CHAPTER III

OUTCAST

A stretch of yellow ground broken here and there by black-green foliage patches and gray rocks. Above, a blazing white sun in a copper sky; the hot expanse broken by an occasional buzzard that hung moveless on broad serrated wings between earth and heaven.

And alone--almost infinitesimal in the boundless expanse--over the baking area of plain and rolling ground moved a dark blue speck.

On nearer observation this speck of blue resolved itself into a man. A man whose tangle of hair was covered by the discarded straw sombrero of some peon, whose face was haggard and unshaven, whose body was whimsically draped in the tatters of what had once been a United States army uniform, whose feet had by long tramping worn apart the soles and uppers of a once-spruce pair of cavalry boots.

More than a second glance would have been needed for any of the man’s former fellow-officers to recognize in the military scarecrow the faultlessly groomed Lieutenant-Colonel Brinton of General Zachary Taylor’s personal staff.

East and northeast he had plodded; at first in a daze and guided only by the homing instinct.

Leaving General Scott’s headquarters, he had delayed not a minute in beginning his homeward march. Afoot in a land where all save the meanest rode, he had shaped his course without conscious effort.

Dawn had found him far beyond the American lines. After that, for a time, dawn and noon and sunset had been one to him. Thirst--the terrible thirst that follows upon a _pulque_ debauch--had gripped him with agonizing pains.

And he had found himself stopping at cisterns and even at roadside puddles.

Late at night his legs had given way as he breasted a hill. He had fallen forward and slept where he fell; to stagger stiffly onward at dawn. From a peon vender he had bought a great stack of _tortillas_ and a bundle of _tamales_ on the second day, and had stuffed them into all his pockets; munching now and then when he chanced to think of it.

The purchase had been half-involuntary; some latent campaigning instinct leading him to buy the food for future use. In payment he had given a five-dollar gold piece; the only coin he chanced to have in his pocket; and it had not occurred to him to ask for change.

Somewhere along the road he had seen the broad-brimmed straw hat lying; its frayed brim and a hole in the crown testifying to its uselessness to a former owner. He had picked it up and put it on, in exchange for his shelterless military cap, as a better shield against the sun’s broiling heat.

For several days Brinton continued his blind progress northeastward.

He had met few people. And at these he had not so much as glanced.

Such of them as were Mexicans noted appraisingly his ragged state (for cactus spines and rocks had claimed their full toll of cloth-scraps in the blundering journey), and decided he was not worth molesting and had let him go in peace.

A stray American soldier, here and there, had taken him for a deserter and, out of pity, had looked the other way. The war was practically at an end. They saw no reason for dragging back to punishment a man who seemed so anxious to get home; nor to report seeing him.

At last the numbness lifted, bit by bit, from Brinton’s mind. And he knew it had not been the numbness of drink, but of shock.

He came to his senses to find himself repeating mechanically, for the thousandth time:

“Dishonorably--dismissed--from the service you have--disgraced!”

The odd repetition of the prefix “dis” in the three pregnant words of the sentence stood out in his memory. He could shut his eyes and see Scott’s rage-bloated face, as the general had flung the phrase at him.

“Dishonorably dismissed from the service you have disgraced!”

That was it. And the torn-off epaulets had dangled from Scott’s gnarled fists as the sentence was spoken. “Dishonorably dismissed!”

Brinton, like a child who bites on a sore tooth, fell to recalling his own father--veteran of the war of 1812.

The grandfather whom he dimly remembered as a bent, withered giant--the once herculean captain who at the battle of Saratoga had with a single backhand stroke of his cavalry saber sliced off the head of a British dragoon.

At home hung the musket--the “Queen’s Arm” gun--that his great-grandfather had carried in the French and Indian War, and later, as a very old man, at Concord and Lexington.

“Three generations of them,” he mumbled, half-aloud. “Fighters all. And I don’t know how many generations before that. One in every one of our wars. And I was the fourth. I guess it meant more to me than to any of them.

