The Code of the Mountains Part 22

Thus they spent their first night in the field with the unending, but comparatively harmless, roar from the north as a clangorous lullaby, and the tropic starlight in their faces, and the breeze which whispered gently across the salt marshes from the sea fanning their foreheads.

When the dawn broke with tropical suddenness like the ringing up of a quick curtain, the theater of last night's drama stood revealed. With daylight came a slackening of the night-long Insurgent thunder, which slowly dropped away to desultory firing, and then to complete quiet. Off to the left of the line, where the Kentuckians had lain, stretched the broken wastes of the salt marshes, with here and there in the distance blue glimpses of the sea. But directly ahead, where all night the trenches had been barking and vomiting, the landscape was naked of visible life. The rice-fields went off for a short distance, broken only by their d.y.k.es, and farther away rose a dense screen of bamboo and woodland, a solid ma.s.s of green, from which waved a ragged top of shredded palms.

As the men crouched over their hard-tack and coffee, they were thinking of the day's work, which they hoped would include pa.s.sing beyond that screen and those trenches.

CHAPTER XVIII

During the night a siege-gun had been brought up by hand, and now, from its place where the road cut through the entrenchments, it opened with the morning greeting of a hoa.r.s.e bark, as the crew serving it began feeling over the landscape for the field-piece which had boomed so insistently last night.

Then, as the morning wore on, and orders to advance came, the slow rifle-firing began again and increased in volume as the sun climbed.

The night-long rain of random lead had taken its toll in a few wounded, though none had sustained mortal hurt. Two or three men from B Company came back to the front from the improvised dressing-station at the rear, wearing reddened bandages, which they displayed with the c.o.c.ky pride of medals, as they picked up their pieces and joined again in the game.

The masking woods told nothing of the trenches beyond except in the swish of Mauser bullets, which shredded drooping palm fronds into tatters. Newt Spooner was squatting on his haunches in the trench, with a pipe between his teeth. Every now and then he came to his knees and fired a shot. At his side knelt Jim Dodeman, who until he joined the militia had never fared twenty miles from the cabin on Troublesome where he had been born. Jimmy was bored with the ennui of shooting at a screen of palm trees and crouching between times in a hot ditch. So, at last, he rose for a fuller view and to stretch the cramp from his limbs.

He rose silently and as silently lay down again, but this time he lay flat, and, when a pause in proceedings gave Newt leisure to relight his pipe, he looked down to recognize in Jimmy's posture the dummy-like quality of death. The little muddy spot under the soldier's temple was fed by blood trickling from his brain.

First-Sergeant Peter Spooner had been going back and forth along the company line, curbing the inclination of its restive integers to over-spend cartridges in futile bickering. He stopped and turned the prostrate figure face up, and for a moment looked into the dulled eyes.

"Dead," commented the sergeant briefly.

Newt nodded.

"Them d.a.m.ned Falkinses got him," he said over his shoulder. Then, remembering that he had swapped enemies, he grinned, and corrected himself: "I mean them other varmints."

At noon, a brigade staff-officer brought instructions. The whole line was to be advanced five hundred yards to a new position where the woods would no longer screen the enemy, and it was there to dig trenches along a roadway, which paralleled the present front.

That news sent a drone of excited pleasure through the bluegra.s.s companies, and even into the phlegmatic stoicism of the s.h.i.+rt-tail battalion crept the suppressed expectation of the first charge. Major Falkins went along the line for final instructions to company commanders, and First Sergeant Spooner cast down his company front the anxious glance of a stage-director who awaits the curtain call, on a first night.

But the two platoons seemed steady enough as they rose from the trenches in extended order, and waited for the word that should launch them forward.

Then a bugle rang, and the entire two battalions started silently and stolidly onward. In a few minutes the silence would be broken--from the front. On to the screen of the woods they went at a rapid quickstep, and through the foliage they broke into view, like circus riders through paper hoops. As they emerged into the open rice-fields, and could see the straw hats at the top of the trenches four hundred yards to the north, the stillness was ripped in one wild roar of musketry, and their terrific welcome had begun. Its echoes rolled away in waves of sound that merged with fresh outburstings, and nearer at hand, in weird shrieks, piercing the louder detonations, whimpered the lost-soul wail of the Mauser bullets. As the straw hats bobbed hysterically up and disappeared again, the men of the two battalions began stumbling and lying grotesquely down in the rice-fields.

They reached the road, which the brigade order said was to be their resting place. But neither brigade nor division orders can keep men alive in a place where the physical topography forbids. The road ran at the right and left in a sunken band between banks two or three feet high, affording--to east and west--a natural protection; but for the length of several furlongs it elected to rise and proceed in a level flush with the rice-fields and gave to even the closest-lying and most prostrate figures pitiless conspicuousness as targets. On each side, the troops were at work, improving their cover, and for their work they had partial security; but the Kentuckians were left mercilessly exposed.

They were firing desperately at the solid earth ahead and receiving in response a death-hail which they could not for many minutes endure.

Sergeant Peter Spooner, running in a crouching att.i.tude, dropping, rising, his rifle barking, was doing all that mortal being could do to make moles of his men and burrow them into the earth. The situation was intolerable. The s.h.i.+rt-tail battalion and the bluegra.s.s battalion stood in peril of decimation in their maiden engagement.

Newt Spooner lay stretched behind a mound of earth some seven inches high. He lay spraddled and flattened like a large drab lizard, hugging the earth with his feet stretched apart, and even his heels held tight to the clay. At each report of his piece Private Spooner opened the block and blew through the breech, as a trap-shooter blows the powder out of a shot-gun. Private Spooner's face was sweating with exertion, and the dust turned to mud as it gathered on his chin and jaws.

Behind similarly insufficient mounds, or no mounds at all, several hundred other privates were similarly employed. At the front rose a dense fog of fleecy white, for the volunteers had not yet been afforded the luxury of smokeless powder. Ever and anon a man rose on one elbow and strained his eyes in a vain effort to penetrate the pale smoke, and as the hour-like minutes wore on, more and more of them rolled quietly over and relinquished their rifles and stared up out of eyes which the hot glare had ceased to trouble.

Orders are orders, and the line was commanded to remain here, but Major Falkins knew that his section of it must move forward, or fall back and leave the line broken. The colonel was at the regimental center where the line lapped on the deeper banks. Falkins, with a scarlet thread down his face where death had brushed him in pa.s.sing, found the commanding officer.

"I can't stay where I am," he shouted; "I must go forward."

"Go," acquiesced the "C. O." crisply. "And go like h.e.l.l!"

At the returning major's elbow pressed the battalion's trumpeter, and, at the signal of a nod, he set the bugle to his lips and blew, "Cease firing!" It was the command for which he had been fretting. The brazen message went only a little way along the noisy line, but it was relayed by word of mouth; and, as the firing fell away, the second command clamored upon the first. "Fix bayonets!"

Those notes were magic. They stood for the wild dash and close quarters and hand-to-hand punishment. They promised vengeance for the men who had fallen asleep. Down the front ran the ominous metallic click of engaging hilt and muzzle, and, as the pall of smoke began to rise, the line came shouting to its feet and set its eyes hungrily on the yellow stripe that marked the top of the earth-works. They stood, a moment, exposed as the command of "forward" flexed their taut nerves. There were three hundred yards between them and their goal, and these three hundred were annoyingly and maddeningly broken with fences and gullies, but now they were free to fire at will, which meant as fast as they could load. Also, as they advanced, they left behind their own blinding curtain of powder fog. And these men from the hills, shooting now at a point-blank range to which they were accustomed: a range at which every man was a sharp-shooter, combed and harried the yellow earthen band ahead of them with so galling and stinging and venomous a punishment that the straw hats drew down like turtle heads into sh.e.l.ls, and the Mauser bullets, fired at random, went wilder and higher.

It was not easy work, though much easier than lying p.r.o.ne and being shot to pieces. Even with random marksmans.h.i.+p and growing panic, the brown men were still sheltered, and many shots went home. Newt, clambering over a fence, saw at his shoulder a boy who used to sit at his side on the split-log bench at school. He saw the boy loosen his hold on the same fence and roll over and over in the rice-stubble, clawing at his breast, while his lips snarled and swore.

Then, sixty yards from the yellow rim of the trenches, the bugle rang out its most blood-quickening call, and, in answer, the line trembled and leaped forward, and mountain reticence broke at last in one prolonged mountain yell of fury and loosened pa.s.sion.

And, as that barbaric howl of impending doom smote upon the ears of the Filipinos in their ordered trenches, they read in it a cue for swift exit, and their white-clad bodies began clambering out of the rifle-pits, and their brown legs began twinkling through the rice-fields behind.

The Kentuckians redoubled their pace. It was intolerable that the men whom they had left strewn along the rice-paddies should go unavenged.

Yet, when they clambered across the trench fronts, it was to find them empty, save for those who lay dead.

For a moment, the victors halted, winded and almost exhausted at the trenches they had carried. Companies were as hopelessly jumbled and mixed as a galley of type that a compositor has dropped downstairs.

Private Newt Spooner and perhaps enough men to make a half-platoon, after a few moments of gasping and sweat-wiping, rose up and started on in the trail of the fleeing insurgents.

"Hold on there!" bellowed Sergeant Peter Spooner, for once losing his composure in a volley of profanity. "Where the h.e.l.l do you think you're goin' to?"

"We're goin' atter 'em!" shrieked back Private Newton Spooner. "Come on, boys--we kin git 'em."

Major Falkins had seen the trouble and rushed up, his face steaming, but triumphant.

"Get back, d.a.m.n you!" he ordered. "Get back to those trenches." He had neither time nor inclination to explain why pursuit was denied. Such matters as preserving division alignment were of no interest to these men.

For a moment, Newt Spooner hesitated, surveying his battalion commander with an insolent contempt, then he turned to the other restive privates.

"Come on, boys!" he yelled. "Don't suffer them n.i.g.g.e.rs ter git away."

The major and his sergeant acted promptly. With the flat of sword and clubbed musket, they beat back the mutinous and excited men, and, after one blood-mad moment, all except Newt turned readily enough with shamefaced grins.

But, in the momentary flail-like wielding of his saber-blade, Henry Falkins had struck Newton Spooner one light blow, and straightway the boy forgot any war between the United States and Aguinaldo; and remembered only the old war between himself and the man who had sent him to prison. He slipped a cartridge into his breech and would have settled the score at the moment.

But, in that same moment, Sergeant Peter Spooner caught his hand, and whispered in his ear.

"Obey orders, d.a.m.n you! This ain't your only chance. This ain't no private quarrel."

No one else had seen that look, or in the larger excitement read its significance, and, even while Sergeant Spooner held Private Spooner's steaming wrist, and their faces bent close together, sweat-wet and dirt-stained, a new roar awoke two hundred yards to their left, to seize their attention. The windows and doors of the old Spanish church, that stood with a crooked cross tottering over its stained stucco walls, was belching fire upon them. There was no time to form company or platoon now, or to sort men into their rightful commands. Major Falkins waved his saber and led the way at a run toward the offending walls, and Sergeant Spooner at his heels was herding the group forward at pell-mell speed, their rifles blazing and barking as they went.

A few of them did not reach the place, but enough did, and, as they came to the front, spreading and dividing to prevent possible escape from other entrances, the doors opened, and the over-venturesome refugees rushed out in a pelting tide of effort to fight their way to freedom by a sortie. Then the wrath of the mountaineers was appeased, and those of the enemy who did not remain for burial went back as prisoners.

As Henry Falkins hurried back to his command, Private Newt Spooner followed close at his heels and this time his rifle swung at his side.

Its bayonet bore some stains which he wiped off as he walked. At the trenches, the bugle was sounding a.s.sembly. Across the face of the country, wisps and attenuated clouds of smoke were wreathing their way up and melting in the blue. From the rice-paddies and d.y.k.es rose wavering mists of heat.

The Kentucky hillsmen, now reformed into column, were going back to their fellows. They alone had had the capping triumph of crossing the earth-works and effecting the hand-to-hand dislodgment of the enemy. So they went back with a jaunty tread, and they paused before starting across that four hundred yards where they should be watched as returning victors, to pull out their s.h.i.+rt-tails. Marching in that style, they would not have to declare their ident.i.ty.

To Henry Falkins they suggested, as the skirts of their flannel s.h.i.+rts flapped around their legs like kilts, those far-off ancestors of the Scotch highlands whose blood flowed unamalgamated in their veins.