Part 7

The men of the regiment scarcely appreciated the gradual change in Johnny. He unfolded just as a plant unfolds. Growth was there, steadily going on. The major knew, and the colonel remarked upon it, but the rest did not comprehend until one day the street boy stripped to the buff and, urged on by the mock encouragement of some of the privates, entered an improvised ring for a “friendly” contest with an ex-professlonal, who had entered the service chiefly in search of novelty in the way of recreation. When the affair was over with, and the amateur referee had finished the rather prolonged count over Johnny’s opponent, Tom O’Brien said delightedly; “Begorra, the byes didn’t get a run fer their money. Yez kin all poke fun at Johnny now, an’ ask him all the sassy quistions ye loike, an’ divil a wurrud’ll I say to yez, unless yez go in more than wan at a toime.”

It was evident that Johnny had become soldierly timber, and it was not long before the captains vied with each other in coaxing him to apply for a transfer to their companies. Captain Harkins alone refrained from urging the boy to return to the ranks. He might simply have assigned him back to company duty, but as he remarked to the colonel, he felt that “Johnny belonged to the man who had made a soldier out of him.”

The major was not ignorant of the change in sentiment regarding his protegé. Desiring to be fair with him he said, “Johnny, some of the officers are beginning to think a little better of you than they used to. Captain Harkins is entitled to you, but seems to think you ought to have a chance to use your own discretion in the matter of going back to the ranks. Taking care of my horse and tent, and rolling bandages for me is possibly not so much to your liking as being a real, fighting soldier. We shall probably go to the front soon. The war isn’t over yet, and they can’t keep us in Florida forever, so we are likely to see some pretty hot times in Cuba. If you want to go back to the company just say the word, and back you shall go.”

Johnny stood at the door of the major’s tent for a moment looking at the gorgeous southern sky. When he turned toward his patron his eyes were wet.

“Did you think I’d do that, sir?”

And the major replied, “No, Johnny, I didn’t think you would.”

But the war did end very soon, and the pride of the Brigade, the --th Illinois,--athletes, every mother’s son of them,--did not get out of Florida and into Cuba until there was nothing remaining to be done save policing that fair and unfortunate island. As soon as orders came to leave for Cuba, Major Brice tendered his resignation, intending to return to civil life and resume his practice. Johnny was disconsolate. Police duty in Cuba was not an inviting prospect--he recalled that he never did like the policeman or his works, on principle. Chicago had no attraction for him. He had been born in the army. His previous existence, he said, “didn’t count.” He had begun life in the major’s tent, and when that tent came down there would be no longer home life for him. The major was deeply touched by his protegé’s devotion, and, quite alive to the fact that Johnny would be a pretty helpless member of any society but the army, interested the brigade commander, who had been assigned for duty in the Philippines, in his case.

Through the combined influence of the general and the major, the boy received his discharge, and was immediately reenlisted in the --th Montana, then preparing to start for Manila. The bluff old general said: “Everything’s over in Cuba, but I suspect that nothing’s begun in the Philippines; In my opinion, h--l’s brewing in Manila, and unless my experience in fighting Indians is worthless, I feel pretty safe in saying that those d--d brown-skinned fellows out yonder are going to give your Uncle Samuel a devil of a lot of trouble before we get through with ’em. Dewey didn’t do a thing to us, not to the Spaniards, when he took Manila. That Montana regiment is as liable to get into a mix up as any of ’em--they’re scrappers all right--and it’s just as well for that orderly of yours to get in on the ground floor. But, Major, will he fight?”

The major’s eyes twinkled as he replied, “Don’t worry yourself about Johnny, my dear General. He’ll give a good account of himself. He is a good soldier by profession, even though I could never cure him of profanity nor teach him what patriotism means. He regards fighting as a vocation, but believes in attending to it for all he is worth.”

As the general had said, trouble had not yet begun in the Philippines. It came soon enough, and Johnny got in on the ground floor with a vengeance. When the fighting finally began he was, to use his own vernacular, “on the spot,” which fact, as he jestingly remarked, gave him for the first time the privilege of enjoying “the luxury of more name than ‘Johnny’.” His comrades exclaimed, apropos of his new cognomen, “Holy smoke! how it fits.”

The --th Montana had its troubles out there in those tropic isles. Few realize what it means to plunge a raw volunteer regiment from a temperate climate into tropic wilds infested with a foe that recognizes no rule in warfare save implacable, relentless murder of the enemy, by hook or by crook, by fair means or foul. A foe that fights manfully and fairly, whether at long range or close quarters, is bad enough for “raw ones” to face, even though they be the best in the world--the which is stenographic for American boys.

Bullets and bayonets are integral parts of the soldier’s life. Familiarity breeds contempt for these--they are his own tools, the tools with which he blazes his own road to glory or to a hero’s death. But those terrible bolos, and the Moro swords--those cruel knives that shear a man from crown to waist, or lop off heads or limbs as though they were chalk, wielded by little brown fiends who care naught for rules of fence and are willing to mix it when you compel them to close with you, just as a rat will set his fangs in your flesh when you corner him--they are different, quite. And when your soldier boy thinks of the newspapers that are preaching the milk of human kindness at home and watching like so many harpies for the slightest mishap from which political capital may be made, whilst he is wallowing in the blood of comrades upon whom nameless mutilations have been inflicted, he has hard work to keep his courage up to the fighting pitch.

Then the dread plasmodium-bearing mosquito of the swamps, with its trail of death dealing chill and hemorrhage, the hellish amœba of the foul tropic streams, that are so often the soldier’s only source of water supply, and that awful typhoid, hovering like a somber-hued, gigantic bat over an army camp--selecting as its victims the very flower of the soldiery--these be things, not of glory, but of death, with no sublimity save that of noble self-sacrifice. And that dreadful nostalgia, that sickening yearning for home, which so often kills, or, aided by the pitiless torrid sun, beating down upon devoted heads unused to a foretaste of hell, sends men with brains awry back to Frisco by the ship load. Were not these terrors an awful crucible in which to try the metal of men whom their friends, at home, who do not know gold when they see it, are wont to call “tin soldiers?”

What a lot of maudlin sentiment the home papers and builders of political issues lavished upon those Filipino fiends who, it was alleged, were given more water than was good for them! The soldier at the front knew the mockery of it all. He had felt the bolo of the treacherous “amigo” at his back, the while he parleyed, friendly-wise, with the aforesaid amigo’s snaky comrade in front. He had seen the pitiful remnant of what were once white human forms, the forms of his own comrades and friends, still living, perhaps, fresh from the torturings inflicted by their savage captors. He had seen the dismembered bodies of children and old men who had been slain in cold blood because they or their friends had been friendly to the Americans, and he had heard the wailing of women who had suffered shameful outrage, aye, a living death, at the hands of our “little brown brother.” What wonder that the boy in khaki grew tired of making prisoners of fiends from hell, who deserved nothing better than a short shrift and a merry trip back to their father, the devil, and drove his bayonet a little deeper or emptied his magazine a bit faster than would permit him to see or heed a signal of surrender?

Of all the regiments who were sent to those far away islands, none bore itself more gallantly, none was more pertinaciously put to the fore than the --th Montana. A history of the thin, khaki-clad firing line in the Philippines that did not give more than a modest share of honor to that gallant regiment would be but a false and biased chronicle.

Johnny, the boy of the slums, may not have been so patriotically inspired as some of his comrades, but he was a fighter by instinct, and a soldier by profession. He knew his duty, fear was a thing apart from him, and he attended strictly to “business” as he understood it, namely, to obeying orders, shooting true, and keeping tab of the Filipinos he potted. There be those who say that his game bags were not only large, but of select contents. He had a keen eye for brown officers, and, as he said, there were so many Filipino generals and such folk, that there were enough for everybody, even after he had taken his multitudinous pick.

It was not long before the mighty ones at staff headquarters became quite familiar with Johnny’s ways. Our soldier soon found himself in demand, a demand which, from details of special and hazardous duty, occasional at first, but finally very frequent, won for him a sergeant’s stripes, and regrets at headquarters that it was not possible to immediately decorate his shoulders with strap and bar. Never did better man wear non-com’s stripes.

The sergeant is the pivot around which, as upon an axis, revolves the discipline and efficiency of the rank and file. He is the key-stone of both the individual and company arch of courage. Johnny was all that a disciplinarian should be, and more, he was idolized by the men. Twice was he wounded by a ball that smashed several ribs and narrowly missed taking out so much of his chest wall that, as he said, his heart and lungs would have been subject to indecent exposure. Again did the little “brown bellies” get him,--with a bolo this time. But Johnny’s bayonet was a fraction of a second too quick for the luckless Filipino who wielded the “chopper” and the heavy blade missed the vitals by a hair. A siege of typhoid followed, but Johnny said, when the surgeon wanted to have him sick-leaved home. “Hell! no. It wouldn’t be business, an’ besides, I’m at home now--anyhow, as near as I’ll ever be. Shootin’, cuttin’ and typhoid never was calculated to kill gutter snipes, an’ so long as I keep away from water, which is the only thing that I hain’t tried, I reckon I’ll pull through. Then there’s old Miss Krag, here,” and he tenderly patted his rifle, “she can’t get any furlough, cause she hain’t had any pluggin’ or boloin’, or fever, an’ she’d be lonesome.” And so Johnny stayed at the front, and shot Filipinos, swore great oaths and--got well.

The Filipinos were “pacified,” so all the home papers said, save those few that were politically favorable to the democratic “outs” and opposed to the republican “ins.” A few boloed soldiers or native women and children were not evidences of war, they were mere “local disturbances, occasional manifestations of unrest, etc.” The men at the front and the friendly brown ones thought differently, but who cares what the pig under the knife thinks? Uncle Sam didn’t seem quite so certain of himself as the papers would have us believe he was. Whilst egging the eagle on to scream peans of victory as a soothing embrocation for such as might be restive under the war tax, he kept his weather eye open just the same. To clinch the matter of pacification, troops were ordered here and there into the towns adjacent to the swamps and rocky fastnesses where lurked the more troublesome of the ladrones. Small detachments were often sent, much smaller in some instances than was safe, as the government learned to its sorrow.

Much of the outpost duty fell upon the --th Montana. K company was ordered to duty in the province of Zambales, island of Luzon, and took up its quarters at Poombato, a place which could be called a town by courtesy only. It was nothing more than a handful of palm thatched huts, inhabited chiefly by old men, women and children who couldn’t become enrolled with their “pacified” brethren who, bolo in hand, were lurking in the neighboring hills and thickets, awaiting a chance for a sudden dash upon the enemy and a merry boloing in the camp of the Americanos. The men of K company were no “kickers,” as they were wont to express it, but the idea of rotting in the wilds while trying to protect a few miserable natives from possible outlaws who were their own kith and kin, and with whom the protected ones kept in pretty close and friendly touch, was not the pleasantest.

The men of K company knew the Filipino--knew him root and branch--they had fought him long enough, the Lord knows, and had discovered that caution was the price of sound throats. Their commander, Captain Benning, was ever a discreet officer and careful of his men, above all he knew that somewhere in the vicinity hovered the worst of all the brigands and cut throats the Philippines had yet produced, “Captain” Agramonte, but the deadly monotony of their daily duties was more than the men could stand. Despite warnings and, it must be confessed, not infrequently despite strict orders, the men would stray away into the jungle, often in quest of a scrap with stray Filipinos, sometimes seeking such excitement as shooting wild game affords. These little excursions were apparently safe enough at first. No accidents happening, however, the men grew bolder, and roamed about almost at will, and then the trouble came. Man after man was found boloed, or disappeared as if the earth had swallowed him up. On one occasion a small searching party, in quest of a missing comrade, was ambushed and narrowly escaped annihilation. Captain Benning was not left long in doubt as to whom he was indebted for the loss of his men. The ghastly, recently severed head of one of his men was hurled from the brake one night into camp, rolling, as chance would have it, its bloody way to the very door of the captain’s own tent. Affixed to the awful thing was a scurrilous note signed, “Agramonte.”

Captain Benning was a brave officer, with just enough revenge corpuscles in his blood to make the possession of Agramonte’s person the one thing in all the world to be desired. This last atrocity was more than he could endure. Agramonte’s life he must and would have. He knew well enough that there was but one way to kill or capture the outlaw. Having but one company at his command he could not well send a large party against the enemy. Indeed, the entire company was scarcely large enough to make a punitive expedition safe. Whatever was done must of necessity be done by strategy, and by a small party. A set plan was impossible. What was wanted was a “man,” and the captain thought that he knew where to find him. Turning to his orderly he said, “Tell Sergeant Blank that I want him to report to me at once.”

Johnny promptly appeared at the captain’s quarters and stood respectfully at attention, awaiting his commander’s pleasure.

“Sergeant,” said the captain, pointing to the outlaw’s grim token of defiance, “do you know Agramonte when you see him?”

“I think I do, sir,” replied Johnny.

“Well, Sergeant, I want him, and I want him badly. If anybody can get him, you can. You have done plenty of scouting. What do you think about it?”

Johnny glanced at the gory head of his comrade, lying at the captain’s feet, and his jaws set ominously. He answered through his teeth:

“I think I’ll get him sir, or he’ll get me.”

“Very well, then,” said the captain, “go after him, and be sure you get him.”

“Alive, sir?”

“Alive if you can; I wish to make an example of him, for the benefit of those cut-throats of his, but don’t take a chance of losing him. I want to see him at my tent door, and a few holes more or less in his miserable carcass will not mar his beauty much in my eyes.”

“All right, sir; any instructions?”

“None whatever, Sergeant, except to get him, get him sure and as quick as the Lord’ll let you.”

The captain rose, and with a total disregard of military etiquette held out his hand and said,

“Good luck to you Johnny, and don’t forget that you are worth more to me than that d--d renegade. If you don’t land him, be sure to bring yourself back. We are old comrades, you know.”

“Don’t bother your head about me, Captain,” replied Johnny, his eyes glistening, as he grasped his commander’s hand; “I’ll come back all right, and I’ll bring that d--d renegade with me. We may neither of us be pretty to look at when we drop in on you, but you can bet we’ll get here together,” and Johnny disappeared in the darkness.

* * * * *

An army scout travels “light” and when he is about to set out on an expedition, his preparations are a marvel of speed and simplicity. Johnny was even speedier than usual in getting ready for his perilous mission. He had little to do save to strap on a brace of navies, his canteen and haversack and say goodbye to his “bunky.” The latter, as his friend was leaving, handed him an enormous bowie knife, saying, “Here’s a western lancet that I want you to take with you, just for luck. We like ’em out our way. They don’t miss fire, nor go off half cocked, and they can’t be beat for tickling the solar plexus.” The bunky forgot to mention the bowie’s chief merit, that it wasn’t noisy. This was left for Johnny’s own exploitation.

Johnny loosened his belt, slipped the bowie upon it and said, “Thanks, and speakin’ of the West reminds me of a little trick one of the boys taught me when we was cooped up in Manila. I almost forgot this,” and reaching up he took down a coil of rope that hung at the side of the tent. This he slung over his shoulder, sash-wise.

In less than half an hour after his interview with his captain, our soldier slipped through the picket lines and plunged into the jungle. He knew that he must get beyond the outskirts of the town under cover of darkness if he would elude the watchful eyes of the Filipinos who hung about in the surrounding hills and jungles. Had he not started before dawn it would have been necessary to await the coming of the next night, in order to leave the camp unobserved by the enemy.

Agramonte’s base of operation was so well known that the uninitiated may naturally wonder why he had not been captured long before. It requires only a moderate knowledge of the native character and of the nature of the country to understand why Captain Benning with the small force at his command, had hitherto refrained from attempts at the outlaw’s capture. A formal campaign against him would have necessitated beating up the Filipinos precisely as game is beaten up in a battue. This would have required a very large and powerful force. Agramonte, fully cognizant of the situation, had established himself at Masillo, a little village in the foot hills less than five miles from the camp of the Americans, where he conducted himself precisely as if there was no such thing existing as the United States of America or a hostile army. The Batolan river lay between him and his enemies in khaki. This was a turbulent mountain stream of considerable width, with no ford nearer than some seven or eight miles from the renegade’s headquarters. Granting that his enemies succeeded in crossing the stream, which was not an easy thing for a small force such as he believed would probably be sent against him to do under fire, he had but to hide himself amid his native rocks and ravines and he could snap his brown fingers at the hated Americanos.

Knowing the outlaw’s lair, and the character of the country, Johnny had evolved his plans of campaign before leaving camp, while he was hastily preparing for the expedition. From his experience in scouting expeditions he knew that the only way to succeed in his mission was to beat the Filipino chief at his own game, by taking him completely by surprise at such time as he might be found separated from his companion ladrones. The lariat which Johnny had slung over his shoulder was perhaps the most methodic and pertinent of his preparations.

Travelling through the Luzon brake is neither easy nor comfortable, even in broad daylight, but at night it is practically impossible to the inexperienced traveller. But Johnny was no novice at the business in which he was engaged, and seemed to instinctively know the weak spots in the wild tangle of trees and brake. He was apprised from time to time that he was an intruder in the jungle. Troops of monkeys chattered at him saucily as they swung down from limb to limb of the trees to get a nearer view of the strange object that had disturbed their sleep. Having seen him, they screamed affrighted warnings to the other jungle folk and fled back to the topmost boughs, there to hurl defiant challenges at the intruder. Enormous bats beat their foul wings fiercely against his face as he toiled on, their whizzing, whirling flight sending the heavy, strangely perfumed night mist of the tropic wood pulsing against his face in dank waves. Once, as he crept through the brake, almost on his hands and knees, he nearly fell face down upon a huge creature of some kind. Johnny never knew the nature of it, for startled as he was, the beast was more so. It sprang up with a frightened yelp and crashed off through the jungle, snarling back at the strange thing that had roused him from his peaceful slumbers.

Again, as our soldier, breathing more freely as he emerged from the brake into the open, was skirting a little glade in the forest, a monster serpent dangling its death dealing loops downward from a bough struck him fairly upon the chest, with a resounding whack that almost knocked the breath out of him. A man less nervy and experienced would have been entangled in the cruel coils of the gigantic reptile, but with a quick push of his powerful arm against the cold, clammy folds of the awful thing and a cat-like spring aside he was free. Courageous as he was, this encounter made his flesh creep. But none the less, he saw a ludicrous side to the incident, and muttered to himself, “Major Brice used to say somethin’ to me about the early bird catchin’ the worm. I’m the early bird, all right, all right, but that worm’s a little too big for Johnny’s craw. Wonder what the dear old major’d think o’ that chap, anyhow. I suppose he’d like to bottle him.”

And there were other things, less pretentious relatives of the giant snake who so nearly did for Johnny. As his feet stumbled on through the luxuriant tangle of tropic weeds and grasses, he heard certain rustlings and hissings that warned him of the nearness of reptiles of lesser bulk, whose fangs were carriers of liquid death, relentless and sudden, yet slow enough for the victim to suffer the agonies of the damned ere he died.