“‘Dishonorably dismissed from the service you have disgraced’--‘Herewith degraded from rank,’” he added, another sentence of the fearful condemnation flashing into his thoughts.

He did not know how long he had traveled. He knew--some sixth sense told him--he was moving in the right direction for home.

Home! The lively little Ohio town through whose main street he had ridden so proudly, at the head of his company, not two years before! What would his return be like?

The fancy stung Brinton to new anguish. He halted; and was minded to shift his course for some refuge where his name and his disgrace would not be known; where he could begin all over again.

Then came the thought--not of his stay-at-home son, but of the grandson he had never seen. And into the man’s burning hot eyes came a mist of unbidden tears.

His baby grandson--and Brinton plodded along his former course.

He expected little sympathy from his severely correct if unwarlike son; the worthy youth who had so smugly refused to join his father in going to the front on the plea that the business would suffer if both senior and junior partner were away for so long a time. But the grandson--

Brinton passed his hand over the unshaven stubble of his chin; and sought to gauge by its length the time his march had lasted. He seemed to have been tramping for an eternity on swollen and tender feet under a murderous hot sun. Yet for days he continued; once bartering his watch for another batch of _tortillas_.

At last nature gave out.

For nearly a day he had found no water. His lips were fevered, his tongue unduly large and as dry as parchment. There was but the fragment of one crumbling and greasy _tortilla_ left in his pocket.

He dared not eat it, faint though he was, lest it add to his already unbearable thirst.

He noted, too, that he was lurching and reeling in his walk. It appeared to him that the buzzards that floated above him had begun to take a new and personal interest in his movements. They were more numerous than on earlier days, and they seemed to follow him; flying very low.

So had he seen them track a sick cavalry horse.

Before him, as dusk fell, rose a low ridge. Beyond it, evidently, was a dip in the rolling ground, and beyond that rose a higher ridge.

At sight of the two prospective climbs, Brinton’s heart turned sick within him. Then he set his teeth and breasted the first rise. After an interminable time he gained its low summit and stood, panting loudly, to rest.

In the gulch just below he saw a fire twinkling through the gloom. Brinton took a step forward. His awkward foot trod on a rolling stone.

Losing his balance and too weak to recover it, he pitched helplessly forward, fell headlong, and rolled down the steep little slope.

As he lay at the bottom, breathless and half-stunned, unseen hands lifted him none too gently to his feet. A glare of light was in his eyes.

He stood there, swaying, blinking, supported by the two men who had picked him up.

Then he saw that he had rolled to the very edge of a campfire. Around the fire lounged a dozen or more men in army uniforms, while one of their fellow soldiers roasted, over a bed of coals, to one side of the blaze, a whole kid. Farther on, a short line of cavalry horses were picketed.

Brinton knew he had stumbled upon an American scouting party. And he would have turned and fled, but for the hands that held him.

A beardless young lieutenant strolled forward, drawn by the exclamations of his troopers. He eyed the tattered, disreputable fugitive in strong contempt; taking in, by the uncertain glow of the fire, Brinton’s general aspect of vagrancy and the fact that he wore what had once been a cavalry uniform.

“Deserter,” at length announced the lieutenant. “What regiment?”

Brinton made no reply.

“What regiment, I said?” repeated the lieutenant sharply.

But shame and shock held Brinton speechless.

“You wear a cavalry uniform!” accused the lieutenant. “In what regiment are you a private?”

“It is a colonel’s uniform,” involuntarily answered Brinton.

But so thick was the utterance of his thirst-swollen tongue that his words were unintelligible.

“Come nearer to the light!” ordered the lieutenant, leading the way to the fire from whose glare Brinton had been edging away.

While the supposed deserter was under interrogation by their officer, the two men who had held him had released their grasp on his feeble arms. Now, as the lieutenant moved away, Brinton turned and bolted.

He made for the steep gulch-side down which he had just rolled. But before he could take a half-dozen tottering steps the cavalrymen were upon him.

They dragged him back to the fire, yanking him roughly from side to side as though shaking a naughty child. Part of his torn clothing came away in their grasp.

Brinton swayed dizzily and unresistingly at every haul and jerk.

“Tie him up!” snapped the officer. “I’ll talk to him in the morning.”

Brinton was thrown down, and his legs and arms were trussed with leather bearing reins whose knots cut deeply into the chafed skin of wrists and ankles. Then he was rolled to one side and left there while the troopers gathered around the now roasted kid.

Even in his stark misery, the victim’s military training disgusted him with the needless cruelty of his treatment and the carelessness wherewith his captors were maintaining their camp.

In the darkness he lay, helpless, sore in every joint and tortured by thirst. But for the time his bodily agony was as nothing to him by comparison with the anguish wherewith his present plight filled his mind.

He foresaw that he would be carried to the regimental headquarters of this scouting party. Probably to General Taylor’s own headquarters, or possibly even to those of General Scott.

There the whole truth must come to light. And the shameful flight must begin all over again!

Nor could he, by explaining the situation to his jailers here, hope to win their credence.

They had evidently been on a more or less prolonged scouting trip. They could not know the story of his degradation. Nor could they be expected to credit so improbable a tale. He could not expect them to believe that Lieutenant-Colonel James Brinton--of whom they might or might not have heard--of General Taylor’s personal staff, was the scarecrow prisoner they had seized as a deserter.

He tugged at his bunglingly tied wrist-bonds. But he could not loosen them. Almost he could draw one hand out from the leather strap. But he could not quite release it.

Supper over, a trooper, at the lieutenant’s command, brought a shallow little tin dish of water and a piece of hardtack to where Brinton lay and set it beside him.

The sight of the water set the prisoner well-nigh insane. Yet, by an effort that called for all his strength of mind, he refrained from drinking it.

Instead, he lay still, looking up at the big southern stars until sentries were posted for the first watch and the other troopers rolled into their blankets. Then, cautiously, he stretched forth his bound hands and laid his wrists in the shallow tin dish of water.

The touch of the cool liquid brought on another mad craving to drink. But Brinton, after a second battle of will, conquered, and forebore to waste the precious water in the mere quenching of thirst.

For ten minutes he let his wrists and their leathern thongs soak in the dish. Then he drew them out and exerted all his weak force to pulling his close-fastened wrists asunder.

The leather, as he had foreseen, had softened and stretched from immersion. A desperate tug that scraped off most of the skin of one wrist--and his right hand was free.

It was a simple matter to double over and to reach the bonds that tied his ankles. The knot was soon untied. And Brinton lay unbound and half fainting.

For hours he lay thus. Then, at a change of sentries, he began to wriggle noiselessly away from the camp.

Giving the drowsy sentry a wide berth, he crept on hands and knees through the darkness until the camp lay a furlong behind him and the sides of the farther and higher ridge loomed directly above him.

An hour later, at first glimmer of dawn, Brinton gained the ridge’s summit and lay resting for a time on its crest. After which he rose and looked ahead. In front of him, far below, and a few miles beyond the ridge, something broad and silvery lay glittering in the dawn light.

With a hoarse cry, Brinton recognized it.

“The Rio Grande!” he croaked. “The Rio Grande! Yonder to the left is the ford we crossed! And--beyond, lies God’s country!”

At noon, Brinton reached the river’s bank. Hope had replaced strength and had made the last stage of the journey possible. Waist deep he waded into the stream, crouching down and rolling over in the tepid water; sucking in pints of it as he assuaged his thirst.

To his feet once more and floundering on, across the ford; then he fell on his face at full length, on the northern bank; his hands digging deeply into the soil.

“My country!” he sobbed, hysterically. “My own, _own_ country!”

Then, as an echo, chilling his wild joy, he found himself murmuring incoherently:

“Dishonorably--dismissed!”