Part 2

“It was a voice in the jungle that had startled Tarrant. I tell you the whole story, Miss Noreen, because of _that_ voice in the jungle. The natives were led by a white man, who wore the khaki of an American soldier. It was this white leadership which had herded Tarrant’s column for slaughter in that hot sink of the jungle. The cry of ‘Rawder! Rawder!’ went up from the American command. Something in the voice troubled me--just for a second--with the fear that Rawder _might_ have run mad at the last.... Listen, I think there is no hate in the world so baleful and destructive as that aroused by a deserter who leads the enemy against his own people. And this man led a black force of Malays!... The natives retired finally, and the white man with them. An Indiana soldier was dying in the sun when all was still. I heard him say wearily, ‘Gawd, if I could only have killed Rawder, hell would have been a cinch for me!’

“That’s how they hated him that day. The story of Rawder, the deserter, went around the world. It had the eternal grip of interest of a scapegoat who turns into a fire-brand. Manila sent column after column of infantry into the Indang country and down below to the Camarines, but the renegade was not to be captured just yet.

“I continued to ride with Tarrant for awhile after that. He found action when there was any; moreover, I felt that the real story of Rawder had not been written. He was big to me, and I could not believe the voice from the jungle was his. Tarrant was ordered with his troop and two others, dismounted, to Minday, a little island south of Luzon, which Nature has punished in various ways. I remember the empty, sun-blinded inlet, as our little transport stirred the sand. Not a _banco_ or _casco_ came out to meet us. We were in the midst of a people who put up no front for peace. There is a Spanish tradition that each male native of Minday is possessed of seven devils and the leaders ten.

“‘Best fighting men on the islands--these Mindayans,’ Tarrant told me. ‘The price of life here is to kill first, to kill all the time, snakes and men.’ That night I wandered about the deserted port in the Crusoe silence. At the edge of the town, I was ‘put out’ by the route of flashing stars--a blow on the head from behind.

“Oddly enough, Miss Noreen, the natives let me live. In the morning I awoke in a bungalow and discovered Rawder sitting in the doorway.

“His queerly-cut eyelids were drawn together by the intensity of light. Outside, the sunlight waved in pure white flame. It was the vividest time of the day, of the hottest time of the year, in the fieriest island of the globe. Minday is insidious. You can breathe and walk outside, but if you don’t get under cover when your scalp warns you with its prickling, you will likely be buried at eventide by the wild dogs of Minday. Or, possibly, if your vitality is immense, the sun will spare your life, but fry the contents of your brain-pan, which is rather worse than losing an arm.

“Rawder did not note that I was awake. He was exchanging ideas with a young Mindayan whose skin was the color of the dead wet oak leaves which floor the woods at home in the spring. It appears that this stained one had been in Luzon and learned eighteen or twenty words of English. Through these, and the signs which clasp the world, Rawder was amassing Mindayan for the purpose of--administering Methodism to the natives.

“I had been unconscious for many hours. I could not rise, and my brain seemed to be working on a little boy’s shift. For ages, it seemed, I watched the hand and lip converse, too weak to call, to ask why I lived--my skull filled with sick-room wonderings. Rawder labored on with the language, calm, gentle, homely unto pain. He was leaner, stronger, than before; untanned, but the pasty pallor was gone from his face. Years had outgrown the heritage of physical disorder. I had always noted how his thoughts formed, slowly, thoroughly, without adornment, but each thought straining his limitations to the roof of his brain. If an action were involved in any of Rawder’s thoughts, he carried out that action, as good hounds run--to the death. I saw now that wonderful look about him, that Heaven-warmed something which distinguishes a man who has great work to do in the world. Perhaps I alone could see it. They say God never sends a great soul among men without some one to recognize it. It may be that the honor is mine in the case of Rawder. Stricken as I was, I could not help noting his endurance of concentration. This, as you know, is the gift only of mystics. He was driving the monkey-mind of the Mindayan interpreter to the beds of torture with it.... He saw, at last, that my eyes were open, and came to me, kneeling down to take my hand. The native seized the moment to escape.

“It transpired I was in the real village, two miles back from the port. The Mindayans had brought me with several American soldiers who had wandered the night before over the edge of camp, to furnish a bright torture-entertainment in the town-plaza. Rawder had saved my life, but the others had gone out in unmentionable ways.

“‘I was awake when they brought you in,’ he said. ‘These people have not rallied to me very strongly yet, or I could have saved the boys who were captured.... But you--I begged for your life through the interpreter, saying that you were a great teacher and not a soldier, showing them the difference in your garments--and your face.’

“Perhaps you can picture, Miss Noreen, his struggle with the natives, while I had lain unconscious that night.... I explained to him that Tarrant’s command took him for a deserter and a renegade, whose leadership had made fiends of the Tagals. He stared out in the open for a long time without speaking. He was not whipped nor enraged, as a lesser man would be. I think I shall always remember his words:

“‘I seem to fail so many times and in so many ways before getting started in my real work, Mr. Routledge. The soldiers are not to blame. They could not understand me; and yet my purpose was so simple. I should not have told them that I meant to be a missionary in Asia when my enlistment was through. It confused them. Some time all will understand. Some time I shall do well and not fail.’

“‘But how did you get away from the command?’ I asked.

“‘I do not know,’ he answered. ‘During the fight I fell from the heat and a slight wound. I awoke alone, concealed my arms in the jungle, and tried to follow the troop. I must have mistaken the trail, because I never saw the American outfit again. Three days of night travel brought me close to the big native coast town of Triacnakato, where I fell in with a party of Mindayans, there on a trading voyage----’

“‘Tell me, Rawder,’ I interrupted, ‘why you joined the cavalry in the first place.’

“‘Asia called to me. Always, in those last days in Boston I heard Asia call me to work. I had no money to reach the Pacific nor to cross it, so I was enlisted with a regiment ordered to service here. I had heard of certain soldiers doing good work among their fellows in the old English regiments, and thought that until I was free again I might be a help in the troop. White men do not seem to listen to me, Mr. Routledge.’

“Thus he talked, Miss Noreen. Do you like him a little bit--my great man, Rawder?”

The girl regarded him hesitatingly for a moment, as if to reply was not easy. “I like him so well,” she answered at last, “that I wish it were my destiny to meet him every little while up the years, as you do. Tell me all.”

“And so he had started in to teach the words of John Wesley, and others, to these Mindayans whom Spain had left to themselves on account of their ferocity. God knows why the Mindayans gave him a Messiah’s chance to learn their language and explain his message, but they let him live. And now I must tell you about another moment or two of battle. There has been far too much war already for your frightened eyes, but this is short and about my bravest man.

“As we talked, there was a sharp crack of a Krag carbine. I could not rise, but crawled to the doorway. The Mindayans had formed in the plaza for action. Tarrant was coming with his squadron of cavalry to settle for the murders of the night before, and the naked Mindayans essayed to meet him in the open--as the Tagals of Luzon had never dared to do. It was all on in a moment. Out of the jungle came the boys from the States--queer, quick lines, blowing their bubbles of white smoke, dropping down to fire and running forward in skirmish, answering the trumpet-talk as running metal answers to the grooves of a mold. In the blazing open--in a light so intense that it was pain to look through it--the forces met. Mindayans, with guns dating from Magellan; the Americans with their swift, animate Krags; a squadron of white men, three skeleton troops picked from forty States, stacked against a thousand-odd glistening blacks all enthused to die. Hell’s forbidden chambers were emptied that hour, Miss Noreen. I hated war then--but have hated it since far more.

“They met--before my eyes they met--and the dead flew out of the lines like chaff, and were trampled like chaff by the toilers. Hand-to-hand at last; shiny black of flesh against the dull green-brown of khaki; the jungle alive with reserves exchanging poisoned salads of metal; science against primal lust; seasoned courage against fanaticism; yellow sky above, yellow sand beneath; blood-letting between, and the eternal jungle on every hand. It was a battle to haunt and debase a watcher’s brain.

“I did not know Tarrant’s prowess until that day. One man might falter in his command, but the lines were rigid as steel. His trumpeter interpreted every movement of the commander’s lips. I pawed the matting of the hut, but could not lift the anchorage of my hips. Rawder stood above me, watching, the lines of his sweating face weaving with sorrow. The thing was growing upon me--what the end of the fight would mean to him--but his sad face was clean of all fear. Years ago, when I was a boy and loved physical courage, I should have worshipped that clean look of his. Tears in his eyes for the men who had brutalized him!...

“There is always a last minute to a fight, Miss Noreen,--when each force puts forth its final flicker of courage, and the lesser zeal is killed. The last drain of gameness wins the battle, when strength and strategy are gone. It wins for spiders and boys and armies. Tarrant had it.... When it was all over, the men of Rawder’s troop saw him in the doorway and rushed forward.

“‘Mr. Routledge,’ he said softly, ‘they are coming for me. The boys have spoiled my mission here.’

“His hand touched my forehead. The ghastly illness left me.... I don’t believe in telling a lady a story which one would refrain from telling his fellow war-scribes, Miss Noreen, but believe me, you have impelled it with perfect listening----”

“His hand touched your forehead,” she repeated.

“Yes, and there was something about the touch that a dealer in war-stuff could not very well enlarge upon in print. At one moment I was but the shell of a man--and the next I could rise.

“Rawder’s old troop was running forward to finish him--Tarrant in the lead. I tried to make them hear--these white men, as they rushed in, full of the hang-over hell of a fight. But they would not hear me. The men saw only the crown of a great day--to kill the deserter who had led the Tagals against them in Luzon--Rawder, the renegade, whom they believed stood also behind the deaths of last night and this day. To kill him after whipping the Mindayans would call down the glory of the Pantheon.... Rawder stepped back, smiling, empty of hand. I managed to trip Tarrant and yell the story in his ears as he fell. A top-sergeant went by me with a native-knife.... The fluids were running from the man who had saved me, before Tarrant or I could intervene, but the rest were stopped.

“Hours afterward, in the night, he regained consciousness. At least, consciousness wavered in his eyes, and I bent to hear, ‘I am not yet to die.’...

“And it was true, Miss Noreen, in spite of a fearful wound--but that is all healed.... Tarrant was relieved from Minday. Back in Manila, we learned that the real renegade of lower Luzon had been captured alive by volunteer infantry. His name is Devlin, and he is since notorious in Luzon story. Through Tarrant, whom I saturated with the substance of Rawder’s character, my bravest man was discharged for disability.... A month ago, I left him on the Hong Kong water-front. He had found night-work among the sailors--saving them from the human vultures who prey upon poor Jack-ashore-with-money-in-his-pocket--hard, evil-judged work, but the only kind that Rawder knows so far. Many a drugged or drunken sailor has awakened on board his own ship with a tithe of his earnings and a whole skin left, to wonder vaguely in after voyages who was his strange-voiced, gentle-handed protector--the last he remembered in Hong Kong.... Rawder told me I should find him in India next--said that he was called to the heart of India by a dream. He is to find his teacher.... Is it beyond belief to you, Miss Noreen, that there is a great meaning in this Indian shadow which has fallen upon my bravest man? I have known Hindus who could look beyond the flesh of men--despised by their own race--and discover souls of stirring evolution and inspiring purity.”

Jerry Cardinegh entered. Noreen caught her breath quickly, as if suddenly awakened from a dream.

“I feel that some time I shall see your bravest man, Routledge-san,” she whispered.

