The Code of the Mountains Part 25

When Mrs. Falkins learned that a company from headquarters would march at once to follow up what news the scouts brought in, she promptly announced that as far as the village she would accompany the expedition.

The major raised no objection. It was a pleasant thought that he could defer his farewell with his wife until he left the edge of the safety-zone, and meet her there on his return. Mrs. Falkins rode her native pony along that ten mile-march with a feeling of exhilaration and pride. These men who marched and fought behind her husband, were to her all members of a great family, of which he was the head. They were no longer raw men, "unmade, unhandled, unmeet," but seasoned and tempered veterans, and her young heart thrilled with pride as she drank in the morning air, and gazed with fascination at the vivid colors of the forests and the weird picturesqueness of the thatched hamlets by the way.

For five days after their arrival in the village, they awaited news from the hills. They had hoped for definite tidings before that time, but as yet the delay had caused no anxiety. The scouts might have found the reconnaissance a larger enterprise than they had antic.i.p.ated. So those at the village invoked the philosophy of patience--and waited.

It had been some time since Lieutenant Barlow had seen a woman from G.o.d's country. He was one of the men who had come to the regiment with its reorganization, and now he was glad that he had turned a native bungalow into a fairly comfortable place for the quartering of his superior and his superior's wife. There was a small thatched porch, shaded against the mid-day glare by a gra.s.s curtain. From this verandah when the moonlight flooded the village, one had a view not to be despised. Across a bare s.p.a.ce of so-called plaza stood the house occupied as headquarters, and now, on the fourth evening after their arrival, its office stood open-doored and vacant, save for the musician of the guard, who must remain on duty there until tattoo.

Everywhere about the village was the ordered quiet of a town well guarded. The girl sat in a deep wicker chair, while the two officers nursed their khaki-clad knees on the steps--and all talked of the States. The moonlight seemed to gush and flow over the face of the world, and to throw walls and roofs and palms into the fantastic picture-shapes of a fairy tale. Off between the houses, she could see the pacing figure of a sentry. Overhead from the nipa roof came the occasional stirring of a house-snake, and in the long silences, which the night stillness fostered, they heard tiny sounds of delicate scurrying footfalls as the lizards scampered across the walls.

One of them darted out into the yellow light of the open door, and halted near the lieutenant's knee. There, flashing like luminous jade and inflating his small crimson throat, he shrilled out his small, strident voice, and others answered.

It all seemed very unreal and far away and strangely beautiful. Then to their ears drifted a call from the sentry line for the corporal of the guard.

Athwart the front of the headquarters building lay an unbroken s.p.a.ce, which the moonlight dyed with the deep blue-green radiance of a black opal. Shortly there appeared into this s.p.a.ce two figures, carrying something which seemed heavy. They moved slowly as though their burden were a thing that required much care and, as they came nearer and made their way slowly toward the open door of the headquarters office, it became obvious that what they bore between them was a very limp human being. At first, it seemed unconscious and hung sagging in their arms; but, before they had disappeared through the doorway, it came to life with a nerve-rasping jargon of delirious sounds and lashed out inconsiderately with its arms and legs at the men who were giving it a.s.sistance.

Major Falkins and Lieutenant Barlow rose hastily, and crossed the s.p.a.ce of moonlight. The girl rose, too, but she went into the house with that sound of raving still in her ears--and sat down, suddenly unnerved.

In the office, the major and lieutenant found the creature which had, several days ago, been a private soldier of the headquarters scouts, lying on the floor in the lemon-colored lamplight. It was mumbling inarticulate things through parched and cracking lips, and gazing wildly out of a couple of red embers that had formerly been eyes. Its clothing hung on it in tatters, and the exposed flesh was bolo-gashed and briar-torn. This was the one man of the twelve who came back to report--and came back decorated from torture. The surgeon was already kneeling on the floor, doing what human skill could do--which was too little.

The raving man made tortured efforts to speak, as though the eternal peace of his soul required it; but, of those bending over him, none could construe the hoa.r.s.e gibberish of his swollen tongue and unbalanced brain.

Sergeant Newton Spooner had silently entered the office in response to the major's summons. Now, he stood at attention just within the threshold, and his eyes were not pleasant eyes as he gazed on the threshing, disfigured thing, and recognized in him a kinsman. But, if his face was hard-set and l.u.s.tful for vengeance, it was hardly more so than that of the battalion commander, standing by as the surgeon forced brandy between the teeth of the wrecked face. The physician finally rose with a shake of his head.

"It's no use," he announced briefly. "He can't last two hours."

But to the object of erstwhile human shape came a momentary flash of revival. He tried to prop himself on one elbow and waved his torn fingers toward the mountains. From his mouth came incoherent sounds, and in his eyes burned the desperation of a final effort to rid himself of some message. Then he reached his hand around to his neck, and they saw that he bore, pinned to his belt, a package wrapped in the red calico of which _tao_ breeches are fashioned.

They removed it, and opened the covering, to find inside a communication of the sort that sc.r.a.pes the civilization from men as a coa.r.s.e cloth sc.r.a.pes the tender blush from a peach.

"This memento we return with compliments," ran the screed in neatly penned Spanish. "The rest will be dealt with as befits foes of the Republic. If you follow you will find at Santa Rosa another memento.

"_Adios, con mucho felicidad_, General Jose Rosario."

Major Falkins wheeled to Sergeant Newton Spooner. His face was very white and stony. "Have your company ready to hike--quick!" His words were snapped out like the cracks of a mule-whip; but Sergeant Newton Spooner had saluted and disappeared before the final syllable was uttered.

Within the hour, Mrs. Henry Falkins stood at the sh.e.l.l-paned window of the bungalow and saw the company swinging toward the edge of town with a step that argued coming events. At their head, guiding them into the blind trails of the _bosque_, went a native from the village, but he went with a rope around his shoulders, which was held by a st.u.r.dy private of the advance guard. There was no intention that he should abruptly disappear into the jungle and carry warning, instead of giving service as guide.

At noon the next day, the column had proof that thus far at least they were following the right trail. The overhead wheeling of buzzards would have guided them now, even had the native failed of loyalty.

In the gulch of a stream that ran between tall and tangled banks, the advance came upon the bodies of the two men who had comprised the "point," and who had first run into the ambuscade. What the other ten had done was plain enough. At that first outbreak, they had scattered into a second slough, running at right angles with the dipping trail.

There they had lain down and taken cover among the scattered rocks, and there eight of them still lay. It was the only thing they could do, also it was what the enemy had planned they should do. Major, lieutenant, and sergeant went over the ground and read the signs. It was quite easy.

They could tell the approximate order in which each had died, by counting the litter of empty cartridge-hulls about the bodies.

Then they found one pile of these spent souvenirs in a place where there was no corpse, and it was perhaps the largest pile of all. That should be the spot where Sergeant-Major Peter Spooner had come to bay for his last stand. Probably he had lost consciousness from blood-letting at the end. Otherwise, he would hardly have been taken alive.

The bodies were hurriedly buried, and the graves marked; then the column pushed on, a little grimmer and a little more silent and a little faster, toward Santa Rosa.

At dawn, the men of the 26th Volunteers filed into empty streets which echoed their marching tread. It was like a village of the dead, a place of empty houses and open doors. No one had waited to explain to the wrathful avengers. But they found, nailed conspicuously to the front of a nipa shack in the princ.i.p.al street, a large white sheet of paper, bearing another note of satiric directions.

"On the trail which leads from this street, the _bosque_ will, at the distance of one league, contain one more memento.

"_Adios, con mucho felicidad_, General Jose Rosario."

There was no spoken word, as Falkins, turning from the message, nodded to the company commander, and the column swung forward. There was no sound as they marched through the deserted street, except the rattle of cup and canteen on haversack and the purposeful thud of their own feet on the hard-beaten earth.

And beyond the edge of the town, where a sullen-looking carabao bull, sole occupant, gazed after them, there was still grim silence as they plunged into the thick growth of the _bosque_ and bored their way into the country, which at every mile was growing wilder and more impa.s.sable.

The eight bodies they had buried, and the one which had doubtless been, by this time, buried back at the garrison, accounted for seventy-five per cent. of the detachment which had gone ahead. The three others included Lieutenant Sperry, of Jackson, and Sergeant-Major Peter Spooner, and those two had been taken alive. The column was so grim in its purpose now that it needed no more orders than blood-hounds would have required.

CHAPTER XXII

At a place where they came upon the ashes of a dead fire, Henry Falkins halted the command, and, accompanied by a lieutenant and Sergeant Newton Spooner, undertook some investigations of his own. It was Sergeant Spooner, led by an inborn instinct which became a compa.s.s in the woods, who discovered the thing they sought. He returned in grim silence to the officers, and led them to a small clearing in the _bijuca_ tangle.

There, roped upright to a tree, was a body wearing the uniform of a first lieutenant of United States Infantry. Newt Spooner had found the "memento." The dead man bore no bolo gashes, and the wound which had disabled him had been only a bullet through one shoulder. Yet, as the officers came near, they realized that he had not been dead when he was placed here. He had stood up, lashed against a slender palm bole, and died on his feet. Yet even that failed to account for the hideous twist of acute agony frozen on the dead features. No ordinary torture would have so stamped the dying visage of such a stoic. The large brown ants were crawling everywhere, but the full meaning of their presence was to pa.s.s unrealized until Newton Spooner attracted attention. He silently led them closer and pointed to an amber smear about the lips and nostrils of the dead man.

"Honey, sir," he said briefly, in a voice that rasped like a file; "wild honey. They put that stuff in his nose and mouth, sir. The ants did the rest."

The officers turned away, sickened, and after a moment Falkins ordered briefly.

"Bring a burial detail, sergeant--and, sergeant," he added, as a vicious note crept into the timbre of his utterance, "when we come up with these fellows, we take no prisoners. You understand, no prisoners!"

For ten days after that, a company of United States Volunteers drove their way through the mountains and _bosques_ of eastern Luzon, with the hammer-blows of forced marches. Their faces were the bristling, unshaven visages of half-wild men, and their eyes bore the inky cancellation-marks of a fatigue which, in such climates, is courtship of death. They had been bearing a noonday steam-like heat that parboiled them and wasted them in floods of sweat. They had marched and slept in wet khaki when sudden rains drenched the land and the jungle simmered afterward. A demoniacal desire for a reckoning in full with one Jose Rosario sustained them. The chase had resolved itself into a h.e.l.lish adaptation of hare and hound, for always ahead of them lay clews and information, and evidences of recent departures. Always, the wily guerilla was just out of grasping and crushing distance. In lonely villages, they found marks of his recent occupancy--with prisoners. In the hills, they found the ashes of his fires, but himself they never found. And, as he taunted them, they followed, "as dust-blown devils go": followed with an artificial and superhuman endurance engendered of mountain hate and an una.s.suaged thirst for vengeance. In many brains queer nightmare shapes rose and had to be brushed aside with a conscious effort, and in many veins the blood ran hot and feverish. The pursuit had carried them in a long circle like the flight of a fox, and brought them back to a point not so many miles from where they had entered the hills, but as far as ever from their quarry. The pursuing force was too large. The rest of the way they would rake _bosque_ and hill in scattered segments, each acting for itself and seeking to fall upon the enemy while he watched the decoy of the largest detachment.

Major Falkins and a dozen men, including First Sergeant Newton Spooner, were working their way through a jungle which seemed impervious to human progress. For days they had been so working. Step by step they moved lethargically, and in single file. No military order of formation can be kept unbroken where men are weaving their tired bodies in and out through a matted growth of rank _bijuca_ and jungle tangles. Besides, they moved as men half-asleep and indifferent to consequences, dragging leaden feet. The course they had taken had yielded never a sign, never an indication that they had chosen wisely. It led them through an unpeopled country where the valleys were mosquito-infested and malaria-ridden, and where drenching rains brought chill to their aching bones. They forced themselves forward with their hair matted and their brains dull. Clouds of mosquitoes moved with them. They were steadfast and resolute men, but they were also half-insane.

In this fashion, they came to a small, ravine-like channel, which for a little way ran in the direction they wished to go. Through it they could walk upright without fighting vines and cane. Experience had taught the danger of easy ways, but weariness had overcome caution, and for a furlong they plodded silently.

Ahead of them, the dry stream-bed, which was giving them momentary comfort as a roadway, twisted at an angle. Even in their lethargy they observed one rule of military caution. They walked in file with an interval of several yards between each two. Eleven of them had pa.s.sed out of sight around the turn. Major Falkins, who was number twelve, was just turning the point, and behind him trailed one other. It was Sergeant Spooner, who rarely lagged in the rear. Then the heavy stillness broke into the old familiar thunder, and four men lurched forward and crumpled down on their faces, as useless henceforth to the United States of America as burst bubbles.

"Back here, boys!" yelled Falkins, leaping out of his lethargy into sudden life.

"Git behind this twist--d.a.m.n ye! Git into ther la'rel!" shrieked Sergeant Spooner in echo, forgetting that the natural cover of the Islands was not the laurel of the c.u.mberlands. Falkins, standing at the turn, became an instant target, and the sergeant saw his campaign hat fly off spinning; saw the officer set his feet farther apart as one who braces himself, and heard the spiteful bark of his revolver. The sergeant himself was unseen, and it suddenly occurred to him that he might be more effective by remaining so. He saw the men who were still on their feet falling back on the protecting angle with its steep banks, firing doggedly as they came, and one by one he saw them drop short of their goal, except two who reached it only to lie down at the margin of shelter. He saw the major stand for a moment, shaking his head as the voices of the Krags died away and only the Remingtons of the enemy broke the silence.

Then the major, who no longer had a command, stepped back around the angle, and sat down on the ground. He laid his pistol on his knees and wiped blood from his eyes, but, after a moment, as though that posture were not comfortable enough, he stretched quietly out, with one elbow under his cheek, and drew up his knees as a child might lie in a crib when its mother has kissed it good-night. Spooner realized that he alone of that detail remained an efficient. There was no one to save except himself--and Falkins. To save himself was easy. He had not yet been seen.

Cautiously, the sergeant crawled over and possessed himself of all the firearms that lay in reach, without revealing himself; then again he crawled back, burrowing under the overhanging bank. He laid the four Krags in a row with their muzzles roughly trained above the major's body, and waited. At his back rose a bank which would confuse and multiply with echoes any sound.

Finally, the cautious brown heads appeared, and brown bodies flitted among the dead, collecting their spoils. Then Newt cupped both hands at his lips, and let out the mountain yell, a yell which had grown famous in Luzon. At the same instant, as fast as he could work the triggers lying grouped before him, he made the rifles speak from their magazines, as it seemed in unison, and the four reports were magnified by the rocks into a seeming of volley-fire. Instantly and in frenzied consternation, the brown men disappeared, and Newt Spooner worked his way forward, firing as fast as he could until he could peer into the channel. But the white men there would require no attention, and could benefit by none save the impossible courtesy of burial. As for the brown men, they were gone.

In one body, however, there was still life, and that happened to be the body of the battalion commander.

Newton Spooner strapped as many cartridge-belts about himself as he could carry. Then he pressed his canteen to the lips of Major Falkins, and began a slow and tedious journey back toward a point ten miles to the east, where if all went well and every chance favored him, he might possibly strike the camp of the main detachment to-morrow afternoon.

To-morrow afternoon! For once in his life, Newton Spooner laughed.

That night, Major Falkins did not die, but lay raving with a delirium of fever in the seclusion of the jungle whither the "non-com" had borne him. And, while he lay tossing, a dark figure sat huddled near-by, lethargically slapping at mosquitoes and bringing himself back with heart-breaking effort out of the heavy-lidded temptation of sleep. The man who so sat, grinned from time to time, and there was the queer, distorted quality of madness in the grin.