Crittenden Part 12

"Is that your negro?" A sarcastic Lieutenant was asking the question.

"He's my servant, sir."

"Well, we don't allow soldiers to take their valets to the field."

"My servant at home, sir, I meant. He came of his own accord."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Nothin', Ole Cap'n--jes doin' nothin'--jes lookin' for you."]

"Go find Basil," Crittenden said to Bob, "and if you can't find him," he added in a lower tone, "and want anything, come back here to me."

"Yessuh," said Bob, loath to go, but, seeing the Lieutenant scowling, he moved on down the road.

"I thought you were a Captain," said Grafton. Crittenden laughed.

"Not exactly."

"Forward," shouted the Lieutenant, "march!"

Grafton looked Crittenden over.

"Well, I swear," he said heartily, and, as Crittenden moved forward, Grafton stood looking after him. "A regular--I do be d.a.m.ned!"

That night Basil wrote home. He had not fired his musket a single time.

He saw nothing to shoot at, and he saw no use shooting until he did have something to shoot at. It was terrible to see men dead and wounded, but the fight itself was stupid--blundering through a jungle, bullets zipping about, and the Spaniards too far away and invisible. He wanted to be closer.

"General Carter has sent for me to take my place on his staff. I don't want to go, but the Colonel says I ought. I don't believe I would, if the General hadn't been father's friend and if my 'bunkie' weren't wounded. He's all right, but he'll have to go back. I'd like to have his wound, but I'd hate to have to go back. The Colonel says he's sorry to lose me. He meant to make me a corporal, he says. I don't know what for--but Hooray!

"Brother was not in the fight, I suppose. Don't worry about me--please don't worry.

"P. S.--I have often wondered what it would be like to be on the eve of a battle. It's no different from anything else."

Abe Long and Crittenden were bunkies now. Abe's comrade, the boy Sanders, had been wounded and sent to the rear. Reynolds, too, was shot through the shoulder, and, despite his protests, was ordered back to the coast.

"Oh, I'll be on hand for the next sc.r.a.p," he said.

Abe and Crittenden had been side by side in the fight. It was no surprise to Crittenden that any man was brave. By his code, a man would be better dead than alive a coward. He believed cowardice exceptional and the brave man the rule, but he was not prepared for Abe's coolness and his humour. Never did the Westerner's voice change, and never did the grim half-smile leave his eyes or his mouth. Once during the fight he took off his hat.

"How's my hair parted?" he asked, quietly.

A Mauser bullet had mowed a path through Abe's thick, upright hair, sc.r.a.ping the skin for three inches, and leaving a trail of tiny, red drops. Crittenden turned to look and laugh, and a bullet cut through the open flap of his s.h.i.+rt, just over his heart. He pointed to it.

"See the good turn you did me."

While the two were cooking supper, the old Sergeant came up.

"If you don't obey orders next time," he said to Crittenden, sternly, for Abe was present, "I'll report you to the Captain." Crittenden had declined to take shelter during the fight--it was a racial inheritance that both the North and the South learned to correct in the old war.

"That's right, Governor," said Abe.

"The Colonel himself wanted to know what d.a.m.n fool that was standing out in the road. He meant you."

"All right, Sergeant," Crittenden said.

When he came in from guard duty, late that night, he learned that Basil was safe. He lay down with a grateful heart, and his thoughts, like the thoughts of every man in that tropical forest, took flight for home.

Life was getting very simple now for him--death, too, and duty. Already he was beginning to wonder at his old self and, with a shock, it came to him that there were but three women in the world to him--Phyllis and his mother--and Judith. He thought of the night of the parting, and it flashed for the first time upon him that Judith might have taken the shame that he felt reddening his face as shame for her, and not for himself: and a pain shot through him so keen that he groaned aloud.

Above him was a clear sky, a quarter moon, an enveloping mist of stars, and the very peace of heaven. But there was little sleep--and that battle-haunted--for any: and for him none at all.

And none at all during that night of agony for Judith, nor Phyllis, nor the mother at Canewood, though there was a reaction of joy, next morning, when the name of neither Crittenden was among the wounded or the dead.

Nothing had been heard, so far, of the elder brother but, as they sat in the porch, a negro boy brought the town paper, and Mrs. Crittenden found a paragraph about a soldier springing into the sea in full uniform at Siboney to rescue a drowning comrade, who had fallen into the surf while trying to land, and had been sunk to the bottom by his arms and ammunition. And the rescuer's name was Crittenden. The writer went on to tell who he was, and how he had given up his commission to a younger brother and had gone as a private in the regular army--how he had been offered another after he reached Cuba, and had declined that, too--having entered with his comrades, he would stay with them to the end. Whereat the mother's face burned with a proud fire, as did Phyllis's, when Mrs. Crittenden read on about this Crittenden's young brother, who, while waiting for his commission, had gone as a Rough Rider, and who, after gallant conduct during the first fight, had taken his place on General Carter's staff. Phyllis clapped her hands, softly, with a long sigh of pride--and relief.

"I can eat strawberries, now." And she blushed again. Phyllis had been living on bacon and corn-bread, she confessed shamefacedly, because Trooper Basil was living on bacon and hardtack--little dreaming that the food she forced upon herself in this sacrificial way was being swallowed by that hearty youngster with a relish that he would not have known at home for fried chicken and hot rolls.

"Yes," laughed Mrs. Crittenden. "You can eat strawberries now. You can balance them against his cocoanuts."

Phyllis picked up the paper then, with a cry of surprise--the name signed to the article was Grafton, whom she had seen at the recruiting camp. And then she read the last paragraph that the mother had not read aloud, and she turned sharply away and stooped to a pink-bed, as though she would pick one, and the mother saw her shoulders shaking with silent sobs, and she took the child in her arms.

There was to be a decisive fight in a few days--the attack on Santiago--that was what Phyllis had read. The Spaniard had a good muster-roll of regulars and aid from Cervera's fleet; was well armed, and had plenty of time to intrench and otherwise prepare himself for a b.l.o.o.d.y fight in the last ditch.

So that, each day there was a relief to the night agony, which, every morning, began straightway with the thought that the fight might be going on at that very hour. Not once did Judith come near. She had been ill, to be sure, but one day Mrs. Crittenden met her on the way to town and stopped her in the road; but the girl had spoken so strangely that the mother drove on, at loss to understand and much hurt. Next day she learned that Judith, despite her ill health and her father's protests, had gone to nurse the sick and the wounded--what Phyllis plead in vain to do. The following day a letter came from Mrs. Crittenden's elder son.

He was well, and the mother must not worry about either him or Basil. He did not think there would be much fighting and, anyhow, the great risk was from disease, and he feared very little from that. Basil would be much safer as an aid on a General's staff. He would get plenty to eat, would be less exposed to weather, have no long marches--as he would be mounted--and no guard duty at all hours of day and night. And, moreover, he would probably be less constantly exposed to bullets. So she must not worry about him. Not one word was there about Judith--not even to ask how she was, which was strange. He had said nothing about the girl when he told his mother good-by; and when she broached the subject, he answered sadly:

"Don't, mother; I can't say a word--not a word."

In his letter he had outlined Basil's advantages, not one of which was his--and sitting on the porch of the old homestead at sunset of the last rich day in June, the mother was following her eldest born through the transport life, the fiery marches, the night watches on lonely outposts, the hard food, the drenching rains, steaming heat, laden with the breath of terrible disease, not realizing how little he minded it all and how much good it was doing him. She did know, however, that it had been but play thus far to what must follow. Perhaps, even now, she thought, the deadly work was beginning, while she sat in the shrine of peace--even now.