FIRST CHAPTER

MOTHER INDIA IS SAID TO BE QUIVERING WITH HATRED FOR HER WHITE CHILD, THE BRITISH FOUNDLING

The dusk was stretching out over the windy hills. There had been a skirmish that day in upper India. Two British columns which had campaigned for months apart telescoped with frightful sounds of gladness. Her Majesty’s foot-soldiers, already tightly knotted about their supper-fires, hooted the cavalrymen who were still struggling with halter-shanks, picket-lines, and mounts that pounded the turf and nickered sky-high for the feed-wagons to come in. Every puff of wind bore a new smell--coffee, camels, leather, gun-reek, cigarettes, saddle-blankets, and nameless others. To-morrow there would be a mile square of hill-pasture so tainted by man and beast that a native-bullock would starve before cropping there until the season of torrents soaked it sweet again.

The civilian correspondents grouped together for mess. There was Bingley of the _Thames_, respected but not loved, and rather better known as the “Horse-killer”--a young man of Napoleonic ambition and Cowperish gloom. There was Finacune of the _Word_, who made a florid romance of war-stuff, garnished his battle-fields with palms and ancient temples, and would no more forget his moonlight than the estimate of the number slain. Finacune made a red-blooded wooer out of the British army, and a brown, full-breasted she-devil out of the enemy. His story of the campaign was a courtship of these two, and it read like “A Passion in the Desert,” for which the _Word_ paid him well and loved him mightily. Finacune had another inimitable peculiarity. He possessed one of those slight, natty figures which even civilized clothes cannot spoil; and he could emerge from thirty days in the field, dapper and sartorially fit as from a morning’s fox-hunt.

Then there were Feeney and Trollope and Talliaferro, who carry trays and announce carriages in this narrative, though high priests of the press and Londoners of mark.

The point of the gathering was old Jerry Cardinegh, of the _Witness_, by profession dean of the cult of the British word-painters of war, but a Tyrone patriot, bone and brain and passion. Just now, old Jerry was taking a dry smoke, two ounces of Scotch, commanding his servants to beat a bull-cheek into tenderloin, and adorning the part of master of ceremonies. Cardinegh wore easily a triple fame: first, and always first, for the quality of his work; second, for having seen more of war (twenty-seven campaigns since he messed with the Chinese Gordon, to this night in Bhurpal) than any other man on the planet; and third for being the father of Noreen Cardinegh, absolutely the loveliest young woman manifesting at the present time in London. The old man’s tenderness of heart for Ireland and for all that Ireland had done and failed, was known in part among the scribes and Pharisees. It had been an endless matter of humor among his compatriots. Just now Finacune remembered the stock question and launched it:

“Jerry, if England and Ireland went to war, which would be your home-office--London _Witness_ or Dublin _Contemporary_?”

Cardinegh had never answered twice the same. “Neither,” he declared lightly now, extracting a can of kippered herring from Finacune’s saddle-bags, “but a captain’s tent, during such times as I wasn’t leading the Irish to glory. Have you an opener? I need a relish to cut this whiskey.”

“The old war-horse isn’t always humorous,” remarked Bingley, who was sitting apart. Bingley always sat apart, lest somebody should see his black book of notes or borrow his provisions.

Trollope turned to Finacune with a whisper. “The dean is looking ill. Have you noticed?”

Finacune nodded.

“It would be a heller if this little affair in the hills should prove the old man’s last campaign,” Trollope drawled softly.

Another figure emerged from the dusk, and Jerry Cardinegh leaped with a roar into the arms of an agile giant in a great frieze coat. For a moment it appeared as if the two were in deadly conflict. Pup-tents were unpinned, supper-kits scattered, native servants crawled off as from a duel of man-eaters, and the saintly camels lifted their heads in fresh dismay. It was a good, a relishable greeting, and the proper way for men who love each other to meet after prolonged absence.

“Arise, my children, and _kow-tow_ to Routledge, your spiritual father!” Cardinegh commanded at last.

All but Bingley obeyed.

“Get up, you young scut,” Jerry called ominously, “or go feed with the camels.”

“I haven’t the honor of knowing the gentleman,” Bingley said without rising.

“Better read your history some more,” the dean observed, turning his back upon the young lion of the _Thames_. “Gentlemen,” he resumed with an oratorical pause, “behold the man whom the Gods formed for a war-correspondent--or a spy, as you like--and they tempered him in hell’s fire and holy water--the Gods. Gentlemen, this is Routledge, who knows India better than any of you know London, and he’s an American. This is Routledge, who rides alone, who stays afield in times of peace promoting wars for us--and more wars. I say, Routledge, when were you home last?”

