Crittenden Part 15

Crittenden handed him his canteen, and Bob drank and rose unsteadily to his feet.

"Dat ain't nuttin'," he said, contemptuously, feeling along the wound.

"'Tain't nigh as bad as mule kick. 'Tain't nuttin', 't all." And then he almost fell.

"Go back, Bob."

"All right, Ole Cap'n, I reckon I'll jus' lay down heah little while,"

he said, stretching out behind the tree.

And Grafton reached over for Crittenden's hand. He was getting some new and startling ideas about the difference in the feeling toward the negro of the man who once owned him body and soul and of the man who freed him body and soul. And in the next few minutes he studied Crittenden as he had done before--taking in detail the long hair, lean face strongly chiselled, fearless eye, modest demeanour--marking the intellectual look of the face--it was the face of a student--a gentleman--gently born.

And, there in the heat of the fight, he fell to marvelling over the nation that had such a man to send into the field as a common soldier.

Again they moved forward. Crittenden's Lieutenant dropped--wounded.

"Go on," he cried, "d.a.m.n it, go on!"

Grafton helped to carry him back, stepping out into the open for him, and Crittenden saw a bullet lick up the wet earth between the correspondent's feet.

Forward again! It was a call for volunteers to advance and cut the wires. Crittenden was the first to spring to his feet, and Abe Long and Reynolds sprang after him. Forward they slipped on their bellies, and the men behind saw one brown, knotty hand after another reach up from the gra.s.s and clip, clip, clip through the thickly braided wires.

Forward again! The men slipped like eels through and under the wires, and lay in the long gra.s.s behind. The time was come.

"FORWARD!"

Crittenden never knew before the thrill that blast sent through him, and never in his life did he know it again.

It was the call of America to the American, white and black: and race and colour forgotten, the American answered with the grit of the Saxon, the Celt's pure love of a fight, and all the dash of the pa.s.sionate Gaul.

As Crittenden leaped to his feet, he saw Reynolds leap, too, and then there was a hissing h.e.l.l of white smoke and crackling iron at his feet--and Reynolds disappeared.

It was a marvel afterward but, at that moment, Crittenden hardly noted that the poor fellow was blown into a hundred fragments. He was in the front line now. A Brigadier, with his hat in his hand and his white hair shining in the sun, run diagonally across in front of his line of battle, and, with a wild cheer, the run of death began.

G.o.d, how the bullets hissed and the sh.e.l.ls shrieked; and, G.o.d, how slow--slow--slow was the run! Crittenden's legs were of lead, and leaden were the legs of the men with him--running with guns trailing the earth or caught tightly across the breast and creeping unconsciously. He saw nothing but the men in front of him, the men who were dropping behind him, and the yellow line above, and the haven at the bottom of the hill. Now and then he could see a little, dirty, blue figure leap into view on the hill and disappear. Two men only were ahead of him when he reached the foot of the hill--Sharpe and a tall Cuban close at his side with machete drawn--the one Cuban hero of that fierce charge. But he could hear laboured panting behind him, and he knew that others were coming on. G.o.d, how steep and high that hill was! He was gasping for breath now, and he was side by side with Cuban and Lieutenant--gasping, too. To right and left--faint cheers. To the right, a machine gun playing like hail on the yellow dirt. To his left a sh.e.l.l, bursting in front of a climbing, struggling group, and the soldiers tumbling backward and rolling ten feet down the hill. A lull in the firing--the Spaniards were running--and then the top--the top! Sharpe sprang over the trench, calling out to save the wounded. A crouching Spaniard raised his pistol, and Sharpe fell. With one leap, Crittenden reached him with the b.u.t.t of his gun and, with savage exultation, he heard the skull of the Spaniard crash.

Straight in front, the Spaniards were running like rabbits through the brush. To the left, Kent was charging far around and out of sight. To the right, Rough Riders and negroes were driving Spaniards down one hill and up the next. The negroes were as wild as at a camp meeting or a voodoo dance. One big Sergeant strode along brandishing in each hand a piece of his carbine that had been shot in two by a Mauser bullet, and shouting at the top of his voice, contemptuously:

"Heah, somebody, gimme a gun! gimme a gun, I tell ye," still striding ahead and looking never behind him. "You don't know how to fight. Gimme a gun!" To the negro's left, a young Lieutenant was going up the hill with naked sword in one hand and a kodak in the other--taking pictures as he ran. A bare-headed boy, running between him and a gigantic negro trooper, toppled suddenly and fell, and another negro stopped in the charge, and, with a groan, bent over him and went no farther.

And all the time that machine gun was playing on the trenches like a hard rain in summer dust. Whenever a Spaniard would leap from the trench, he fell headlong. That pitiless fire kept in the trenches the Spaniards who were found there--wretched, pathetic, half-starved little creatures--and some terrible deeds were done in the l.u.s.t of slaughter.

One gaunt fellow thrust a clasp-knife into the b.u.t.tock of a shamming Spaniard, and, when he sprang to his feet, blew the back of his head off. Some of the Riders chased the enemy over the hill and lay down in the shade. One of them pulled out of a dead Spaniard's pocket cigarettes, cigars, and a lady's slipper of white satin; with a grunt he put the slipper back. Below the trenches, two boyish prisoners sat under a tree, crying as though they were broken-hearted, and a big trooper walked up and patted them both kindly on the head.

"Don't cry, boys; it's all right--all right," he said, helplessly.

