Winning the Wilderness Part 48

"I wonder where Doctor Carey is tonight," Thaine's comrade said in a low voice, as the two came together in the road.

"What's made you think of him?" Thaine asked.

"I haven't seen him since Christmas day. A young Filipino and I got into a sc.r.a.p with a drunken Chinaman who was beating a boy, and the c.h.i.n.k slashed us both. Carey st.i.tched us up, but the other fellow keeps a scar across his face, all right."

"I know that Filipino," Thaine said. "He seems like a fine young man. The scar was a marker for him. I'd know him by it anywhere."

"So should I, and by his peculiar gait. I saw a man slipping along beyond the lines just now who made me think of that fellow, and that made me think of Doctor Carey," the sentinel said, and turned away.

It was after nine o'clock, and the hours were already beginning to stretch wearily for sentinels, when a faint sound of guns away to the eastward broke on the air. Again and again it came, intermittently at first, but increasing to a steady roar. Down in Manila there was dead quiet, but along the American line of outposts the ripping of Mauser bullets and long streaks of light flashed the Filipino challenge to war in steady volleys.

As Thaine listened, the firing seemed to be creeping gradually toward the north, and he knew the insurgents were swinging toward the Tondo road, down which they would rush to storm the bridge. In that moment civil life dropped off like a garment, and he stood up a soldier. He crept cautiously toward the bend to see what lay beyond, and dropped on his face in the dusty way as a whirl of bullets split the air above his head.

As he sprang back to his place beside his comrade, other sentinels joined them, and behind them loomed the tall form of Captain Clarke.

"What's around there, Aydelot?" Clarke asked.

"Didn't you hear?"

Thaine's reply was lost in a roar of rifles, followed by increased firing along the entire line, ma.s.sing to the north before the Twentieth's front.

"There are ten more men on the way up here. We'll hold this place until reinforcements come," Captain Clarke declared.

It was such a strategic point as sometimes turns the history of war. But the odds are heavy for sixteen men to stand against swarms of insurgents armed with Mausers and Remingtons. In the thrill of that moment, Thaine Aydelot would have died by inches had this tall, cool-headed captain of his demanded it. Clarke arranged his men on either side of the way, and the return fire began. Suddenly up the road a lantern gleamed. An instant later a cannon shot plowed the dust between the two lines of men.

"They've turned a cannon loose. Watch out," Clarke called through the darkness.

A second time and a third the lantern glowed, and each time a cannon ball crashed through a nipa hut beside the little company, or threw a shower of dust about the place.

"They have to load that gun by the light of a lantern. Let's fix the lantern," Thaine cried, as the dust cloud settled down.

"Good! Watch your aim, boys," Captain Clarke replied.

The bullets were falling thick about them. They whizzed through the bushes, they cut into the thatched huts, they flung swirls of dust on the little line of brave soldiers, they poured like stinging sweeps of hail, volley after volley, along the Tondo road. When the lantern flashed again, sixteen bullets riddled it, and without its help the big gun was useless.

"Poor lantern! It fell on the firing line, brave to the last," Thaine declared as the smoke lifted.

But the loss of the cannon only doubled the insurgents' efforts, and they threshed at the invincible little band with smoking lead. On the one side was a host of Filipino rebels, believing by the incessant firing of the Kansans that it was facing an equal host. On the other side were sixteen men who, knowing the odds against them, dared the game of war to the limit.

"How many rounds have you left?" Captain Clarke asked.

"Only one," came the answer.

"Give it to them when I give the word. We won't run till our guns are empty," the captain declared grimly.

The last shot was ready to fly, when a wild yell burst from the darkness behind them, the shouts to "remember the _Maine_," mingled with the old university yell of "Rock Chalk, Jay Hawk, K. U. oo!" and reinforcements charged to the relief of the invincible sixteen.

What disaster might have followed the capture of the Tondo road and the attack upon the bridge is only conjecture. What did happen is history--type henceforth of that line of history every company of the Twentieth Kansas was to help to build. When daylight came, Thaine Aydelot saw the frontier line that he had proudly felt himself called hither to push back, and the reality of it was awful. He had pictured captured trenches, but he had not put in their decoration--the p.r.o.ne forms of dead Filipinos with staring eyes, seeing nothing earthly any more forever.

Beyond that line, however, lay the new wilderness that the Anglo-American must conquer, and he flung himself upon the firing line, as if the safety and honor of the American nation rested on his shoulders alone; while all his dreams of glorious warfare, where Greek meets Greek in splendid gallantry, faded out before the actual warfare of the days and nights that followed.

Thaine's regiment, not the "Kansas Scarecrows," but the "Fighting Twentieth" now, was one of the regiments on which rested the brunt of driving back and subduing the rebellious Filipinos. Swiftly the Kansas boys pushed into the unknown country north of Manila. They rushed across the rice fields, whose low d.y.k.es gave little protection from the enemy.

They plunged through marshes, waist deep in water. They lay for hours behind their earthworks, half buried in muddy slime. They slept in holes, drenched to the skin. With the University yell for their battle cry of freedom, they tore through tropical jungles with the bullets of the enemy cutting the branches overhead or spattering the dirt about their feet.

The American regiments were six days in reaching Caloocan, a prosperous town only six miles north of Manila; a mile a day, every foot stubbornly contested.

On Sabbath morning in the first day's struggle, Thaine was running in a line of soldiery toward the Filipino fortification, when he was halted beside a thatched hut that stood between the guns of both armies and was riddled with bullets.

"Help the corporal here, Aydelot, then double quick it ahead," Lieutenant Krause commanded.

Thaine followed the corporal inside the hut where, shot to pieces, lay the mangled forms of women and children who had caught the storm of bullets from both firing lines. Through a gaping hole in the wall beyond, he saw a shallow pit where wounded and dead men and women were huddled together.

"Help me get out the live ones and send them back to Manila, and we'll cover the others right here," the corporal declared.

It was the neighborhood custom of the Gra.s.s River Valley for young men to a.s.sist at every funeral. Thaine had jokingly dubbed himself "official neighborhood pall-bearer," and had served at so many funerals that the service had become merely one of silent dignity which he forgot the next hour. He knew just how to place the flowers effectively, when to step aside and wait, and when to come forward and take hold. And these were the only kinds of services he had known for the dead.

As he bent over the blood-smeared bodies to take up the wounded and dying now, the horror of war burst upon him, and no dead face could be more ashy gray than the young soldier's face as he lifted it above a dying Filipino woman whom he stretched tenderly beside the hut. The next victim was a boy, a deserter from Manila, whom Thaine recognized by a scar across his cheek as the young Filipino whose wound Doctor Carey had dressed.

"You poor fellow!" Thaine said softly.

The boy's eyes opened in recognition.

"For liberty," he murmured in Spanish, with a scowling face. Then the scowl faded to a smile, and in a moment more he had entered eternal liberty.

A detachment of the Red Cross with a white-haired surgeon just then relieved the corporal of the wounded, and Thaine saw Dr. Horace Carey coming toward him.

"I know what you are thinking. Maybe your gun did a good deal of it. This is war, Thaine."

The young man's dark eyes burned with agony at the thought.

"Forget it," Carey added hurriedly. "It is the lost cause here. I worked that line myself for four years long ago. I know the feeling. But this is the only medicine to give the islands here. They can't manage liberty for themselves. You are giving them more freedom with your rifle today than they could get for themselves in a century. Don't wet your powder with your tears. You may need it for the devil that's after you now. Wait till you see a Kansas boy brought in and count the cost again. Good-by."

The doctor hastened away with the wounded, and Thaine helped to straighten out the forms about him and to fill the pit where they were placed in one common grave.

"Wait till you see a Kansas boy brought in and then count the cost."

Somehow, the words, ringing again and again down his mind, could not take away the picture of the thing he had just witnessed. And the dying gasp, "For liberty!" seemed to stab his soul, as he ran forward.

Two days later his company had orders to hold the trenches before a jungle filled with sharpshooters. All day the sun had blazed down upon them and the humid atmosphere had scalded them. All day the murderous "ping! ping!"

of the hidden Mauser in the jungle had stung the air about them.

Late in the afternoon Thaine lay crouched behind his low defense with a college comrade on either side. Colonel Funston had just given the command to rid the woods of the sharpshooters, and the force ordered to the attack came racing by. Captain Clarke stood near Thaine's post, and as the soldiers rushed forward, Lieutenant Alford halted beside him. Even in the thrill of the hour, the private down in the trenches felt a sense of bigger manhood as he looked at the young officer, for Alford was every inch a king; his soldier uniform became him like a robe of royalty. His fine face was aglow now with the enthusiasm of the battle and the a.s.surance of victory.

Thaine did not hear the words of the two officers, for the jungle was beginning to roar with battle cries and bursting fire from many guns. But he knew the two had been boyhood friends, university chums, and military comrades, and the love of man for man shone in their faces.

Alford tarried but a moment with Clarke. As he spied Thaine and his comrades, he gave an instant's glance of kindly recognition to the admiring young privates, and was gone. The three involuntarily rose to their feet, as if to follow him, and from three l.u.s.ty throats they sent after him the beloved battle yell of the regiment, "Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk!

K. U.!" then dropped to their places again and hugged the earth as the rifle b.a.l.l.s whizzed about them.