Stories That End Well Part 21

"Great, isn't it?" said Danvers. "I wish they'd waited two weeks and given us fellows a show, but I dare say there won't be any show by that time, the way they are after the dons at Santiago. Can't you get off now, to pack? But--you'll be sure to come back and say good-by, Chris!"

"I ain't off yet," said Spruce, "and I ain't too sure I will be.

They're always gitting orders and making an everlasting hustle to pack up, and then unpacking. You go to sleep."

He was about to move away, but Danvers detained him, saying that he wanted to be turned; and as the soldier gently turned him, the boy got one of his hands and gave it a squeeze. He tried to say something, but was barely able to give Spruce a foolish smile. "Spruce, you're a soldier and a gentleman!" he stammered. He turned away his head to hide the tears in his eyes. But Spruce had seen them. Of course he made no sign, stepping away briskly, with a little pat on the lean shoulder.

He came back softly in a little while. He looked at Danvers, who was simulating sleep, with his dark lashes fallen over red eyelids, and he shook his head. During his absence he had found that the orders were no rumor. The regiment was going to Porto Rico sure enough. Spruce stood a moment, before he sat down by Danvers' side. But he barely was seated ere he was on his feet again, in a nervous irritation which none had ever seen in Spruce. He walked to the door of the tent and gazed, in the same att.i.tude that the nurse had gazed, an hour earlier, at the low, white streets. Two great buzzards were flying low against the hot, cloudless vault of blue.

"Them boys'll be all broke up if I go!" said Spruce.

He frowned and fidgeted. In fact, he displayed every symptom of a man struggling with a fit of furious temper. What really was buffeting Spruce's soul was not, however, anger, it was the temptation of his life. Spruce had known few temptations; at least, he had recognized few.

His morality was the lenient, rough-hewn article which satisfies a soldier's conscience. He had no squeamishness about the sins outside his limited category; he fell into them blithely and had no remorse when he remembered them, wherefore he preserved a certain incongruous innocence even in his vices, as has happened to many a man before. It is, perhaps, the moral nature's own defense; and keeps untouched and ever fresh little nooks and corners of a sinner's soul, into which the conscience may retreat and from which sometimes she sallies forth to conquer the abandoned territory. What Spruce called his duty he had done quite as a matter of course. He had not wavered any more than he wavered when the war bonnets were swooping down on his old captain's crumpled-up form.

But this--this was different. The boys needed him. But if he stayed with the boys, there was the regiment and the company and the captain and the chance to distinguish himself and march back in glory to his town.

"I guess most folks would say I'd _ought_ to follow the colors," he thought; "raw fellers like them, they need a steady, old hand. Well, they've got Bates." (Bates was an old regular, also, of less enterprising genius than Spruce, but an admirable soldier.) "I s'pose,"--grudgingly--"that Bates would keep 'em steady. And captain can fight, and the colonel was a West Point man, though he's been out of the army ten years, fooling with the millish. I guess they don't need me so awful bad this week; and these 'ere boys--Oh, d.a.m.n it all!" He walked out of the tent. There was a little group about a wagon, at which he frowned and sighed. "Poor Maxwell!" he said. Then he tossed his head and stamped his foot. "Oh, d.a.m.n it all!" said he again, between his teeth.

But his face and manner were back on their old level of good cheer when he bent over Danvers, half an hour later.

"Sa--y! d.i.c.k!"

"Yes, Chris. You come to say good-by! Well, it's good luck to you and G.o.d bless you from every boy here; and we know what you've done for us, and we won't forget it; and we'll all hurry up to get well and join you!" Danvers' voice was steady enough now and a pathetic effort at a cheer came from all the cots.

Spruce lifted his fist and shook it severely. "You shut up! All of you!

You'll raise your temperature! I ain't going, neither. Be quiet. It's all settled. I've seen captain, and he wants me to stay and see you boys through; all the G boys. Then we're all going together. I tell you, keep quiet."

d.i.c.k Danvers was keeping quiet enough, for one; he was wiping away the tears that rolled down his cheeks.

The others in general shared his relief in greater or less measure; but they were too ill to think much about anything except themselves. In some way, however, every one in the tent showed to Spruce that he felt that a sacrifice had been made.

"I know you hated it like the devil, and just stayed for fear some of your precious chickens would come to mischief if they got from under your wings, you old hen!" was d.i.c.k's tribute; "and I know why you went into town yesterday when the boys went off. It _is_ rough, Chris, and that's the truth!"

"Oh, it's only putting things off a bit; the captain told me so himself," said Spruce, very light and airy. But his heart was sore. The G boys understood; he wasn't so sure that all the others did understand.

He caught his name on one gossiping group's lips, and was conscious that they gazed after him curiously. "Wonder if I'm scared that I stayed home, I guess," he muttered, being a sensitive fellow like all vain men.

"I wish they'd see the things I've been in! d.a.m.n 'em!"

The men really were discussing his various Indian experiences and admiring him in their boyish hearts. But he was unluckily out of earshot. Unluckily, also, he was not out of earshot when a lieutenant of another regiment who had had a difference about a right of way with Spruce's captain and been worsted by Spruce's knowledge of military traditions freed his mind about that "b.u.mptious regular who was so keen to fight, but (he noticed) was hanging on to his sick detail, now the regiment had a chance to see a few Spaniards." Spruce, in his properly b.u.t.toned uniform, his face red with the heat and something of the words, saluted rigorously and pa.s.sed by, not a single muscle twitching. All the while he was thinking: "I'm glad he don't belong to _my_ town! G.o.d! If anybody was to write them things about me!"