“Sit down, you ‘damaged archangel,’” Routledge said laughingly. “I sat before your fireside in Cheer Street, London, little more than a year ago.”

Hearing the name of the newcomer, the “Horse-killer” was not slow to gain his feet. He came forward hastily, the sullenness gone from his face, giving place to a mixture of envy and admiration. He stared long and intently at the gaunt profile of Routledge. Finacune saw the look and interpreted it for his own pleasure in these words: “And so you are Routledge, the, just now, so-called greatest of all. Well, I am Bingley of the _Thames_. I have surpassed all the others in this campaign, and some time I shall measure wit and grit with you. Meanwhile, you are worth cultivating.” And truly enough the first words of the “Horse-killer” as he extended his hand were:

“I am Bingley of the _Thames_, Mr. Routledge.”

“I have both seen and heard of your work, and admired it, Mr. Bingley,” Routledge responded cordially. “It is good to know you.”

“And I have heard of you, too,” Bingley replied, to the delight of the others.

Routledge embraced several old friends, but to most he was known less in person than by reputation. He had a tendency to laugh at the Powers in the act of making war, a tendency to make the world see that war was a hang-over from the days when men ate their flesh hot from the kill, not from the fire. Veiled under all his work, and often expressed openly in a stinging line, was his conviction that war was a ghastly imposition upon the men in the ranks. This was considered by the rest as a mere mental dissipation of a truly great worker.

A certain aloofness added to the mystery and enchantment of the man. In the field, he would attach himself to some far-ranging column out for dirty work, choosing his command from an intimate knowledge of the leader and the men; to which was added a conception of India, her topography, strategies, fighters, and her methods of thought and action which could hardly be paralleled--outside of the secret service--in any British mind.

The _Review_ invariably kept a second man at the heart of things to cover the routine, so that Routledge could follow his inclinations for hard-riding and bring in his wondrous tales of far chances, night attacks, the enemy at first hand, the faces and valor of the few who hearkened to the swish of the Reaper, the scream from inert flesh as the spirit flees away--the humor, the horror, the hell of the clash.

It is an axiom of the craft that in a platoon fighting for its life there is all the grip of human interest that appals in the collision of fifty-mile battle-fronts; and Routledge played the lesser game to the seeds. It was said of him that he could crawl into the soldier’s brain and watch the machinery falter in full blast and break down. Always you felt, as you read him, that he had a great pity for the ranker, and a great hate for the system that used him.

Where the Terrible was involved, there was a jolting energy in the descriptive powers of Routledge. Even the type which bore his messages from the field to the streets of London seemed sometimes vivid, crackling characters snapped hot from the reeking centres of war. He could make his first lines stand out in the thick _Review_ columns like a desert sunset.

At the end of a campaign, instead of seeking the seductions of hero-worshipping London, Routledge would drift, possibly disguised, into some Indian hot-bed, there to study language, occultism, Borgian poisons, or Cleopatran perfumes. Tales of his ways and his work took the place of his presence at home in times of peace. Some traveller coming in from afar would relate how Routledge had smiled through a six-day water-famine; how Routledge had missed the native knives which find so often the source of human fountains in the dark. It was whispered, and accredited, that the Brahmins called him _One_; that they remembered him as great and distinguished and of sacerdotal caste in some former incarnation, and were loyal still. This is an honor so great that there are not five score men in all the occident who adequately can appreciate it. Mother India is sensitive to the warming currents of a great man, even though he be a derelict in the world.

Routledge had made the English-speaking world utter his name familiarly and to look for the same in public prints. For this reason, Finacune, with his typewriter on his lap, an American _poncho_ spread upon the turf beneath him, his back against a stone, and a lantern at his elbow, rained a column upon his machine. Finishing the work with a half-smile, he hooted aloud: