The Code of the Mountains Part 26

When Henry Falkins at last opened his eyes, he saw about him only the dense tangle of the forest, and heard only the bird-voices in the trees.

Slowly a recollection of yesterday came to his mind. He tried to rise on his elbow, and discovered his feet were tight-bound. Evidently he had been captured and was now being carried off by the ingenious Rosario to be filed away for future torture. Then he heard a sound like a strained chuckle, and turned his eyes, to find himself gazing into a grinning, lunatic face, which was the face of Sergeant Newton Spooner.

"Where are we, sergeant?" he inquired with forced composure. "Why am I tied up?"

The sergeant's reply was a hyena-like laugh, under which his gums were exposed beyond his teeth.

"I reckon," he suggested slowly, "ye mout es well drop the sergeant part of hit. Thar's jest the two of us left, and hit won't be long twell thar's jest one."

The wounded battalion commander settled back on the ground and said nothing. The demoniacal face of the other was not a face that could be reasoned with. It was the face of a man whose unhinged reason was capable of anything but sanity.

"Ye penitentiaried me oncet," went on the sergeant in dead-voiced reiteration of an old theme. "Ye sent me thar when ye didn't have nothin' erginst me. In the penitensherry--" he talked on half-coherently, half-ramblingly--"a feller jest studies 'bout things and gits meaner--and hyar hit 'pears like he kin git meaner yit."

"You must have dragged me away from that ravine," interrupted Falkins, realizing that they were not where he had fallen, and reasoning rather with himself than with the other. "You saved me yesterday. Why did you do that?"

"Because," retorted the other quickly, with a fierce up-leaping of pa.s.sion to his eyes, "because I was savin' my superior officer--not you, but a man in that uniform--besides ye b'longed ter me. I wasn't a-goin'

ter suffer no n.i.g.g.e.r ter git ye. Thet would hev been a soldier's death.

Now thar's jest two of us--we ain't soldiers now--we're jest men."

Falkins lay of necessity outstretched, awaiting the pleasure of his captor. About him swarmed mosquitoes, and he tossed his head in the vain effort to shake them off, and slapped viciously at them--for with his feet trussed there had been no necessity to tie his hands. Above him he could see patches of blue between the waving palm fronds, and to his fevered eyes the sky seemed to rock and ripple like a placid sea. Then he looked at the other soldier, standing at a distance, and the soldier, too, seemed to wave gently from head to foot as though painted on a fluttering curtain, but he read in the glowering face that the man meant to kill him.

"You fool!" he muttered. "You poor d.a.m.ned fool!"

He spoke in a voice of la.s.situde, as though his interest in the matter were academic and dilute. In his brain, the tide of fever was rising afresh, and this time it stole on him with the warmth of a comfortable narcotic.

But Newt Spooner went on, more steadily now, though with no faltering of determination.

"I've waited the h.e.l.l of a time.... I told ye my chanst would come.... I told ye, when ye tried ter play a d.a.m.n' hero there at 'Frisco, thet I'd git my chanst. Ef I'd kilt ye then, ye'd hev hed all ther best of hit, but now hit's different. Now I kin make ye pray fer mercy--an' not git none."

"Kill me, and be d.a.m.ned to you!" snapped the bound man, for a moment roused out of growing stupor into a peevish irritability. "I'm no more afraid of you now than I was then."

"I reckon," the boy spoke very deliberately and impressively, "I reckon I knows a way ter make ye skeered." It had been a long time now since Newton Spooner had talked in the uncouth vernacular of the hills, but the Newt Spooner of this morning was, it seemed, a man relapsed; a man from whom had slipped all the changes that the months had wrought. He came slowly and unsteadily over, and squatted on his haunches above the prostrate figure. He drew one hand from behind him, and held it out.

"I found a wild bee gum down thar," he went on in a dead, level tone.

"This hyar's wild honey. Thet-thar idee of givin' the ants a party hain't so d.a.m.ned bad atter all, is it?"

The major rolled over and presented his back to his enemy. He laughed and his tormentor did not know that it was the laughter of uncomprehending delirium. To Newt, it seemed a misplaced sense of humor.

"Wake me up for breakfast," murmured the major. "I want to take a nap now."

Later, Falkins awoke to a lucid interval, and saw nothing of his mad companion. But gradually his mind began to collect scattered fragments of memory, and the thing he had laughed at rose up to torture him. He remembered the threat now, and he remembered the dead face of the man they had found tied to a tree. He lay alone, shivering in weakness and harried by a terror he would not have cared to confess. An ant crawled over one wrist, and he leaped up, choking off a wild scream. It seemed that he could feel them crawling and stinging in thousands through his nostrils and nibbling at his brain. His fever would return, but for the present he lay sane and clammy with chill.

When the cool of the evening came, Newt reappeared. But his face, too, had lost its maniac glare. It was the face now of a man unutterably weary--as though all day he had been in some great travail.

"I reckon we mout as well be hikin'. Kin ye walk?" he inquired curtly.

"I'm not going to walk," retorted the officer belligerently. "This is as good a place to die as any."

"I ain't goin' ter hurt you," said Newt Spooner in a tired voice. "I reckon the time ain't come yet, after all."

"When will it come?" demanded the other, amazed beyond belief at this sudden change of front.

"Thet's my business. I hates you worse than pizen ... but I can't hurt you while we're both wearin' this uniform. It beats h.e.l.l how much a man gets to thinkin' about a d.a.m.n' pair of government breeches!" He stopped off as if in embarra.s.sment. Then he added: "Besides, I'm beholden to your wife. She gave me a lift once on the high-road."

Two days later, just as the platoon, flushed with a success which the others had missed, was preparing to break camp for the day's march, two men, both gibbering foolishly, both shambling on unsteady feet, tattered, thorn-torn and scalded with fever, dragged themselves, in the locked embrace of drunken men, up into sight of the outposts, and collapsed. One wore a major's uniform, and one had on his sleeve what was left of a sergeant's chevrons.

CHAPTER XXIII

The policy of splitting the command into bits, and leaving one platoon to carry on the seeming of the full force, had brought both disaster and success. The main body had taken a middle course upon which the smaller details might--theoretically--fall back, and on either side squads had scouted. While the men under Falkins were being misled and trapped, another detachment had slipped fortuitously upon a scouting party of the enemy, and, being less fatigued by reason of an easier course, they were stealing through the _bosque_ with unabated caution, and not one of that scouting party escaped alive except two who were captured. The detachment rejoined the platoon, and in view of the spirit in which the main command received these prisoners, they finally laid aside their show of sullen stubbornness and talked volubly.

Not only did they talk, under the effective persuasion of their captors, but they acted. They agreed to lead the _Americanos_ to the camp of General Rosario, which they said was pitched in a particularly inaccessible part of the mountains only a day's march away. Then the command, which had for so long been following a fox-fire, rose up, invigorated by the prospect of final success, and all day they slipped forward through trails which they could not have found alone. They marched with the swiftness of the final spurt, and at nightfall lay under cover, feasting their eyes on a column of smoke which rose from a canyon where the enemy lay in fancied security. The captives had done their work well, once they had undertaken it, but the onslaught must be sudden. There must be no time given to slaughter the American prisoners whom Rosario was carrying north with him as a present for Aguinaldo.

They could but admire the sagacity with which the enemy had selected his lair. They must attack through two high-walled gorges where machine-guns waited to mow them down. But the _Americanos_ meant to reach those guns before they were discovered, and after that the impregnable strong-hold would become a trap without exits.

The column had therefore divided, each section taking a guide. The guides, with bayonets at their backs as reminders of their mission, had gone forward and with pa.s.swords bespoken the sentries, whose voices had been choked off in the pitchy darkness before they could give outcry.

Then came the mountain yell, but it came only from the narrower gorge, and it was accompanied by musketry which the steep walls echoed and re-echoed. The flood of flight surged into a wave of disorganized rout toward the other opening--where it fell back in broken spray from volley and bayonet. Useless now were the machine-guns; worse than useless the impregnable walls of rock. The insurgent forces, remembering their red iniquities, asked no terms or quarter, but hurled themselves on the bayonets and went down in the close chaos of bolo and clubbed musket.

"And luckiest of them that fell, were those of them that died."

It was a little keyhole picture of red and black inferno, while it lasted, but it did not last long.

Yet, of General Rosario and his white prisoners there was no trace. That wily leader had gone on with a small escort before nightfall, and no one was left to tell what direction he had taken.

So it happened that when the two survivors of the ambuscade came tottering into the camp which they had hoped to reach much sooner, they found the main detachment just leaving. Had it not been belated by the delay of the successful expedition into the hills, it would have pa.s.sed this point twenty-four hours ago, and the half-dead refugees would have been too late.

It had taken Henry Falkins and Newt Spooner two days instead of one to cover that ten miles of _bosque_. They had come staggering, sometimes gibbering, and rarely were both of them sane. Sometimes they raved in duet, but during the first day Newt kicked and pummeled his superior forward as long as he could walk. After that, he carried, dragged and rolled the limp figure, obsessed only by the fixed idea that he had a package to deliver somewhere "over yon." Frequently he forgot that the package was a thing of life. Frequently, too, he madly beat it and swore at it, but always he worked it forward, falling time after time to rise again and stumble ahead. Then Newton Spooner became a thing without consciousness, and a faint spark of realization flickered back into the murk of the major's brain, and laid on his sick soul the same necessity.

That day, or part of it, he dragged and carried and kicked. At last, with neither fully conscious, they linked arms about each other's shoulders, gazed at each other with wild, agonized eyes, mumbled at each other with swollen tongues, and shambled, crawled and hitched along together.

Between two cots in the village at the mountains' edge the wife of Major Falkins vibrated like a pendulum for several days, and when the commanding officer's tongue became again a thing which he could lift and command he told her of his rescue by the boy who had taken a blood-oath against him, but he told nothing of the episode in which the sergeant had debated the fulfilment of his vow.

Later, when the company had marched back to its headquarters in the town with the church, Mrs. Falkins drew a glowing picture of heroism in a letter which she wrote home to the States. The colonel, her father, in due time received it, and it found its way into news column and editorial, and was duly read by many persons.

"Clem's gal," no longer at the mountain college, but studying at the State University in Lexington with the scholarship that she had won, was one of the many. She read in the little dormitory room overlooking the quiet campus. She had come here to prepare herself for a return to the mountain school as a teacher, and when next she went back to the c.u.mberlands the paper went with her, that the prophet might have honor at home.

It was October, and she had been summoned by the illness of her step-mother. Now, as the girl rode along the creek-bed roads, the hills were flaunting their watch-fires of autumn, and the horizon wore its veil of Indian-summer softness. Clem had met her in Jackson with his nag, and she was riding, mountain-fashion, on a pillion behind him. Her father was battered and disheveled, and about his clothes clung the smoke-house odor of the windowless cabin with its log fire, but there also clung about the vaulting slopes and ruggedly beautiful ravines the fragrance of the fall, and the girl could not find it in her heart to feel gloomy, even though she was exchanging the wholesome life of the university for the squalor of the cabin. Thanks to Newt, she had her room, where she could withdraw as into her own castle. She felt almost gay, and, as she thought of the room which a rude, sullen-eyed boy had reared for her with his calloused hands, her eyes grew soft like the horizons. That boy, too, had been away into the world, and had become a hero. Presumably he was mending his broken life.

The old horse plodded slowly and sometimes the girl slipped down and walked alongside. Clem had little conversation after he had told how "porely" the step-mother was. "He reckoned hit all come about from gittin' dew-pizened." But, as they made the trip, the girl recited to him the news from the far-away islands.

The man listened stolidly, and at the end inquired:

"Did I onderstand ye rightly, M'nervy? War Henry Falkins ther feller he saved?"

When the information was confirmed, he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed in wonderment: