Part 14

A week afterwards old Hawthorne came to my tent. He was holding a telegram from the Secretary of War. "Jack," he said, "I am a Major General, and you are the Captain of Braxton Bragg's company. The boys of it wired petitions and elected you. They said you led them twice to victory. They want you to lead them always."

Our hardest fight was at Iloilo last week. We took the city, but once out of the water we had to fight down barricaded walls, hemmed in and shot at from walls and house tops. For two hours we were busier than a bull-terrier in a den of cats. They were the best fighters we struck. They were officered, we learned, by the brave and brainy little Japs.

At the Lapaz sugar mill they tried to cut off some of the Regulars. We were nearest. It was merely our luck. Any other regiment would have cut through the enemy to save their comrades. At Naglocan they made a stand and there we finished them.

* * * * *

That was written a month ago. I will finish and let it all go together, finding you if it can; and if not, well my heart has found yours somewhere, sweetheart; in the writing my thoughts have met, somewhere, yours.

We stay and hold Iloilo, but General Hawthorne with a battalion of our boys went a month ago to Cebu to help out the Twenty-third regiment of Regulars who were hemmed up there in the mountains and fighting for their lives.

Would you like to hear how close I came to death yesterday, and not on the firing line at that? It was a nasty close call I had and the horror of it still twangs on my nerves. It is that, and not knowing what the morrow may bring, that has brought me to the writing of this last love letter should either of us pass into the shadow of things.

On the nearby Island of Mindanao live the savage fanatics, the Moros. These people have been a terror to the Spaniards and are the nightmare of our own men. They are Mohammedans, and the fiercest, most treacherous fighters of all the Philippine Islands. They cannot be civilized, they cannot be conquered, they can only be killed. There is a bloody tradition about them and the Spaniards; how, hemmed up for slaughter, when their warriors have all fallen, the women have been known to rush on the Spanish lines with their babes in their arms, and, as the Spaniards would meet them with their bayonets, hurl their babes onto the steel, blocking both it and the fire behind it, and cut down the soldiers with the deadly _borangs_ of their dead husbands. Then there with their babes on the bayonets they would die.

Of these Moros, there is one the soldier dreads more than the firing line of death, more than the panther that springs at night, or the rattlesnake that strikes in the grass. It is the _Juramentado_.

When one of the Moros is adjudged guilty of thieving, impurity or half a hundred other crimes and sentenced to death he becomes a _Juramentado_. Strange, mystic ceremonies are performed over him by the priest in the black wood of the black night. Cruel tortures are inflicted; his head, face, eyebrows, and mustache are shaved clean, his face painted, his body left half naked.

There is but one atonement for him. He must kill as many Christians as he can before dying himself. Dying in the act he is transplanted to Paradise.

They are great sailors and are liable to run amuck and then float out to distant places, to any place where they can find a Christian. Stealthily they creep into a camp, or town, or church, or wherever there is a gathering. Their keen _borang_ is sheathed between two bamboo reeds; its blade is a razor, its weight that of lead. With a blow they have cut heads clean from shoulders, or split a soldier from neck to hip.

At a word they will turn in a crowd and kill all those around them. The Spaniards tell how five of these fanatics slipped up to a company of their men peacefully, and then in sudden frenzy killed nineteen soldiers before they could shoot them down.

Our orders are strict concerning them: a soldier must never be out of lines without his side arms. And so nameless a danger is in their very name that it is the unwritten law of the camp to courtmartial any soldier who cries out for a joke, _Juramentado_!

I was visiting the camp of the Regulars and as I went through the gate a file passed out for guard mounting. A _Juramentado_ had paddled over from Mindanao, slipped in, and suddenly attacked a soldier of the Eighteenth Regulars, as he was returning on a pony from some duty. The first blow of the _borang_ took off the man's arm at the shoulder. Clapping spurs to his pony he rushed for the main entrance just as I passed out, with the file of soldiers behind me. In an instant the frenzied, howling, painted thing was on us.

I heard the officer in charge cry "fire," and a dozen Krags snarled their smokeless call, sending twelve steel-jacketed bullets into the charging demon whose painted face, and sharp black teeth were grinning like a wolf in my very face, and whose _borang_ was at my throat.

The bugler got him with his Colt's 45. Twelve steel bullets had cut twelve clean pin-point holes through him, and not one had stopped him, not being in the brain.

The Krag is a failure. It shoots too clean and hard to kill quick. That old time Colt 45 saved my life. I saw the dead snarling thing all night. When I waked his black painted teeth grinned in my face. I was never un-nerved before.

And so I am writing you, Dear Heart, for I realize now how near to death I have been, how nearer I may yet be. And maybe another thing makes me write to-night. It is such a story as Clarke, our First Lieutenant, has brought back to me to-night. It has set me to dreaming, and made the camp and men and guns sleeping under the mango trees seem like ghosts from another land. Like ghosts, Dear Heart, for in the dream which is always more real than the real, it is you and Old Tennessee that I see to-night, not slumbering guns under mango trees, nor tropical mountain tops, smoking mistily to the moonlighted skies, nor the palm trees, sentineling the ghostly beach.

Clarke has filled my thoughts to overflowing to-night. So I have left him and the sleeping camp. And I lie alone on the beach looking across the ocean toward home.

He told of a girl in Cebu, where our main hospital is, one of the Red Cross nurses from the States. She came over a month ago. Clarke has talked of her till I can see only you. If I did not know you were ill I'd swear it could be only you, peerless, bravest, gamest, most beautiful woman that ever was. She is a trained nurse, but she rode with old Hawthorne, rode Satan, too, to the relief of the Twenty-third Regulars.

Who could have done what she did but you and Satan, clear a ten-foot fissure of a yawning volcanic abyss, outfooting the Filipino ponies when they thought they had cut her off? And her shooting! Again I saw the brown stubble of Tennessee wheatfields, the blue hills circling the sky line, the flush and whir and the crack of the sweet little twenty gauge! If you are not dead or in the hospital it was you--the only one in all the world--there can be no other!

But I shall not see her, for we leave for the States in the fall. They are sending other boys to relieve us, others who want to serve their country.

I shall go home then to my work. I shall take up the life I left, the life of labor and of love, of love, Dear Heart, love of all loves, love of a Memory. And now good-night and for my pen, good-by, Eloise! ...

*CHAPTER VI*

*THE BATTLE IN THE BACAUE MOUNTAINS*

I wrote you last from Iloilo, but no word has come back to me. And toward the late fall, our term of service having expired, and so many others crowding for a chance to serve, we were mustered out and ordered home. The big transport Indiana stood by for our home-taking.

It was good news for the boys, but sad for me. They were going home to wife or sweetheart, but I had no home.

There is one great thing about war, the steel it puts into the heart to stand things, to die smiling and unafraid, to take life as a battle, and fight it out on the firing line. There are many living, but few on the firing line of life. They think they are soldiers, but they are sutlers.

In a short time we sighted Cebu. Our General, Hawthorne, and a battalion of us were there, as I wrote you before, sent to help out the Regulars. We were ordered to pick up this battalion; it completed what was left of the First Tennessee, for some would sleep forever under far-off Pacific skies.

Cebu is a little city on the island of the same name in the center tier of the Archipelago. Bitter and desperate are the inhabitants and savage in the extreme, and to take the place has cost us a hard battle; and to hold it almost cost the life of the Twenty-third, for they had been cut off in the mountains and all but lost when Hawthorne came to their aid, three months before.

It is a long narrow island with a backbone of volcanic mountains, in the recesses of which live a race of savage fighters who do not quibble to rush, half naked, and with bolos and spears, upon lines of steel and Gatlings.

Their mountain fastnesses are all but impregnable. The volcanic mountains run sheer up straight and the level plateaus yawn with the most dangerous and sudden chasms.

Here were the forts and fortifications of the savage Insurgents, and here they had again threatened portions of the Sixth, Nineteenth and Twenty-third Regulars under General Snyder.

It was night when we heard it; we had anchored and prepared to take General Hawthorne and our boys on the homeward journey.

Then like a bolt came the news: portions of the Nineteenth Regulars were surrounded and cut off in the mountains by ten thousand yellow savages. They were doomed.

And Hawthorne and his battalion, instead of being on the beach to embark for home, had already gone back to the mountains to fight.

I drew up our men in line of dress parade on the Indiana's decks. "Men," I said, "we have been mustered out! We are no longer soldiers but citizens of the Republic, homeward bound, with all it means to every man of you who has done his duty as you all have. No man of you may be ordered to go one step from this transport's deck till you reach your own land. But news has come that the enemy has attacked and cut off our comrades. Our General and a small battalion have already gone to their aid. I ask no man to follow me. I am going, and every man who would go with me take two steps forward."

The First Tennessee to a man moved two steps forward on the deck.

At daybreak we were off for the mountains eight miles away. All forenoon we marched under the hot sun, passed mango trees and squalid huts over ashes of dead volcanoes. We established headquarters on Elpado Mountain across the Labanyon Valley. Along the low mountains in our front ran the forts of the Filipinos, a rude fringe to the crest of the hills.

A detachment of the Sixth and Nineteenth Regulars had been over-daring. They had got in behind the enemy, and being a new regiment sent to relieve us, they had not known the true situation. They were surrounded in front and rear. It was for us to cut through to them.

They are peculiar little mountains. Volcanic in origin they have been shaken by earthquakes until often their sides are precipices; on top there are narrow plateaus, and along their whole length bristle the savage fortifications.

There we found old Hawthorne waiting for us. He knew we would come!

At his word we began the ascent. It was a hand over hand climb, from rock to rock, from scrub to scrub, with a spear or a bolo at any time from above or behind any rock. And at unlooked for intervals would come avalanches of rock and volcanic stones, rolled down by the savages above.

It was five hundred feet up, but it took us all the afternoon to reach the first plateau, and half the night to derrick our cannon up with rope and pulley. The tired men had had no sleep for eighteen hours and at daylight they must fight. We camped within three hundred and fifty yards of their fortifications, with all lights out. We made the assault at daylight.

Our guns knocked their forts down around their ears and when we charged they went over the other ridge to the last line of what was left of the forts.

At the bloodiest angle of it when I came back to report to the General our burying squad was already busy:

"This," said a tough old sergeant to me as he pointed to their dead piled up, "is a cordwood of good Filipinos."

Such are the genialities of war.

Our fiercest fighting was before us. Hand over hand and holding to trees we went up to the next fort in an avalanche of stones, arrows, bolos, and spears.

We fought from rock to rock. Often a Krag or a Colt would speak straight up, and a dead Filipino would come vaulting down to our feet.

Again came the derricking of guns. Then we went through a deep aisle where only one man could rush in at a time, with Filipino sharp-shooters above us. But our last fight cut them from our front and we reached the Regulars. They had held their place and escaped death only because they had lain for two days in an old fissure with empty shells beside it and canteens as dry as the old volcano. But weak as they were they charged with us after the Filipinos, scattering them like mountain goats over the hills.

There was a tropic moon that tropic night. The Mango trees circled the farther mountain sides and the bamboos stood in groups in the valley below. The kingly palms towered high over all. The weird tropic night sounds were borne to us on the breeze. The tired battle line of my brave boys lolled by camp fires in one long line of sentinel light with the last wrecked forts of the beaten enemy at their backs. The field guns, rapid of fire, poked their long blue noses out into the night. "Still smellin' for the varmints loike blood houns for nagurs," said Moriarty, our fighting Irishman, and the wit of the regiment.

Then he would walk over and pet the blue steel beauties, for they were his. Moriarty it was who had brought them over mountain side and _crevasses_ where no man dreamed they could go.

"An' it's aisy it is," he would laugh and say when I praised him to his face. "It's aisy, Cap'n; I've done nothin' but pet 'em, an' so they jus' foller me loike dogs."

Half a mile out a line of pickets faced the way the beaten enemy had fled. Our fighting was over. Cebu's island would no longer be troubled with Insurgents. And the next day would be the Indiana and home!

Our General had thrown off his sword belt and come over to my camp, and together we had smoked and talked of home and the war, of everything but you, sweetheart. But when he left he smiled and said a puzzling thing to me. "I've a surprise for you to-morrow, at Cebu, Jack, that will knock the war and even the homegoing out of your head."

Then he twisted his gray mustache and smiled delightedly. Had the old man, as we all loved to call him, received word of another promotion for me, I wondered. For myself I wanted no more war. I wanted only you, Eloise, somewhere, somehow, living; or the memory of you amid my own Tennessee trees.

"General," I said, "there are worthier men here than I for any promotion you may have. I will go back to my land and my work; but if you could arrange for Moriarty here--" I added, pointing to the game little Irishman.

"Oh, Pat's fixed already," he answered. "He has brought these guns over hills, through fissures, and the walls of hell. He'll be First Lieutenant in the regular army as soon as I can wire this day's work to the President. But you, Jack,--"

I pressed his hand. "General, dear General, believe me, I want nothing more, nothing but a chance to work and make a home in Tennessee."

I was serious almost to that old gripping in the throat. But he laughed and pressed my hand.

"To-morrow, Jack, to-morrow! You are tired now; I want you to sleep. You have earned your reward this day, my boy, and it shall be yours to-morrow, a promotion that you will love."

I followed him to his own tent door. A black horse stood haltered near by, saddled as he had been for two days and nights.

I took the General's whistle, the one I had used to train Satan to my call in the old days, and which on the firing line the General himself used in calls for his aides and orderlies. I blew softly the three blasts I had taught him to know in the forest. He had not seen me for months. He did not know I was there; but his head went up quickly with the old devil fire in his eyes. The next minute he had thrown his great weight back on the halter, snapping it.

His head was on my shoulder, and he was whinnying.

The General laughed. "It beats the world, Jack, that horse's love for you. Take him to your own tent to-night, he'll rage like a hyena around here all night, now that he knows you are here."

It was true. But tethered at my own camp he was quiet. The confusion had been so great and my men were so scattered that when I came back I ordered Moriarty to call the roll before taps. He came back quickly with word that Ross and Billings of our company were absent. I was surprised. Investigation among the men, tired and half asleep, showed that they had not stopped when we took the last fort, but had been swept on with a squad of the Regulars after the flying Filipinos, carried away with the excitement of it.

I went quickly to the bivouac of the Regulars. They remembered the two men, but thought they had returned, as they went off toward the right of the little village Colena, two miles in our front and through which the enemy had fled.

"If they aren't here now," said an old sergeant, "no use to look for 'em again; when we come back through that village, there wasn't a sound, not a kid, nor a chicken, nor a coon, nor a dog; and when you don't hear nothin' in a Filipino village, when you go through, look out for hell when you come back."

I looked at my watch. It had been full three hours since the Regulars had returned.

"I am going after them," I said, turning to go.

"Ballington," it was the swarthy old Captain, of the Nineteenth who spoke, "you'd be a fool to risk it." He pointed silently to a faint glow across the valley on the side of the mountain beyond. I had thought it was a rising star. "Yonder," he said, "see that other one on the mountain top, that's the signal fire of the little yellow hyenas, that means guerrilla bands in them mountains, they go in packs like wolves, and the night is their time. They know every foot of the mountain, every gorge, valley and _crevasse_. Why, two men lost over there ain't got no more show than a pair of fool goats in a jungle. Why, if them little hyenas couldn't see 'em, which they can--for they see better by night than by day--they can smell 'em, like all jungle breeds."

