, you know, does not break her
promises.
And if you be dead, Dear Heart, as I do deep in my mind fear, for I have
not heard from you, nor Aunt Lucretia since that June day was turned
into December in a night--that day when I went to the old familiar,
sweet places, to find no longer there her who had made them sweet--why,
what matters so much? For the passing of the soul of a dear one, when
we see that it is passed, is such a natural thing at last, such a little
change to make so great a transition! While they lived and life looked
full and wholesome, it all seemed so large, their life and ours. But
they go in a night, in a breath's draught. And then we see how small it
was: a little finger-width zone across the world of things. A little
too much heat, a little too much cold, a tiny vein broken, a severed
cord, and it is whiffed out. Even in the fullness of strength and brave
life a dash at bars on a great game horse....
Forgive me, dear one, if you be alive to read this; for I would not
remind you now of a time you were different. 'Tis God's way, and since
He has kept in my heart my love of you, and through your accident showed
me your love for me, have we not His two greatest gifts for our very
own?
And as to that other world, do you know what instinct tells me it is?
That there we will have a hundred senses where we now have but five; and
there we shall see the Thought as well as the Thing: every thought,
every dream, every hope, every love, these we know not as words but as
beautiful beings whom we shall meet face to face. And its only law is
Balance, Compensation, Recompense, Poise; the Equation of the Universe.
We wonder here why there should be such things as sin and sorrow and
injustice. But there we shall know that sin is not sin, but the prism
which shows us goodness, that sorrow is not sorrow but the prism of
gladness, and that death, as we now know it, is not a stopping, but the
prism through which we see another light. Here, on our little earth,
with only our five small senses, we see only the prism. There we shall
see the rays. It is the difference between the star and its light.
And if we hold the prism of sorrow here, Dear Heart, as I do now, shall
I not hold a handful of the joys which stream through it there? For
here 'tis a poem written, but there the meaning of it. Here 'tis the
sun rising, there the dawn. Here the giving of alms, there the joy of
the giving. Here it is the instrument that makes music, there the
music. Here 'tis only a picture, there the soul that made it.
And if you be passed, Eloise, if you be passed, even yet will I keep
writing to you. For if letters be written with one's heart's blood, I
know, in my soul of souls, that our dead will read them. For though I
have lived but a little while according to the span of things, and less
according to the knowledge of things, yet the little span and the little
knowledge have made known to me the greatest of all truths: _that I do
not know_: that even with my little knowing I have seen things come to
pass which were more wonderful than those which I thought could ever be;
that we live on the borderland of a world wonderful, mysterious; that we
are clasping hands with eternity, and need only the language that will
yet come to spell out the touch for us. And so I shall write to you
even though you are dead, write to you, sweetheart, a love letter for
your heaven, knowing that not only will you read it, but that I, in the
writing, as in all giving, will at last be the one who will get.
It is selfishness in me at last, Eloise, selfishness that I may hold
through life and forever this love of you in my heart, now that it has
only memory and not your own sweet self to live on. And no greater love
and more constant can there be than that which lives on memory. For the
living-love, being flesh, must change with the years. But memory-love,
being eternal, can never change.
I am at Iloilo; and the gap is great since that long ago June, that June
of Tennessee blue grass and roses, and the old home and you, sweetheart.
* * * * *
There is little to tell of my leaving; of my quick decision to fight for
my country and for you, Eloise. For, cast from my father's house there
was nothing left but my country's, and losing the love of my kindred
there was only your own great love left me, yours and my country's. For
these I am fighting. But at the last--I know you will want to hear it
all--at the last our old grandsire seemed strangely touched, and the
memory of it has burned my heart, once strangely amid flying Filipino
bullets on the firing line, and once amid the thunders of the great
thirteen-inch guns from the Monadnoc. And right glad I believe he will
be when he learns, that though he called me a fool for refusing a soft
place as aide to dear old Hawthorne, and a greater fool because I
refused a commission which he himself could have got for me for the
asking, and took a musket in the ranks instead, that I have risen from a
private to the Captaincy of the crack company of the First Tennessee.
So say the Regulars of the Bloody Fourth that we backed to a fight to
the death against the Filipino trenches. So says old Hawthorne
himself--God's blessing on his old white head!--now commanding our
brigade, who led us in with the rebel yell in his throat! And riding
Satan, Dear Heart; cannot you see the picture, such a man on such a
horse! And you should have seen how Satan loves the firing line and how
he hates the smell of a Filipino and his pony!
* * * * *
But this story must be told straight even in a love letter to my unseen
love in an unknown land.
When I left home I only took my father's sword and Satan. I took him
because of my love of you, and that old Hawthorne, our General, might
have a horse to ride into battle that should be worthy of his rider.
For if you have ever thought of it, sweetheart, you will know that no
great soldier ever owned a mean horse.
I joined a company of the First Tennessee. In the company next to me was
Braxton Bragg, commanding it by the influence of our old grandsire.
My first promotion came in San Francisco, where we camped for a month
before sailing for Manila, via Honolulu. Our Captain was a Tennessee
lawyer who knew little of the game. It was I who drilled the company,
my German work stood me in good stead, and we won on dress parade drill.
We were the best drilled company of the First Tennessee. Then our
Captain resigned to practice law in San Francisco, and I was made First
Lieutenant.
We dropped anchor off the city of Manila, November 28. It was an
inspiring sight as we sailed into the Bay, to see the sunken Spanish
ships, and Dewey's flag ship with Old Glory flying, proclaiming
Republican Liberty for the first time to the waters of the great Far
East.
Our first fight came early in February. We had lain outside of the
walled city on the Lunetta Driveway for nearly three months. We knew
that Aguinaldo, with eighty thousand men, armed with guns we had given
him, and those of the Spanish, was in our front, feeling his way.
It was nine o'clock Saturday night, February 4th, when the attack began.
We heard shots from the enemy, then three in rapid succession from our
pickets. It meant help. The men, who had been grumbling for three
months for fear they would have to go back home without a scrap, sprang
like school boys to a playground. Then the front lit up with a crackle
of fire. Our rear was another sheet of it from the fleet in the bay,
firing over our heads.
It was a hot fighting front, the First Colorado, Tenth Pennsylvania,
Thirteenth Minnesota, Fifty-First Iowa, and First North Dakota standing
the brunt. We chafed all night, standing in line down by the beach,
away in the rear, the very base of our half-circle battle line. All
night we stood hoping that we might go into it before it was over, our
blood stirred by the battle and roar in front, and the thunder behind.
At breakfast Sunday morning we still stood in line, expectant, keyed to
a fiddle's string, eager. The cook passed our Sunday fare up the line,
chicken and hot coffee. How little things stick in excitement! Then we
saw a courier come out of the smoke and flame, and old Hawthorne rode
Satan to our front.
"Boys," he said quietly, "they have asked us to take the Filipino
trenches, and we are going to take them. Attention, regiment! right
shoulder arms, fours right, march!"
A Utah battery and the Nebraska boys supported us as we charged over San
Juan bridge under fire and across a rice field.
We kept step to the _boom--boom--boom_--of the thirteen-inch shells
firing over us from the guns of the Monadnoc. Down the bloody lane we
charged, the bullets humming like hornets.
"Listen, boys," said a man in my company, "listen how they hum!"
An old sergeant of the Regulars passed us, going to the rear. He was
binding a handkerchief around his arm, from which the blood was
squirting. But he laughed and called to us, "Oh, don't worry about those
that you hear humming--them you hear won't hurt you!"
Then the trenches grinned in our front, spitting fire. We prepared to
charge. Behind us were Regulars, and in the crisis of it all I saw
Braxton Bragg. I hate to write this of the blood of a Rutherford. My
shame, my sorrow was greater than his. His nerve had simply left him.
He had got down from the hissing bullets behind a sandhill. He had quit
before his own men. They did not shoot him, they did not have time; they
charged with me, backing my own company. It was a quick rush and soon
over. The Filipinos left their breakfast of rice in the trenches. But
we left some of our bravest there, too.
But battered and tired as we were, the real fight was just on. In
sweeping the Filipinos out of their trenches we had hurled them to the
left on our own water-works that supplied the city and the army. If
these were held by the Filipinos and our supply cut off our fight would
be in vain. It is said that twenty thousand of them stood between our
water and our line. Luck again was with us. The First Tennessee
happened to be nearest to them and it was we who cut through, and only
four hundred, a battalion, at that. In a quick bloody charge we took
the works. Old Hawthorne and Satan led us as if on dress parade, a
target for twenty thousand Filipino rifles, and not a bullet touched
them. With cheers we followed the white hair of the old Confederate on
his black horse with the north star on his head. We were holding a
perilous place, for we were in the rear of the Filipino army, with our
backs against the water-tanks, and foes in front and rear. But we held
it for two days until help came. And the first battalion and third
battalion had equally as good a record when the fighting was over.
A week afterwards old Hawthorne came to my tent. He was holding a
telegram from the Secretary of War. "Jack," he said, "I am a Major
General, and you are the Captain of Braxton Bragg's company. The boys
of it wired petitions and elected you. They said you led them twice to
victory. They want you to lead them always."
Our hardest fight was at Iloilo last week. We took the city, but once
out of the water we had to fight down barricaded walls, hemmed in and
shot at from walls and house tops. For two hours we were busier than a
bull-terrier in a den of cats. They were the best fighters we struck.
They were officered, we learned, by the brave and brainy little Japs.
At the Lapaz sugar mill they tried to cut off some of the Regulars. We
were nearest. It was merely our luck. Any other regiment would have
cut through the enemy to save their comrades. At Naglocan they made a
stand and there we finished them.
* * * * *
That was written a month ago. I will finish and let it all go together,
finding you if it can; and if not, well my heart has found yours
somewhere, sweetheart; in the writing my thoughts have met, somewhere,
yours.
We stay and hold Iloilo, but General Hawthorne with a battalion of our
boys went a month ago to Cebu to help out the Twenty-third regiment of
Regulars who were hemmed up there in the mountains and fighting for
their lives.
Would you like to hear how close I came to death yesterday, and not on
the firing line at that? It was a nasty close call I had and the horror
of it still twangs on my nerves. It is that, and not knowing what the
morrow may bring, that has brought me to the writing of this last love
letter should either of us pass into the shadow of things.
On the nearby Island of Mindanao live the savage fanatics, the Moros.
These people have been a terror to the Spaniards and are the nightmare
of our own men. They are Mohammedans, and the fiercest, most
treacherous fighters of all the Philippine Islands. They cannot be
civilized, they cannot be conquered, they can only be killed. There is a
bloody tradition about them and the Spaniards; how, hemmed up for
slaughter, when their warriors have all fallen, the women have been
known to rush on the Spanish lines with their babes in their arms, and,
as the Spaniards would meet them with their bayonets, hurl their babes
onto the steel, blocking both it and the fire behind it, and cut down
the soldiers with the deadly _borangs_ of their dead husbands. Then
there with their babes on the bayonets they would die.
Of these Moros, there is one the soldier dreads more than the firing
line of death, more than the panther that springs at night, or the
rattlesnake that strikes in the grass. It is the _Juramentado_.
When one of the Moros is adjudged guilty of thieving, impurity or half a
hundred other crimes and sentenced to death he becomes a _Juramentado_.
Strange, mystic ceremonies are performed over him by the priest in the
black wood of the black night. Cruel tortures are inflicted; his head,
face, eyebrows, and mustache are shaved clean, his face painted, his
body left half naked.
There is but one atonement for him. He must kill as many Christians as
he can before dying himself. Dying in the act he is transplanted to
Paradise.
They are great sailors and are liable to run amuck and then float out to
distant places, to any place where they can find a Christian.
Stealthily they creep into a camp, or town, or church, or wherever there
is a gathering. Their keen _borang_ is sheathed between two bamboo
reeds; its blade is a razor, its weight that of lead. With a blow they
have cut heads clean from shoulders, or split a soldier from neck to
hip.
At a word they will turn in a crowd and kill all those around them. The
Spaniards tell how five of these fanatics slipped up to a company of
their men peacefully, and then in sudden frenzy killed nineteen soldiers
before they could shoot them down.
Our orders are strict concerning them: a soldier must never be out of
lines without his side arms. And so nameless a danger is in their very
name that it is the unwritten law of the camp to courtmartial any
soldier who cries out for a joke, _Juramentado_!
I was visiting the camp of the Regulars and as I went through the gate a
file passed out for guard mounting. A _Juramentado_ had paddled over
from Mindanao, slipped in, and suddenly attacked a soldier of the
Eighteenth Regulars, as he was returning on a pony from some duty. The
first blow of the _borang_ took off the man's arm at the shoulder.
Clapping spurs to his pony he rushed for the main entrance just as I
passed out, with the file of soldiers behind me. In an instant the
frenzied, howling, painted thing was on us.
I heard the officer in charge cry "fire," and a dozen Krags snarled
their smokeless call, sending twelve steel-jacketed bullets into the
charging demon whose painted face, and sharp black teeth were grinning
like a wolf in my very face, and whose _borang_ was at my throat.
The bugler got him with his Colt's 45. Twelve steel bullets had cut
twelve clean pin-point holes through him, and not one had stopped him,
not being in the brain.
The Krag is a failure. It shoots too clean and hard to kill quick.
That old time Colt 45 saved my life. I saw the dead snarling thing all
night. When I waked his black painted teeth grinned in my face. I was
never un-nerved before.
And so I am writing you, Dear Heart, for I realize now how near to death
I have been, how nearer I may yet be. And maybe another thing makes me
write to-night. It is such a story as Clarke, our First Lieutenant, has
brought back to me to-night. It has set me to dreaming, and made the
camp and men and guns sleeping under the mango trees seem like ghosts
from another land. Like ghosts, Dear Heart, for in the dream which is
always more real than the real, it is you and Old Tennessee that I see
to-night, not slumbering guns under mango trees, nor tropical mountain
tops, smoking mistily to the moonlighted skies, nor the palm trees,
sentineling the ghostly beach.
Clarke has filled my thoughts to overflowing to-night. So I have left
him and the sleeping camp. And I lie alone on the beach looking across
the ocean toward home.
He told of a girl in Cebu, where our main hospital is, one of the Red
Cross nurses from the States. She came over a month ago. Clarke has
talked of her till I can see only you. If I did not know you were ill
I'd swear it could be only you, peerless, bravest, gamest, most
beautiful woman that ever was. She is a trained nurse, but she rode
with old Hawthorne, rode Satan, too, to the relief of the Twenty-third
Regulars.
Who could have done what she did but you and Satan, clear a ten-foot
fissure of a yawning volcanic abyss, outfooting the Filipino ponies when
they thought they had cut her off? And her shooting! Again I saw the
brown stubble of Tennessee wheatfields, the blue hills circling the sky
line, the flush and whir and the crack of the sweet little twenty gauge!
If you are not dead or in the hospital it was you--the only one in all
the world--there can be no other!
But I shall not see her, for we leave for the States in the fall. They
are sending other boys to relieve us, others who want to serve their
country.
I shall go home then to my work. I shall take up the life I left, the
life of labor and of love, of love, Dear Heart, love of all loves, love
of a Memory. And now good-night and for my pen, good-by, Eloise! ...
*CHAPTER VI*
*THE BATTLE IN THE BACAUE MOUNTAINS*
I wrote you last from Iloilo, but no word has come back to me. And
toward the late fall, our term of service having expired, and so many
others crowding for a chance to serve, we were mustered out and ordered
home. The big transport Indiana stood by for our home-taking.
It was good news for the boys, but sad for me. They were going home to
wife or sweetheart, but I had no home.
There is one great thing about war, the steel it puts into the heart to
stand things, to die smiling and unafraid, to take life as a battle, and
fight it out on the firing line. There are many living, but few on the
firing line of life. They think they are soldiers, but they are
sutlers.
In a short time we sighted Cebu. Our General, Hawthorne, and a
battalion of us were there, as I wrote you before, sent to help out the
Regulars. We were ordered to pick up this battalion; it completed what
was left of the First Tennessee, for some would sleep forever under
far-off Pacific skies.
Cebu is a little city on the island of the same name in the center tier
of the Archipelago. Bitter and desperate are the inhabitants and savage
in the extreme, and to take the place has cost us a hard battle; and to
hold it almost cost the life of the Twenty-third, for they had been cut
off in the mountains and all but lost when Hawthorne came to their aid,
three months before.
It is a long narrow island with a backbone of volcanic mountains, in the
recesses of which live a race of savage fighters who do not quibble to
rush, half naked, and with bolos and spears, upon lines of steel and
Gatlings.
Their mountain fastnesses are all but impregnable. The volcanic
mountains run sheer up straight and the level plateaus yawn with the
most dangerous and sudden chasms.
Here were the forts and fortifications of the savage Insurgents, and
here they had again threatened portions of the Sixth, Nineteenth and
Twenty-third Regulars under General Snyder.
It was night when we heard it; we had anchored and prepared to take
General Hawthorne and our boys on the homeward journey.
Then like a bolt came the news: portions of the Nineteenth Regulars were
surrounded and cut off in the mountains by ten thousand yellow savages.
They were doomed.
And Hawthorne and his battalion, instead of being on the beach to embark
for home, had already gone back to the mountains to fight.
I drew up our men in line of dress parade on the Indiana's decks.
"Men," I said, "we have been mustered out! We are no longer soldiers
but citizens of the Republic, homeward bound, with all it means to every
man of you who has done his duty as you all have. No man of you may be
ordered to go one step from this transport's deck till you reach your
own land. But news has come that the enemy has attacked and cut off our
comrades. Our General and a small battalion have already gone to their
aid. I ask no man to follow me. I am going, and every man who would go
with me take two steps forward."
The First Tennessee to a man moved two steps forward on the deck.
At daybreak we were off for the mountains eight miles away. All
forenoon we marched under the hot sun, passed mango trees and squalid
huts over ashes of dead volcanoes. We established headquarters on
Elpado Mountain across the Labanyon Valley. Along the low mountains in
our front ran the forts of the Filipinos, a rude fringe to the crest of
the hills.
A detachment of the Sixth and Nineteenth Regulars had been over-daring.
They had got in behind the enemy, and being a new regiment sent to
relieve us, they had not known the true situation. They were surrounded
in front and rear. It was for us to cut through to them.
They are peculiar little mountains. Volcanic in origin they have been
shaken by earthquakes until often their sides are precipices; on top
there are narrow plateaus, and along their whole length bristle the
savage fortifications.
There we found old Hawthorne waiting for us. He knew we would come!
At his word we began the ascent. It was a hand over hand climb, from
rock to rock, from scrub to scrub, with a spear or a bolo at any time
from above or behind any rock. And at unlooked for intervals would come
avalanches of rock and volcanic stones, rolled down by the savages
above.
It was five hundred feet up, but it took us all the afternoon to reach
the first plateau, and half the night to derrick our cannon up with rope
and pulley. The tired men had had no sleep for eighteen hours and at
daylight they must fight. We camped within three hundred and fifty yards
of their fortifications, with all lights out. We made the assault at
daylight.
Our guns knocked their forts down around their ears and when we charged
they went over the other ridge to the last line of what was left of the
forts.
At the bloodiest angle of it when I came back to report to the General
our burying squad was already busy:
"This," said a tough old sergeant to me as he pointed to their dead
piled up, "is a cordwood of good Filipinos."
Such are the genialities of war.
Our fiercest fighting was before us. Hand over hand and holding to
trees we went up to the next fort in an avalanche of stones, arrows,
bolos, and spears.
We fought from rock to rock. Often a Krag or a Colt would speak
straight up, and a dead Filipino would come vaulting down to our feet.
Again came the derricking of guns. Then we went through a deep aisle
where only one man could rush in at a time, with Filipino sharp-shooters
above us. But our last fight cut them from our front and we reached the
Regulars. They had held their place and escaped death only because they
had lain for two days in an old fissure with empty shells beside it and
canteens as dry as the old volcano. But weak as they were they charged
with us after the Filipinos, scattering them like mountain goats over
the hills.
There was a tropic moon that tropic night. The Mango trees circled the
farther mountain sides and the bamboos stood in groups in the valley
below. The kingly palms towered high over all. The weird tropic night
sounds were borne to us on the breeze. The tired battle line of my
brave boys lolled by camp fires in one long line of sentinel light with
the last wrecked forts of the beaten enemy at their backs. The field
guns, rapid of fire, poked their long blue noses out into the night.
"Still smellin' for the varmints loike blood houns for nagurs," said
Moriarty, our fighting Irishman, and the wit of the regiment.
Then he would walk over and pet the blue steel beauties, for they were
his. Moriarty it was who had brought them over mountain side and
_crevasses_ where no man dreamed they could go.
"An' it's aisy it is," he would laugh and say when I praised him to his
face. "It's aisy, Cap'n; I've done nothin' but pet 'em, an' so they
jus' foller me loike dogs."
Half a mile out a line of pickets faced the way the beaten enemy had
fled. Our fighting was over. Cebu's island would no longer be troubled
with Insurgents. And the next day would be the Indiana and home!
Our General had thrown off his sword belt and come over to my camp, and
together we had smoked and talked of home and the war, of everything but
you, sweetheart. But when he left he smiled and said a puzzling thing
to me. "I've a surprise for you to-morrow, at Cebu, Jack, that will
knock the war and even the homegoing out of your head."
Then he twisted his gray mustache and smiled delightedly. Had the old
man, as we all loved to call him, received word of another promotion for
me, I wondered. For myself I wanted no more war. I wanted only you,
Eloise, somewhere, somehow, living; or the memory of you amid my own
Tennessee trees.
"General," I said, "there are worthier men here than I for any promotion
you may have. I will go back to my land and my work; but if you could
arrange for Moriarty here--" I added, pointing to the game little
Irishman.
"Oh, Pat's fixed already," he answered. "He has brought these guns over
hills, through fissures, and the walls of hell. He'll be First
Lieutenant in the regular army as soon as I can wire this day's work to
the President. But you, Jack,--"
I pressed his hand. "General, dear General, believe me, I want nothing
more, nothing but a chance to work and make a home in Tennessee."
I was serious almost to that old gripping in the throat. But he laughed
and pressed my hand.
"To-morrow, Jack, to-morrow! You are tired now; I want you to sleep.
You have earned your reward this day, my boy, and it shall be yours
to-morrow, a promotion that you will love."
I followed him to his own tent door. A black horse stood haltered near
by, saddled as he had been for two days and nights.
I took the General's whistle, the one I had used to train Satan to my
call in the old days, and which on the firing line the General himself
used in calls for his aides and orderlies. I blew softly the three
blasts I had taught him to know in the forest. He had not seen me for
months. He did not know I was there; but his head went up quickly with
the old devil fire in his eyes. The next minute he had thrown his great
weight back on the halter, snapping it.
His head was on my shoulder, and he was whinnying.
The General laughed. "It beats the world, Jack, that horse's love for
you. Take him to your own tent to-night, he'll rage like a hyena around
here all night, now that he knows you are here."
It was true. But tethered at my own camp he was quiet. The confusion
had been so great and my men were so scattered that when I came back I
ordered Moriarty to call the roll before taps. He came back quickly with
word that Ross and Billings of our company were absent. I was
surprised. Investigation among the men, tired and half asleep, showed
that they had not stopped when we took the last fort, but had been swept
on with a squad of the Regulars after the flying Filipinos, carried away
with the excitement of it.
I went quickly to the bivouac of the Regulars. They remembered the two
men, but thought they had returned, as they went off toward the right of
the little village Colena, two miles in our front and through which the
enemy had fled.
"If they aren't here now," said an old sergeant, "no use to look for 'em
again; when we come back through that village, there wasn't a sound, not
a kid, nor a chicken, nor a coon, nor a dog; and when you don't hear
nothin' in a Filipino village, when you go through, look out for hell
when you come back."
I looked at my watch. It had been full three hours since the Regulars
had returned.
"I am going after them," I said, turning to go.
"Ballington," it was the swarthy old Captain, of the Nineteenth who
spoke, "you'd be a fool to risk it." He pointed silently to a faint
glow across the valley on the side of the mountain beyond. I had
thought it was a rising star. "Yonder," he said, "see that other one on
the mountain top, that's the signal fire of the little yellow hyenas,
that means guerrilla bands in them mountains, they go in packs like
wolves, and the night is their time. They know every foot of the
mountain, every gorge, valley and _crevasse_. Why, two men lost over
there ain't got no more show than a pair of fool goats in a jungle.
Why, if them little hyenas couldn't see 'em, which they can--for they
see better by night than by day--they can smell 'em, like all jungle
breeds."
"Boy," he said again, looking at me kindly and smiling an apology for
the title which we both bore, "I wouldn't let you go. I'd go to old
Hawthorne and have you arrested first. You Tennessee fellows," he said,
laying his big rough hand on my shoulder, "have done the whitest thing
ever done in this war. It ain't often we old Regulars that never go
home and have to serve 'till the last taps, takes much notice of you
volunteer fellows that fights awhile for fun and quits when the time is
up; but when you biled out of that transport and came over them
mountains an' cut through to us, you done a thing that'll warm the
cockles of our boys till the last tattoo and the taps. Now I ain't
goin' to let you go out there in no such fool thing. I'm an old
soldier, I fought with Miles and Cook on the plains, and I tell you now,
Sitting Bull and his Sioux were lambs to them little mountain savages.
You go back now," he said kindly, taking my hand in his own, "go back
and go to sleep. You are a boy yet, though you proved you are full
grown to-day, my lad, and ain't even got up a beard. Of course you have
got a sweetheart waiting in Tennessee. Go back to her, and the next
year send old Brawley of the Nineteenth a picture of her and the kid.
He ain't never had no time to marry, it's been fighting all his life
with him from hell to breakfast."