Over at the block-house, Crittenden stopped firing suddenly, and, turning to his men, shouted:

"Get back over the hill boys, they're going to start in again." As they ran back, a Lieutenant-Colonel met them.

"Are you in command?"

Crittenden saluted.

"No, sir," he said.

"Yes, sir," said the old Sergeant at his side. "He was. He brought these men up the hill."

"The h.e.l.l he did. Where are your officers?"

The old Sergeant motioned toward the valley below, and Crittenden opened his lips to explain, but just then the sudden impression came to him that some one had struck him from behind with the b.u.t.t of a musket, and he tried to wheel around--his face amazed and wondering. Then he dropped. He wondered, too, why he couldn't get around, and then he wondered how it was that he happened to be falling to the earth.

Darkness came then, and through it ran one bitter thought--he had been shot in the back. He did think of his mother and of Judith--but it was a fleeting vision of both, and his main thought was a dull wonder whether there would be anybody to explain how it was that his wound was not in front. And then, as he felt himself lifted, it flashed that he would at least be found on top of the hill, and beyond the Spaniard's trench, and he saw Blackford's face above him. Then he was dropped heavily to the ground again and Blackford pitched across his body. There was one glimpse of Abe Long's anxious face above him, another vision of Judith, and then quiet, painless darkness.

It was fiercer firing now than ever. The Spaniards were in the second line of trenches and were making a sortie. Under the hill sat Grafton and another correspondent while the storm of bullets swept over them.

Grafton was without gla.s.ses--a Mauser had furrowed the skin on the bridge of his nose, breaking his spectacle-frame so that one gla.s.s dropped on one side of his nose and the other on the other. The other man had several narrow squeaks, as he called them, and, even as they sat, a bullet cut a leaf over his head and it dropped between the pages of his note-book. He closed the book and looked up.

"Thanks," he said. "That's just what I want--I'll keep that."

"I observe," said Grafton, "that the way one of these infernal bullets sounds depends entirely on where you happen to be when you hear it. When a sharpshooter has picked you out and is plugging at you, they are intelligent and vindictive. Coming through that bottom, they were for all the world like a lot of nasty little insects. And listen to 'em now." The other man listened. "Hear 'em as they pa.s.s over and go out of hearing. That is for all the world like the last long note of a meadow lark's song when you hear him afar off and at sunset. But I notice that simile didn't occur to me until I got under the lee of this hill." He looked around. "This hill will be famous, I suppose. Let's go up higher." They went up higher, pa.s.sing a crowd of skulkers, or men in reserve--Grafton could not tell which--and as they went by a soldier said:

"Well, if I didn't have to be here, I be d.a.m.ned if I wouldn't like to see anybody get me here. What them fellers come fer, I can't see."

The firing was still hot when the two men got up to the danger line, and there they lay down. A wounded man lay at Grafton's elbow. Once his throat rattled and Grafton turned curiously.

"That's the death-rattle," he said to himself, and he had never heard a death-rattle before. The poor fellow's throat rattled again, and again Grafton turned.

"I never knew before," he said to himself, "that a dying man's throat rattled but once." Then it flashed on him with horror that he should have so little feeling, and he knew it at once as the curious callousness that comes quickly to toughen the heart for the sights of war. A man killed in battle was not an ordinary dead man at all--he stirred no sensation at all--no more than a dead animal. Already he had heard officers remarking calmly to one another, and apparently without feeling:

"Well, So and So was killed to-day." And he looked back to the disembarkation, when the army was simply in a hurry. Two negro troopers were drowned trying to get off on the little pier. They were fished up; a rope was tied about the neck of each, and they were lashed to the pier and left to be beaten against the wooden pillars by the waves for four hours before four comrades came and took them out and buried them. Such was the dreadful callousness that sweeps through the human heart when war begins, and he was under its influence himself, and long afterward he remembered with shame his idle and half-scientific and useless curiosity about the wounded man at his elbow. As he turned his head, the soldier gave a long, deep, peaceful sigh, as though he had gone to sleep. With pity now Grafton turned to him--and he had gone to sleep, but it was his last sleep.

"Look," said the other man. Grafton looked upward. Along the trenches, and under a hot fire, moved little Jerry Carter, with figure bent, hands clasped behind him--with the manner, for all the world, of a deacon in a country graveyard looking for inscriptions on tombstones.

Now and then a bullet would have a hoa.r.s.e sound--that meant that it had ricochetted. At intervals of three or four minutes a huge, old-fashioned projectile would labour through the air, visible all the time, and crash harmlessly into the woods. The Americans called it the "long yellow feller," and sometimes a negro trooper would turn and with a yell shoot at it as it pa.s.sed over. A little way off, a squad of the Tenth Cavalry was digging a trench--close to the top of the hill. Now and then one would duck--particularly the one on the end. He had his tongue in the corner of his mouth, was twirling his pick over his shoulder like a railroad hand, and grunting with every stroke. Grafton could hear him.

"Foh Gawd (huh!) never thought (huh!) I'd git to love (huh!) a pick befoh!" Grafton broke into a laugh.

"You see the charge?"

"Part of it."

"That tall fellow with the blue handkerchief around his throat, bare-headed, long hair?"

"Well--" the other man stopped for a moment. His eye had caught sight of a figure on the ground--on the top of the trench, and with the profile of his face between him and the afterglow, and his tone changed--"there he is!"

Grafton pressed closer. "What, that the fellow?" There was the handkerchief, the head was bare, the hair long and dark. The man's eyes were closed, but he was breathing. Below them at that moment they heard the surgeon say: