CHAPTER II

DISGRACE

Winfield Scott, the “general commanding” the United States armies, sat in the high-ceiled living-room of his temporary headquarters.

Night had come--the night of the day that was to have marked so elaborate a tribute to the United States in the person of the general commanding.

The general had discarded his gaudy dress uniform in favor of a fatigue suit that left his chest unpadded and allowed far more waist room for a no longer gracefully restricted circumference. He sat at the head of a deal table whereon burned two sconces of candles.

The center of the room, where stood the table, was softly alight, but ceiling and walls were in wavering gloom.

The general was writing, handling his white quill-pen with wondrous facility, considering the size and gnarled condition of his hands.

He came to the end of a page, reached ponderously across the table for a perforated box, and carefully sanded the ink-scrawled sheet; then started on another page. His rubicund face wore a scowl, and his shaven lip-corners were almost ludicrously drawn down.

At the first line of the new page he paused and looked up from under his bushy, white brows, threateningly as might a charging bull. An orderly stood in the dim-lit doorway opposite him.

“Captain Grant, sir,” reported the orderly, saluting.

A grunt from Scott and the man withdrew. Presently in his place entered a thick-set officer of middle height, clean-shaven, and evidently still in the late twenties or very early thirties.

“Well?” rapped out Scott.

“He is awake, sir,” replied Captain Grant, “and quite sober again. I made the inquiries you ordered.”

“Well?” again demanded the general.

“He is Lieutenant-Colonel James Brinton of General Taylor’s staff, as he said,” went on Grant. “And he was sent here with a message from General Taylor. The message--”

“Never mind the message, sir!” broke in General Scott. “That can wait.”

“Colonel Brinton says,” continued the unruffled captain, “that he reached the outskirts of the city an hour before the time set for the celebration. He had ridden hard, having miscalculated the time.

“When he found he had an hour on his hands he stopped at a _fonda_ to quench his thirst. They offered him _pulque_. He had never before tasted it, and he drank several glasses in quick succession. That is the last thing he remembers until he woke in the guard-house half an hour ago.”

“Drunk!” sneered the general. “Drunk on a military mission. What I might have expected from one of Taylor’s men.”

“I have been talking with two or three officers who were with General Taylor last year,” ventured Captain Grant. “And they tell me Colonel Brinton is not a drinking man. His record is good and--”

“His record ends here and now,” interrupted Scott, “as far as the United States army is concerned. I am writing an account of the case to President Polk. He will indorse the action I am about to take. A drastic action such as is needed to prevent any repetition of such disgraceful conduct among American officers in Mexico. Bring the man here.”

Grant saluted and turned toward the door. On the threshold he paused. General Scott, blinking at him through the shadows, said peremptorily:

“You may go, Captain Grant. Bring him here at once.”

“_Pulque_ is not the kind of liquor our men are used to, general,” hesitated the captain. “A man who does not know its strange effects might readily--”

“For an officer with a reputation for taciturnity, Captain Grant,” said Scott coldly, “you are wasting a great deal of breath. Bring the man here, and after that you may retire to your quarters.”

Grant saluted again and left the room.

To the general’s long-nursed wrath the well-meant intercession added fresh zest. He straightened himself in his chair, loosened his shirt at the throat, and sat staring in expectant fury at the dark gap the oblong of the open doorway made in the scarce-lighter wall.

Presently Grant’s dimly seen figure reappeared in the opening. The captain raised his hand to his fatigue cap, faced about and vanished, leaving in his place a second and taller figure.

The newcomer, at a rough word of command from Scott, slowly moved forward into the radius of candlelight.

His hair and clothes were in disorder, his face was pasty, and his eyes were red and bleared. The hand that went to his throbbing head, as he stood at attention across the table from Scott, trembled from nerve-rack.

The general leaned back again in his chair and eyed Brinton through half-shut lids. Now that his victim was actually in his presence the old chief was able to force back rage for the moment and to substitute for it the no less fierce martinet discipline for which he had long been famed.

“You are Lieutenant-Colonel James Brinton?” he asked. “Of General Taylor’s staff, I believe?”

“Yes, sir,” came the unsteady reply.

“You were sent here by General Taylor with a message to me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Which message you publicly delivered in the plaza to-day.”

“No, sir!” almost shouted Brinton.

The involuntary eagerness wherewith he made the denial drove drink-pains tearing madly through his head and sent an ensuing wave of nausea over his whole numbed body.

“No?” queried Scott with dangerous gentleness.

“No, sir. At least--I--I have no recollection of what I said to you to-day. But from what Captain Grant and the others tell me--”

“So?” put in Scott in seeming amazement. “General Taylor entrusted you with a message to me and you have no recollection of delivering it? General Taylor has indeed an excellent knowledge of men. When it comes to selecting a trustworthy courier or representative--”

“I remember the message, sir,” said Brinton, the pastiness of his cheeks tinged with red. “But I am told I did not deliver it; that I said--”

“I am a rough soldier, Colonel Brinton,” returned Scott. “I am not a member of the diplomatic corps. My mind cannot grasp the intricacies of General Taylor’s motive in sending here a representative who admits that he had one message to deliver, that he did not deliver it, and that he delivered another message whose purport he cannot remember. If General Taylor deals with other military affairs as wisely as he chooses his messengers--”

“General Taylor’s unbroken line of triumphs speaks for him, sir!” flashed Brinton.

“And you are one of those triumphs? A fair sample of the rest?”

“I was drunk, sir.”

“No! You astonish me. And _in vino veritas_? When your tongue was unguarded by your brain, you inadvertently expressed opinions of me that you and the rest of General Taylor’s staff have no doubt frequently heard from your chief?”

“No, sir. I have never heard General Taylor speak slightingly of you nor of any other man.”

“Really,” said Scott incredulously; then, feeling he had almost exhausted his ability to torture the man through the latter’s loyalty to Taylor, he began on a new tack.

“Then, Colonel Brinton,” he charged, dropping the ironic suavity that had sat upon him as gracefully as a satin coat on a camel, “your insult to me to-day was gratuitous?”

“If a contrite apology will--”

“It will not. The case stands like this: in time of war and in the enemy’s country you were entrusted with a message from one of your country’s generals to another. You suppressed that message and substituted one wholly different. Do you acknowledge that, Colonel Brinton?”

Brinton opened his mouth as though to protest against this peculiar version of the affair. Before he could speak Scott continued:

“Or am I to believe that General Taylor so far forgot himself as to send the message you delivered to-day? If so, in my report to the President I shall embody--”

“No, no!” exclaimed Brinton, covertly moistening his cracked lips and seeking to rally his benumbed brain to a comprehension of what was going on.

“Then,” pursued Scott, “you do acknowledge that in war-time you deliberately suppressed the message sent by one general to another and that you willfully substituted--”

“Y-yes, sir,” muttered Brinton.

“Very good. As an officer of the United States army you are familiar, Colonel Brinton, with the articles of war?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You know the penalty attaching to such a military crime as you confess you have committed?”

Brinton squared his shoulders, raised his pain-crazed head, and made answer:

“Yes, sir.”

Scott paused for an instant as though to let the fact sink in, then was off on a new theme.

“How old are you, Colonel Brinton?” he asked.

“Forty-one, sir.”

“A West Pointer?”

“No, sir. Militia. I raised a cavalry company in Ideala, Ohio, at the outbreak of the present war. I am a merchant there.”

“You are married?”

“I was married, sir.”

“A widower? You have children?”

“One son, sir--and one grandson.”

“Grandson!”

“I married at nineteen,” answered Brinton, sorely puzzled at this odd trend of the queries. “My son married at twenty. His son was born since I left Ideala.”

“Colonel Brinton,” resumed Scott, “for the sake of your son, and for the grandson you have never yet seen, I am inclined to be merciful in dealing with you. For insubordination, for insulting the general commanding, for malicious substitution of a verbal dispatch, a court martial would unquestionably condemn you to a long term of imprisonment, if not to death. Are you content to waive court martial and to leave your punishment to my discretion?”

“Yes, sir,” replied Brinton, the reaction and nausea from his recent spree once more dulling his mind almost to coma.

“I--I understand the idea,” he went on sleepily. “You don’t want to make a martyr of me and have the story told all over America. You prefer to kick me out of the army with no fuss and feathers.”

He spoke almost subconsciously, not realizing in his momentary numbness of brain that he was thinking aloud.

Scott’s carefully repressed rage broke its bounds at hearing his motives so mercilessly voiced. Nor did Brinton’s unlucky use of the phrase “fuss and feathers”--Scott’s favorite nickname among his swarm of enemies--soften matters.

“Colonel Brinton!” roared the general, getting to his feet. “You are a disgrace to the uniform of the United States army, and to the mother who bore you. You are a disgrace to the flag, and this day you have made your army and its general a laughing stock before their enemies. You are a drunkard and an incompetent; unfit to wear a uniform!”

Beside himself with blind fury, the general lurched forward across the table, seized Brinton by the shoulders, and ripped off both his epaulets.

“You are herewith degraded from rank!” he bellowed. “And you are dishonorably dismissed from the service you have disgraced. The President of the United States will confirm your dismissal. Leave this camp inside of one hour, and do not set foot in an army encampment or on official ground again. To-morrow, the announcement of your dismissal as a common drunkard shall be read to every regiment in the army.

“Go! Get out of here! And go on foot. The horse you rode is the property of the government you have disgraced. If you take him or any other army mount I will have you arrested as a horse-thief and add theft to drunkenness and insubordination in the published list of your achievements. Go!”

Brinton forced his horrified senses to a brief rally; clicked his booted heels together, raised to the salute a hand that no longer shook; wheeled, and with shoulders squared, marched from the room.