The Code of the Mountains Part 27

"Well, doggone my ornery skin! Hit seems like jest yestiddy thet Newty lit out acrost these-hyar hills, h.e.l.l-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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+rt-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 pa.s.sing 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 Jose Rosario, in pa.s.sing, 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 circ.u.mstance--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 appeas.e.m.e.nt 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 a.s.saults 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 d.a.m.nation 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 hara.s.sed 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 courts.h.i.+p, 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 d.a.m.ned.

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 gra.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sent, 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 _p.r.o.nto_!"

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 pa.s.s 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 cortege, 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.