By this time the town was not only his town, but he was sure that he was a figure in the conversation of the place. Thus his anxiety of mind increased daily. He kept it from his charges, who grew stronger all the week, and the next; and he read such papers as drifted out to the camp and such shreds of news about the fighting with frantic interest.

Danvers was able to sit up at the end of three weeks, but most of the boys were further along, walking about the wards, or gone back to their regiment.

"You get out, Chris," said Danvers, "we all know you're on your head with aching to go. _We're_ all right; and I'm off home on furlough to-morrow; I'll get straightened out there quicker, and I'll be after you next week, see if I don't! I knew you'd be hanging on, so I won't give you the excuse. My sister's coming to-morrow."

"Really, d.i.c.k," gasped Spruce, "and you--you're sure the other boys are so's I can leave?"

"Well, you know there are going to be some women from the Red Cross, last of the week--Oh, by the time we are all out of it, this will be a swell hospital, with all the luxuries! Spruce, go, and don't get hurt, or I'll murder you!"

Spruce giggled like a happy girl. He was on his way to put in his application to join his regiment the next day--after d.i.c.k Danvers'

sister had arrived, when something happened. He did not exactly know what it was himself, until he felt the water on his forehead and tried to lift himself up from the sand, catching the arm of the surgeon-in-chief. "Sunstroke, doctor?" he whispered.

"Just fainted," the surgeon answered cheerfully, "you've been overdoing it in this heat. Be careful."

"Oh, it's nothing, sir," Spruce grinned back; "had it lots of times, only not so bad. All the boys git giddy heads--"

Somehow the ready words faltered off his tongue; the surgeon had been fumbling at his blouse, under the pretext of opening it for air, he was looking in a queer, intent way at Spruce's chest.

Of a sudden the eyes of doctor and soldier, who had been nurse, met and challenged each other. There was a dumb terror in the soldier's eyes, a grave pity in the surgeon's. "I seen them spots yesterday," said Spruce, slowly, in a toneless voice, "but I wouldn't believe they was typhoid spots, nor they _ain't_!"

"You get inside and get a drink, Spruce, and go to bed," said the doctor. "Of course, I'm not certain, but as good a nurse as you knows that it isn't safe to try to bluff typhoid fever."

By this time Spruce was on his feet, able to salute with his reply: "That's all right, Major, but--I got to keep up till Danvers gits off with his folks, or he'd be kicking and want to stay. Jest let me see him off, and I'll go straight to bed."

"No walking about, mind, though," said the doctor, not well pleased, yet knowing enough of the two men to perceive the point of the argument.

Spruce saw Danvers off, with a joke and a grin, and an awkward bow for Danvers' sister. Then he went back to the hospital and went to bed, having written his aunt's address on a prescription pad (one of his acquirements in his foraging trips) with a remarkably spelled request that his pay be sent her, and his other property be given his friend, R.

E. Danvers, to divide among his friends, giving the captain first choice.

"Lots of folks die of typhoid fever," he remarked quite easily, "and it don't hurt to be ready. I feel like I was in for a bad time, and I ain't stuck on the nursing here a little bit."

Before the week was out he recognized as well as the doctors that he was a very sick man.

"If you'd only gone off with your regiment three weeks ago," the doctor growled one day, "you'd have missed this, Spruce."

"That's all right," said Spruce, "but some of the boys are home that wouldn't be, maybe. I guess it's all right. Only, you know captain and Danvers; I wish you'd write back to the old town and tell the committee I done my duty. I can't be a credit to the company, but I done my duty, though I expect there's folks in town may think I was malingering."

"Stop talking!" commanded the doctor. "Did you know the women are coming to-morrow; you are to have a nurse of your own here?"

"Time," said Spruce; "if my town had its way they'd been here long ago.

Ever been in my town, Major?"

"No. Good-by, Spruce; keep quiet."

"It's the bulliest town in the country, and the prettiest. And when G company goes back--Oh, Lord, I won't be with 'em!"

The surgeon's hand on his shoulder prevented the movement which he would have made, and he apologized; "I didn't mean to do that! Moving's so bad. Tell you, I'd a time keeping the boys still; they _would_ turn when they got a little off. Say, I got to talk, Major, something's broke loose in me and I _got_ to talk. I don't want to, I just got to."

When the nurse came he was so light-headed as to have no control of his words, yet quite able to recognize her and welcome her with an apologetic politeness.

"I'd have had some lemonade for you if I'd been up myself, ma'am. We're glad to see you. All the G boys are convalescing; most of 'em's gone. We all come from the same city; it's an awful pretty town. I got a lot of friends there that maybe don't take it in why I'm here 'stead of with my regiment, with the old man. I got a good reason; only I can't remember it now."

The captain's father stood outside the telegraph office in Spruce's town. Beside him was the chairman of the relief committee.

"Too bad about that regular," said the chairman. "Spruce--isn't that his name? One of the boys telegraphed he couldn't live through the day.

Better have him brought here for the funeral, I guess; he's been very faithful. Young Danvers wanted to go right down to Florida; but he had a relapse after he got home and he's flat on his back."

"I heard," said the captain's father; "I've just telegraphed, on my own responsibility, for them to send him here. It won't make any difference to him, poor fellow; but we owe it to him. I wish we could do something that would help him, but I don't see anything."

"We have told them to spare no expense, and he's got plenty of money.