And it was. Almost at that hour the troops were breaking camp and moving forward along the one narrow jungle-road--choked with wagon, pack-mule, and soldier--through a haze of dust, and, turning to the right at the first crossing beyond corps head-quarters--under Chaffee--for Caney. Now and then a piece of artillery, with its flashes of crimson, would pa.s.s through the advancing columns amid the waving of hats and a great cheering to take position against the stone fort at Caney or at El Poso, to be trained on the block-house at San Juan. And through the sunset and the dusk the columns marched, and, after night fell, the dark, silent ma.s.ses of slouch hats, shoulders, and gun-muzzles kept on marching past the smoke and flare of the deserted camp-fires that lighted thicket and gra.s.sy plot along the trail. And after the flames had died down to cinders--in the same black terrible silence, the hosts were marching still.

That night a last good-by to all womankind, but wife, mother, sister, sweetheart. The world was to be a man's world next day, and the man a coa.r.s.e, dirty, sweaty, swearing, good-natured, grimly humorous, cruel, kindly soldier, feverish for a fight and as primitive in pa.s.sion as a cave-dweller fighting his kind for food. The great little fight was at hand.

XI

Before dawn again--everything in war begins at dawn--and the thickets around a certain little gray stone fort alive with slouch hat, blue blouse, and Krag-Jorgensen, slipping through the brush, building no fires, and talking in low tones for fear the timorous enemy would see, or hear, and run before the American sharpshooter could get a chance to try his marksmans.h.i.+p; wondering, eight hours later, if the timorous enemy were ever going to run. Eastward and on a high knoll stripped of bushes, four 3.2 guns unlimbered and thrown into position against that fort and a certain little red-roofed town to the left of it. This was Caney.

Eastward still, three miles across an uneven expanse of green, jungle and jungle-road alive with men, bivouacing fearlessly around and under four more 3.2 guns planted on another high-stripped knoll--El Poso--and trained on a little paG.o.da-like block-house, which sat like a Christmas toy on top of a green little, steep little hill from the base of which curved an orchard-like valley back to sweeping curve of the jungle. This was San Juan.

Nature loves sudden effects in the tropics. While Chaffee fretted in valley-shadows around Caney and Lawton strode like a yellow lion past the guns on the hill and, eastward, gunner on the other hill at El Poso and soldier in the jungle below listened westward, a red light ran like a flame over the east, the tops of the mountains shot suddenly upward and it was day--flas.h.i.+ng day, with dripping dew and birds singing and a freshness of light and air that gave way suddenly when the sun quickly pushed an arc of fire over the green shoulder of a hill and smote the soldiers over and under the low trees like rays from an open furnace.

It smote Reynolds as he sat by the creek under the guns before San Juan, idly watching water bubble into three canteens, and it opened his lips for an oath that he was too lazy to speak; it smote Abe Long cooking coffee on the bank some ten yards away, and made him raise from the fire and draw first one long forearm and then the other across his heat-wrinkled brow; but, unheeded, it smote Crittenden--who stood near, leaning against a palm-tree--full in his uplifted face. Perhaps that was the last sunrise on earth for him. He was watching it in Cuba, but his spirit was hovering around home. He could feel the air from the woods in front of Canewood; could hear the darkies going to work and Aunt Keziah singing in the kitchen. He could see his mother's shutter open, could see her a moment later, smiling at him from her door. And Judith--where was she, and what was she doing? Could she be thinking of him? The sound of his own name coming down through the hot air made him start, and, looking up toward the Rough Riders, who were gathered about a little stuccoed farm-house just behind the guns on the hill, he saw Blackford waving at him. At the same moment hoofs beat the dirt-road behind him--familiar hoof-beats--and he turned to see Basil and Raincrow--for Crittenden's Colonel was sick with fever and Basil had Raincrow now--on their way with a message to Chaffee at Caney. Crittenden saluted gravely, as did Basil, though the boy turned in his saddle, and with an affectionate smile waved back at him.