"Boy," he said again, looking at me kindly and smiling an apology for the title which we both bore, "I wouldn't let you go. I'd go to old Hawthorne and have you arrested first. You Tennessee fellows," he said, laying his big rough hand on my shoulder, "have done the whitest thing ever done in this war. It ain't often we old Regulars that never go home and have to serve 'till the last taps, takes much notice of you volunteer fellows that fights awhile for fun and quits when the time is up; but when you biled out of that transport and came over them mountains an' cut through to us, you done a thing that'll warm the cockles of our boys till the last tattoo and the taps. Now I ain't goin' to let you go out there in no such fool thing. I'm an old soldier, I fought with Miles and Cook on the plains, and I tell you now, Sitting Bull and his Sioux were lambs to them little mountain savages. You go back now," he said kindly, taking my hand in his own, "go back and go to sleep. You are a boy yet, though you proved you are full grown to-day, my lad, and ain't even got up a beard. Of course you have got a sweetheart waiting in Tennessee. Go back to her, and the next year send old Brawley of the Nineteenth a picture of her and the kid. He ain't never had no time to marry, it's been fighting all his life with him from hell to breakfast."

I smiled, saluted, and went back to camp.

Moriarty was waiting for me, and, when Moriarty does not smile, I know what to expect.

"Cap'n," he said, "it's not Moriarty that can sleep peaceful the night till we find them, dead or alive."

"And I, too, if you please, Cap'n," said Davis, my corporal, who had been listening.

"There is no need for a call then, men," I said, "we three will go down to the village, we will doubtless find them near it. A Krag for rapid firing and two Colts each," I added, "and plenty of shells. Don't let the other men know; we'll be back by midnight."

As we slipped out of the lines of camp I saw a thing that touched me. Moriarty had stopped at the long, slim, blue-barreled rapid fire and for a moment, lingering over it, one arm around it, he laid his cheek against its lips. It was Moriarty's farewell kiss to the only bride he had ever known.

*CHAPTER VII*

*THE JURAMENTADOS*

There was a mistiness among the mango trees as we went out into the moonlight. It was a mist from the ocean, but it made an uncanny milkiness in the air, which seemed to cling to the long dew-damp leaves of the tropic trees as we descended into the Labanyon Valley; and that queer uncanniness stayed with me. I could not throw it off.

At the picket line I left a note to be carried back with the relief. It was to my First Lieutenant, explaining my absence and stating that, if I were not back by daylight, he was to assume the command. And if, before daylight, he heard any continual rapid fire, he was to send the company to the sound of it, for it would mean that we needed help.

The picket would be relieved at midnight. I asked him not to awaken Lieutenant Clarke until then.

"Captain," said the picket, touching his cap, "excuse me, but if you weren't here I'd arrest Moriarty and Davis and send them back into camp. 'Tis a fool thing they are doing."

"But what about our comrades out there, cut off, doubtless, and surrounded by these savages?"

"Then why not take a company?" he asked respectfully.

"They'd be butchered," said Moriarty. "It's the three of us slippin' around an' nosin' in that can save 'em if we find 'em. And with these rifles and six Colts we'll be all of a company for arrows and bolos."

"Look," said the sentinel, "do you see that?" He pointed to a dim red star, glowing just above the mountain top. "That's a signal fire--and that, and that. Captain," he pleaded earnestly, "go back and let the boys all go with you. It's a fool thing, but if you will go--now listen--when I hear you shoot, if shooting is on, I am going to fire and waken the camp; the boys will want to come to your relief."

Moriarty laughed. "Now don't let your old gun go off too suddent loike. We'll be back without firin' a shot!"

But I, Eloise, as I went down into that valley, became for a moment all but a weakling when I thought of you! We went quietly out into the moonlight, slipping along from the shadow of one great mango to another. Sometimes these trees made a continuous shadow--so thick they were--and our going was easy. But when we emerged into a moonlit space we stooped and crawled through the high grass, for we were an easy target for their sharpshooters on the peaks above.

We were fully a mile from camp before we crossed a _crevasse_, about twelve feet wide, spanned by a culvert or small bridge. I remember noticing the little bridge and thinking that if it should be burnt by the enemy in our rear, we would never be likely to get back into our camp again.