Short Stories of the New America Part 9

With one wild sweep of his windmill arms Cash grabbed up the sheet of paper on which Von Scheurer had made his life's last sketch. With a simultaneous sweep he knocked the gla.s.s-bulbed torch from the sentinel, just as a rifle or two were centering their aim toward him; and, head down, he tore into the group of men who blocked the dugout entrance.

Cash had a faintly conscious sense of dashing down one pa.s.sageway and up another, following by forestry instinct the course he noted when he was led into the colonel's presence.

He collided with a sentinel; he b.u.t.ted another from his flying path. He heard yells and shots-especially shots. Once something hit him on the shoulder, whirling him half round without breaking his stride. Again something hot whipped him across the cheek. And at last he was out, under the foggy stars, with excited Germans firing in his general direction and loosing off star sh.e.l.ls.

Again instinct and scout skill came to the rescue as he plunged into a bramble thicket and wriggled through long gra.s.s on his heaving stomach.

An hour before dawn Cash Wyble was led before his sleepy and unloving company commander. The returned wanderer was caked with dirt and blood.

His face was scored by briers. Across one cheek ran the red wale of a bullet. A very creditable flesh wound adorned his left shoulder. His clothes were in ribbons.

Before the captain could frame the first of a thousand scathing words Cash broke out pantingly: "Stick me in the hoosgow if you're a mind to, Cap! Stick me there for life. Or wish me onto a kitchen-police job forever! I'm not kickin'. It's comin' to me, all right, arter what I done.

"I git the drift of the hull thing now. I'm onter what it means. It-it means Old Glory! It means-_this!_"

He stuck out one muddy hand wherein was clutched a wad of scratch-pad paper.

Then the company commander did a thing that stamped him as a genius.

Instead of administering the planned rebuke and following it by sending the wretch to the guard house he began to ask questions.

"What do you make of it all?" dazedly queried the captain of Top Sergeant Mahan when Cash had been taken to the trench hospital to have his shoulder dressed.

"Well, sir," reported Mahan meditatively, "for one thing, I take it, we've got a new soldier in the company. A soldier, not a varmint. For another thing, I take it, Uncle Sam's got a new American on his list of nephews. And-and, unless I'm wrong, Kaiser Bill is short one crackajack sniper and one perfectly good Prussian colonel too. War's a funny thing, sir."

-Albert Payson Terhune.

IV-THE CITIZEN

The President of the United States was speaking. His audience comprised two thousand foreign-born men who had just been admitted to citizenship.

They listened intently, their faces, aglow with the light of a new-born patriotism, upturned to the calm, intellectual face of the first citizen of the country they now claimed as their own.

Here and there among the newly made citizens were wives and children.

The women were proud of their men. They looked at them from time to time, their faces showing pride and awe.

One little woman, sitting immediately in front of the President, held the hand of a big, muscular man and stroked it softly. The big man was looking at the speaker with great blue eyes that were the eyes of a dreamer.

The President's words came clear and distinct:

_You were drawn across the ocean by some beckoning finger of hope, by some belief, by some vision of a new kind of justice, by some expectation of a better kind of life. You dreamed dreams of this country, and I hope you brought the dreams with you. A man enriches the country to which he brings dreams, and you who have brought them have enriched America._

The big man made a curious choking noise and his wife breathed a soft "Hush!" The giant was strangely affected.

The President continued:

_No doubt you have been disappointed in some of us, but remember this, if we have grown at all poor in the ideal, you brought some of it with you. A man does not go out to seek the thing that is not in him. A man does not hope for the thing that he does not believe in, and if some of us have forgotten what America believed in, you at any rate imported in your own hearts a renewal of the belief. Each of you, I am sure, brought a dream, a glorious, shining dream, a dream worth more than gold or silver, and that is the reason that I, for one, make you welcome._

The big man's eyes were fixed. His wife shook him gently, but he did not heed her. He was looking through the presidential rostrum, through the big buildings behind it, looking out over leagues of s.p.a.ce to a snow-swept village that huddled on an island in the Beresina, the swift-flowing tributary of the mighty Dnieper, an island that looked like a black bone stuck tight in the maw of the stream.

It was in the little village on the Beresina that the Dream came to Ivan Berloff, Big Ivan of the Bridge.

The Dream came in the spring. All great dreams come in the spring, and the Spring Maiden who brought Big Ivan's Dream was more than ordinarily beautiful. She swept up the Beresina, trailing wondrous draperies of vivid green. Her feet touched the snow-hardened ground and armies of little white and blue flowers sprang up in her footsteps. Soft breezes escorted her, velvety breezes that carried the aromas of the far-off places from which they came, places far to the southward, and more distant towns beyond the Black Sea whose people were not under the sway of the Great Czar.

The father of Big Ivan, who had fought under Prince Menshikov at Alma fifty-five years before, hobbled out to see the sunbeams eat up the snow hummocks that hid in the shady places, and he told his son it was the most wonderful spring he had ever seen.

"The little breezes are hot and sweet," he said, sniffing hungrily with his face turned toward the south. "I know them, Ivan! I know them! They have the spice odor that I sniffed on the winds that came to us when we lay in the trenches at Balaklava. Praise G.o.d for the warmth!"

And that day the Dream came to Big Ivan as he plowed. It was a wonder dream. It sprang into his brain as he walked behind the plow, and for a few minutes he quivered as the big bridge quivers when the Beresina sends her ice squadrons to hammer the arches. It made his heart pound mightily, and his lips and throat became very dry.

Big Ivan stopped at the end of the furrow and tried to discover what had brought the Dream. Where had it come from? Why had it clutched him so suddenly? Was he the only man in the village to whom it had come?

Like his father, he sniffed the sweet-smelling breezes. He thrust his great hands into the sunbeams. He reached down and plucked one of a bunch of white flowers that had sprung up overnight. The Dream was born of the breezes and the sunshine and the spring flowers. It came from them and it had sprung into his mind because he was young and strong. He knew! It couldn't come to his father or Donkov, the tailor, or Poborino, the smith. They were old and weak, and Ivan's dream was one that called for youth and strength.

"Ay, for youth and strength," he muttered as he gripped the plow. "And I have it!"

That evening Big Ivan of the Bridge spoke to his wife, Anna, a little woman, who had a sweet face and a wealth of fair hair.

"Wife, we are going away from here," he said.

"Where are we going, Ivan?" she asked.

"Where do you think, Anna?" he said, looking down at her as she stood by his side.

"To Bobruisk," she murmured.

"No."

"Farther?"

"Ay, a long way farther."

Fear sprang into her soft eyes. Bobruisk was eighty-nine versts away, yet Ivan said they were going farther.

"We-we are not going to Minsk?" she cried.

"Ay, and beyond Minsk!"

"Ivan, tell me!" she gasped. "Tell me where we are going!"

"We are going to America."

"_To America?_"

"Yes, to America!"

Big Ivan of the Bridge lifted up his voice when he cried out the words "To America," and then a sudden fear sprang upon him as those words dashed through the little window out into the darkness of the village street. Was he mad? America was 8,000 versts away! It was far across the ocean, a place that was only a name to him, a place where he knew no one. He wondered in the strange little silence that followed his words if the crippled son of Poborino, the smith, had heard him. The cripple would jeer at him if the night wind had carried the words to his ear.