Читать книгу: «The Code of the Mountains», страница 14

"I'm not going to walk," retorted the officer belligerently. "This is as good a place to die as any."

"I ain't goin' ter hurt you," said Newt Spooner in a tired voice. "I reckon the time ain't come yet, after all."

"When will it come?" demanded the other, amazed beyond belief at this sudden change of front.

"Thet's my business. I hates you worse than pizen … but I can't hurt you while we're both wearin' this uniform. It beats hell how much a man gets to thinkin' about a damn' pair of government breeches!" He stopped off as if in embarrassment. Then he added: "Besides, I'm beholden to your wife. She gave me a lift once on the high-road."

Two days later, just as the platoon, flushed with a success which the others had missed, was preparing to break camp for the day's march, two men, both gibbering foolishly, both shambling on unsteady feet, tattered, thorn-torn and scalded with fever, dragged themselves, in the locked embrace of drunken men, up into sight of the outposts, and collapsed. One wore a major's uniform, and one had on his sleeve what was left of a sergeant's chevrons.

CHAPTER XXIII

The policy of splitting the command into bits, and leaving one platoon to carry on the seeming of the full force, had brought both disaster and success. The main body had taken a middle course upon which the smaller details might – theoretically – fall back, and on either side squads had scouted. While the men under Falkins were being misled and trapped, another detachment had slipped fortuitously upon a scouting party of the enemy, and, being less fatigued by reason of an easier course, they were stealing through the bosque with unabated caution, and not one of that scouting party escaped alive except two who were captured. The detachment rejoined the platoon, and in view of the spirit in which the main command received these prisoners, they finally laid aside their show of sullen stubbornness and talked volubly.

Not only did they talk, under the effective persuasion of their captors, but they acted. They agreed to lead the Americanos to the camp of General Rosario, which they said was pitched in a particularly inaccessible part of the mountains only a day's march away. Then the command, which had for so long been following a fox-fire, rose up, invigorated by the prospect of final success, and all day they slipped forward through trails which they could not have found alone. They marched with the swiftness of the final spurt, and at nightfall lay under cover, feasting their eyes on a column of smoke which rose from a canyon where the enemy lay in fancied security. The captives had done their work well, once they had undertaken it, but the onslaught must be sudden. There must be no time given to slaughter the American prisoners whom Rosario was carrying north with him as a present for Aguinaldo.

They could but admire the sagacity with which the enemy had selected his lair. They must attack through two high-walled gorges where machine-guns waited to mow them down. But the Americanos meant to reach those guns before they were discovered, and after that the impregnable strong-hold would become a trap without exits.

The column had therefore divided, each section taking a guide. The guides, with bayonets at their backs as reminders of their mission, had gone forward and with passwords bespoken the sentries, whose voices had been choked off in the pitchy darkness before they could give outcry.

Then came the mountain yell, but it came only from the narrower gorge, and it was accompanied by musketry which the steep walls echoed and re-echoed. The flood of flight surged into a wave of disorganized rout toward the other opening – where it fell back in broken spray from volley and bayonet. Useless now were the machine-guns; worse than useless the impregnable walls of rock. The insurgent forces, remembering their red iniquities, asked no terms or quarter, but hurled themselves on the bayonets and went down in the close chaos of bolo and clubbed musket. "And luckiest of them that fell, were those of them that died."

It was a little keyhole picture of red and black inferno, while it lasted, but it did not last long.

Yet, of General Rosario and his white prisoners there was no trace. That wily leader had gone on with a small escort before nightfall, and no one was left to tell what direction he had taken.

So it happened that when the two survivors of the ambuscade came tottering into the camp which they had hoped to reach much sooner, they found the main detachment just leaving. Had it not been belated by the delay of the successful expedition into the hills, it would have passed this point twenty-four hours ago, and the half-dead refugees would have been too late.

It had taken Henry Falkins and Newt Spooner two days instead of one to cover that ten miles of bosque. They had come staggering, sometimes gibbering, and rarely were both of them sane. Sometimes they raved in duet, but during the first day Newt kicked and pummeled his superior forward as long as he could walk. After that, he carried, dragged and rolled the limp figure, obsessed only by the fixed idea that he had a package to deliver somewhere "over yon." Frequently he forgot that the package was a thing of life. Frequently, too, he madly beat it and swore at it, but always he worked it forward, falling time after time to rise again and stumble ahead. Then Newton Spooner became a thing without consciousness, and a faint spark of realization flickered back into the murk of the major's brain, and laid on his sick soul the same necessity. That day, or part of it, he dragged and carried and kicked. At last, with neither fully conscious, they linked arms about each other's shoulders, gazed at each other with wild, agonized eyes, mumbled at each other with swollen tongues, and shambled, crawled and hitched along together.

Between two cots in the village at the mountains' edge the wife of Major Falkins vibrated like a pendulum for several days, and when the commanding officer's tongue became again a thing which he could lift and command he told her of his rescue by the boy who had taken a blood-oath against him, but he told nothing of the episode in which the sergeant had debated the fulfilment of his vow.

Later, when the company had marched back to its headquarters in the town with the church, Mrs. Falkins drew a glowing picture of heroism in a letter which she wrote home to the States. The colonel, her father, in due time received it, and it found its way into news column and editorial, and was duly read by many persons.

"Clem's gal," no longer at the mountain college, but studying at the State University in Lexington with the scholarship that she had won, was one of the many. She read in the little dormitory room overlooking the quiet campus. She had come here to prepare herself for a return to the mountain school as a teacher, and when next she went back to the Cumberlands the paper went with her, that the prophet might have honor at home.

It was October, and she had been summoned by the illness of her step-mother. Now, as the girl rode along the creek-bed roads, the hills were flaunting their watch-fires of autumn, and the horizon wore its veil of Indian-summer softness. Clem had met her in Jackson with his nag, and she was riding, mountain-fashion, on a pillion behind him. Her father was battered and disheveled, and about his clothes clung the smoke-house odor of the windowless cabin with its log fire, but there also clung about the vaulting slopes and ruggedly beautiful ravines the fragrance of the fall, and the girl could not find it in her heart to feel gloomy, even though she was exchanging the wholesome life of the university for the squalor of the cabin. Thanks to Newt, she had her room, where she could withdraw as into her own castle. She felt almost gay, and, as she thought of the room which a rude, sullen-eyed boy had reared for her with his calloused hands, her eyes grew soft like the horizons. That boy, too, had been away into the world, and had become a hero. Presumably he was mending his broken life.

The old horse plodded slowly and sometimes the girl slipped down and walked alongside. Clem had little conversation after he had told how "porely" the step-mother was. "He reckoned hit all come about from gittin' dew-pizened." But, as they made the trip, the girl recited to him the news from the far-away islands.

The man listened stolidly, and at the end inquired:

"Did I onderstand ye rightly, M'nervy? War Henry Falkins ther feller he saved?"

When the information was confirmed, he ejaculated in wonderment:

"Well, doggone my ornery skin! Hit seems like jest yestiddy thet Newty lit out acrost these-hyar hills, hell-bent on lay-wayin' Henry Falkins fer a-penitensheryin' him."

Then Minerva remembered the lad's face when she had told of Henry Falkins awarding her medal, and for the first time she understood.

Back in the town with the church the months went by with routine of garrison duty and periods of fevered activity.

The energetic Rosario had for a time lain dormant after the paralyzing blow which had obliterated so large a portion of his command, but as the natives began to evince a growing confidence in the protecting hand of the American government, the general bestirred himself, and once more tidings of his atrocities drifted into headquarters. During these months there passed between Sergeant Newton Spooner and his major no reference to the morning in the jungle when the last echo of the old threat had found expression.

It was as though, on this subject, the lips of each were sealed by oath, but Sergeant Spooner went about his work with a smart and soldierly alacrity that kept the men of his company always on their toes. When there was trying work to do the commanding officer found himself instinctively turning to that company, and since the company responded to its top-sergeant like a muscle to a nerve, that meant that he turned to Newton Spooner.

Then came an epidemic of outrage.

Villages with Americanista presidentes went up in smoke. Haciendas of loyal Spaniards and Ilacanos were raided, and their people put to the bolo. With the wild stories of Rosario's activity that drifted in, there came persistently the fame of a white man who stood at the Filipino's right hand, giving him counsel. The rumor added that this man was a deserter from the American army. The truth or falsity of that allegation did not particularly interest the 26th Volunteer Infantry. The 26th from its Shirt-tailed beginnings had been stainless of the reproach of desertion. If other commands had been less fortunate it was not their affair. But it was very much their affair that, when they ran down a band of guerillas and closed with them, they encountered more numerous casualties, because someone had been teaching the brown men how to fight and shoot as they had never in their lives fought and shot before.

It very closely concerned the 26th Volunteer Foot that the game of war was being taught their foes by a renegade who had learned it under their own colors.

But the insult, set upon injury, came one day with a grim humor that was to have an even grimmer sequel.

The telegraph operator at a near-by village was passing the time of day with the S. C. man at the headquarters key. Suddenly the instrument went dead with a splutter, and, while the headquarters operator tested and cursed, it remained stubbornly dumb. The line had been cut again.

Before a detachment could be despatched to follow the wire to the break, the instrument set up a buzz, and the buzz became Morse code. As the astonished operator read the dots and dashes this message was clicked out to him: "General José Rosario, in passing, presents his compliments and hopes to report other mementos in near future."

Obviously the wire had been grounded and the message sent by the enemy himself at some point where he had tapped it with a field-transmitter. That must be the work of the renegade – presumably a Signal Code deserter, and yet though the bosque was combed for days by peeved and eager soldiery, no sign of a hostile force was found. Newton Spooner and a squad of scouting men came upon a muddy spot in the bijuca tangle where a number of feet had trod, and, though the top-sergeant noted the print of a service boot, he said nothing of the circumstance – at the time.

But while Newt said nothing he thought much. Keeping to himself, he was fighting a battle which one way or the other must prove decisive in his nature. He knew that he was facing a conclusion which could not be lightly turned aside, and which could not be met without harrowing his soul. To fail to face a certain specter which had unexpectedly arisen would be to brand himself in the tribunal of his own inner consciousness as a traitor to the service. To face it and accept the consequences that might, and probably would, arise, would be to put behind him and trample under foot the code of the mountains, and to confess that all his preconceived ideas of life had been distorted and without value.

Two deep-rooted impulses were wrestling with a ferocity that made the boy's soul a battle-ground, torn, scarred and utterly miserable. The chaplain had preached a sermon on Golgotha, and had told how the Master had gone to the Place of a Skull, and had fought there with the spirit. Newton Spooner was not the man for prayer or fasting, yet he fasted because his palate revolted against the rations, in the torture of indecision that racked him.

And as he could not eat, so also he could not sleep and the wide eyes which stared at the walls beyond his cot were eyes that burned with feverish misery. Whether or not one is to become an Iscariot is a problem that must bring its agony, an agony beyond the appeasement of thirty pieces of silver. But when the problem so complicates itself that instead of being merely a problem it is a dilemma, and not only a dilemma, but the dilemma of choosing between proving an Iscariot to one's code or to one's country, the matter is one which may well unbalance a brain already depleted and jumbled of perspective by steaming jungles and the assaults of the tropics on one's sanity.

There was no one to whom Sergeant Spooner could go for counsel. To every man comes one black night that tests the metal of his soul, and makes or brands him with its result. It is a night when the furies ride shrieking, and when the border between the man and the madman wavers. He may not know it, but the dawn that comes at the end of such a night breaks on a soul that has accepted its damnation or has liberated itself and transformed itself.

About the garrison, Sergeant Newton Spooner bore a face in which the eyes were sunken and about whose lips ran deep lines of travail. In his duties he was prompt and smart, but that was the ingrained training, which had reached a state where it responded automatically to routine. As he tossed on his cot, he suffered agonies and when he fell asleep it was not for rest, but for nightmare. His dreams were harassed with a bitter problem and what the end was to be hung in the balance. Dreams are precarious and lawless, yet it was in the end a dream which decided him.

Just before he was aroused one morning he fell into a feverish slumber, following a wakeful night, and to him, as to many men before him, a vision came.

Minerva seemed to stand before the regimental band at dress-parade. She waved the flag and said, in a voice which no one else heard:

"The soldier serves his colors."

It happened that about the same time the mestiza girl whom Sergeant-Major Peter Spooner had honored with his attentions, before he had fallen into the villainous hands of Rosario, came back to the town. She did not remain long, and her face was sad. She had come, she confided to Mrs. Falkins, hoping to see the great, brave soldier, and, when she was told of how he had died, her sobs tore her until the spectacle of her grief was insupportable.

Then Newton Spooner did an unprecedented thing. Unversed as he was in the ways of courtship, he dogged the steps of the mestiza girl, fetching and carrying for her with doglike devotion.

And, since he was willing, instead of pressing his own suit, to sing the praises of the late sergeant-major, she let him sit at the threshold of her nipa house, and gaze at her while she sewed. When she went away and Sergeant Spooner asked a brief leave of absence to accompany her on a part of her return journey, the men of the garrison shook their heads and announced that they would be damned.

CHAPTER XXIV

Newt Spooner was gone a week, though he had only announced it as his purpose to escort the girl as far as a near-by village.

In three days more, according to the articles of war, his name must be dropped from the company roll, and his status become that of death or desertion. Even if he came back at once, he must face the lesser charge of absence beyond leave.

When the sergeant did return, he bore the marks of jungle travel, and as he reported to his company commander, his face indicated that his explanation would not be merely personal.

Yet Sergeant Spooner was secretive, and asked permission to guide a small force into the hills. He said that he had come upon evidence which would not wait, and he had, therefore, taken the liberty of following it up independently. He believed he could lead a detachment to a place where a party of insurgents were in hiding, and – at this his captain sat up and took notice – although it was a small party, he had information which led him to believe the renegade might be one of the number.

But for such an enterprise Newton Spooner's superiors required no urging. The sergeant said that no considerable force could hope to reach the place unheralded, so two picked squads stole out that same evening, and before dawn of the third day (for they marched only at night and lay hidden while the sun shone) were creeping through the long grass upon a native farm where two nipa houses proclaimed the presence of humanity. They crept cautiously, for though the place had all the seeming of private and peaceful domiciles, they had learned to distrust appearances and to trust Sergeant Newt Spooner's judgment. The spot was very wild and desolate, lying remote from any village. In the gray mists between night and morning it seemed a land of ghosts, with broken hills and jungle closing about it.

As daylight crept to the east, soldiers stood silent and patient at each door and window of each house. It was a strange disposition of troops about thatched houses that lay soundless and wrapped in profound slumber. The lieutenant who had come in command stood at the right of the front door of the larger house, and over against him, on the left, stood Newt Spooner. But each stood with back pressed to wall, so flattened against the uprights that, in that dim light, one coming out of the door would pass them by unseeing. And at each of the other openings the watchers were likewise flattened as though they had been figures in bas-relief fantastically wrought by the builder.

They stood without sound or movement, until, as the light strengthened a little, the door opened and a mestiza girl in slippered feet and partial attire came out, carrying an earthen water-vessel. As she crossed the threshold, looking neither to right nor left, New Spooner's tight-pressed palm shot out and silenced her carmine lips. The officer recognized the girl. He had himself recently turned away unable to watch her sobs for her dead lover, and now he felt an impulse to resent this rough indignity at the hands of the sergeant. But something in the sergeant's face gave him pause, and at the same moment Newt Spooner sternly whispered to his prisoner in Spanish:

"Call him – call him, I tell you!"

For an instant, the girl stood trembling from head to foot, with dumb agony in her eyes. It was evident that she was facing the hardest crisis of her life, and that terror was dominant. As Newt bent forward with threatening hardness in his relentless face, she shrank back against the wall, bowing her head in forced assent, and with the soldier's strong hand still close enough to stifle any unwished-for outcry, she called in quavering, heart-broken Spanish:

"Beloved, come to me. Come pronto!"

There followed, at once, a sound of bare feet from inside, and a gigantic, half-clad figure appeared anxiously at the door. It was the figure of a white man; and, as the lieutenant caught its shoulder, and threw his revolver muzzle to its broad chest, he found himself looking into the grave eyes of former Sergeant-Major Peter Spooner, late of the 26th Volunteers.

For an instant, the officer stood too dazed to credit the testimony of his eyes, but, while the Deacon glanced down the barrel of Newt's leveled rifle, and shrugged his shoulders with a low oath, the officer realized that he had under his hand the mysterious renegade.

And then, as the deserter, still gazing into the flinty face of his kinsman, raised his hands in surrender, he coolly turned toward the house, and shouted back in excellent Spanish:

"General, we are captives. Resistance is useless."

In answer to that message, there shortly appeared, framed in the door, the startled countenance of the notorious Rosario himself. Once too often, he had trusted himself with those inconsiderable escorts which had enabled him to pass from place to place without attracting attention.

The detail made its march back to headquarters, taking its prisoners with it, in a semi-dazed condition. Against Rosario they felt little vindictiveness, now that he was captive to their arms. But this other, this sergeant-major who had organized most of them into soldiery back there in the Appalachian hills, with him there was a ghastly difference. He had been a hero, mourned as lost. He had taken the pay of the service and held its highest warrant – and he had been false to his salt, for those tin bars which they roughly stripped from his shoulders.

But, if the command was struck sick with astonishment, Black Pete himself treated them to no show of emotion. He had already considered and weighed what it meant to desert to the enemy in time of war, and he had been taken in attendance upon the enemy's district leader, wearing the enemy's livery. He was already, in effect, dead, and he meant to maintain the stolid silence of death.

And so the detachment marched into headquarters with the grim silence of a funeral cortège, though as yet the corpse walked upright and on its own feet.

No lips were tighter set, and no face more stonily expressionless than that of Sergeant Newton Spooner. His was the capture, his the credit – and, in part, the shame. Between himself and the man who must hang existed the bond of one blood and one name. The smirch upon the regiment was likewise a smirch upon that blood and name.

The struggle in himself had begun from the moment when he found the print of a large boot in the mud, and the disgrace to the service and the regiment had come home to him … the one form of disgrace which he had ever understood. But the mental sweat was not yet over. It must have its ugly culmination at general court-martial, and when that time came he, Newt Spooner, must say the words upon which conviction would indubitably follow. He knew that in its hideous fulness, had known it from the start, and yet, when the hour came and he took the stand to testify, no voice could have been steadier, and no gaze more unflinching than that with which he held the eyes of the accused.

But the gaze with which the Deacon met his was in no wise weaker. As Black Pete listened to the proceedings in which his life-sands were running out, his eyes were thoughtful and perhaps a shade wistful, but undrooping, and unwavering.

The defendant testified that, when he was captured, they offered him choice between death and a captain's commission. He had chosen the latter. They took him north, and he had talked with Aguinaldo in person. The "President" had received him as an officer and a dignitary. He had beguiled him with hopes of foreign recognition and a filmy vision of ultimate success. The Deacon had held during his life one goal and one ideal. His dream was leadership. He had tired of the warrant of the "non-com." He wished to sit in council with men of higher rank. The experiment had failed. He made no plea.

The hearing before G.C.M. came after the regiment had left the town with the church. It was on a larger parade ground that the united battalions were drawn up at sunset, and the regimental adjutant stepped a pace forward to the colonel's side and "published the order," which announced that Peter Spooner was "to be hanged by his neck till dead."

The lines stood silent as the adjutant's words were read. Black Pete at "the front and center," to be seen of all men, presented a picture quite as uncompromising as he had ever presented before. His contemplative gray eyes bore straight to the front as he stood at attention, and in them slept a thoughtful expression, as though they were looking off beyond horizons hidden to other men, and already piercing the opaque things of life and death.

And Newt Spooner gave his company front a motionless, sternly impersonal figure upon which to gaze. In neither condemned nor informer was there a vestige of tremor as the officers came to the "front and center" and the formation ended.

In the wet mists of a rainy morning, they escorted Black Pete to a scaffold around which ranged, in hollow square, the regiment he had betrayed – and there they hanged him high as Haman. Brooding hills looked down, rain-shrouded, and to their crests at the last moment the condemned man raised his eyes.

There was silence, save for the pelting of rain on iron roofs, until it was broken by noise of the falling trap and the low whip-like snap of the tautened rope. Then the burial detail went out and did its work. Sergeant Newton Spooner returned to his routine duties with a grim taciturnity which did not invite conversation.

It was at Manila, many months later, that Major Henry Falkins again called Sergeant Spooner to battalion headquarters, and spoke with a certain embarrassment:

"Spooner," he inquired slowly, "have you come to realize that one man may bear testimony against another for reasons other than spite?"

A slow flush, brick-red and hot, spread over the bronzed face of the non-commissioned officer.

"I've come to understand a good many things, sir," he replied gravely. "And I've paid for learning them."

"We'll be mustered out before long," suggested Henry Falkins, "but I won't be long out of uniform, I hope. I'm going to stay in the service. Once I promised you a chance – "

Newt Spooner grinned.

"I reckon the uniform's good enough for me, too, sir," he interrupted. Then he added, with a diffidence which all expression of deep feeling brings to the mountaineer: "I reckon, sir, as long as I can serve under you I'll go on reënlisting."

Falkins was a mountaineer, too. He hastily changed the subject.

"Commissions from the ranks are going to men less capable than you – but examinations must be passed. If you'll study, Spooner, I'd like to get behind you and help."

"I've never spoken of that to any man, sir, but I've been thinking about it," announced the sergeant diffidently. "I've been studying for eighteen months."

Not far from the corner of Main and Limestone Streets in Lexington, Kentucky, and almost in the shadow of the Phoenix Hotel, a poster on the sidewalk and a flag from an overhead window proclaimed that "Men were wanted for the United States Army." Out of the door of the building so decorated, one spring morning, when the trees were in delicate new leafage, came a sergeant attached to the recruiting station. He was selected, as many of these men are, for his soldierliness of appearance. Such men are the best advertisement the service can use, and it uses them.

The sergeant was not overly tall, and, though spare, he was by no means lean. His shoulders swung back squarely, and his chest, rounded and strong like a barrel, bore on its olive-drab blouse a sharp-shooter's cross and the Medal of Honor, which must be bestowed by an Act of Congress.

His face was clear-cut and bronzed by tropic sun and ocean winds. In fine, as the sergeant walked to the corner, casting his eyes up and down Limestone Street, he was an inspiriting figure of a man – and a soldier man. He had for the time nothing better to do than to stroll, and as he strolled a flicker of reminiscent amusement brought a pleasant grin to his firm lips. Sergeant Newt Spooner was thinking of the black-clad, lowering-faced boy who years ago hiked through this town, bent on assassination.

As he went along the historic street, where every square held traditions of ante-bellum days, he began to encounter other strollers, college lads in sweaters and caps, and college girls with books. But his eyes finally focused their gaze on a young woman who came out of a house and also turned up the street, walking ahead of him. She was a slim girl in simple gingham, but in her cheeks was an apple-blossom glow and delicacy, and her movements were informed with the lithe grace of out-of-doors. Newt wanted to overtake and accost her. He wanted to see if she would recognize him, changed as he was, as quickly as he had recognized her, who was even more changed.

For this girl looked like some splendid young blossom that had come to flower in open woods, and the soldier saw, with mingled pride and twinging jealousy, that all the boys and men who passed took off their hats with frank ardor in their eyes. This was such a metamorphosed Minerva that he fell into shyness and delayed announcing himself until they had reached the stone gate-posts of the rolling campus, where, under the maples, the macadam road wound up to the college buildings, and the old field-gun of civil-war days looked out over the cadets' drill-ground.

There he plucked up courage to call in a low voice, "M'nervy!" and at the mountain pronunciation, coming unexpectedly from behind, the girl wheeled and stood for a moment, confronting him in a pretty picture of delight and astonishment, while a warm color stole into her cheeks.