Caybigan Part 3

He stopped with a little gurgle of dismay. Hafner had risen from the ranks by a Teutonic adhesion to regulations, and rumour, supported by his mannerisms, had it that his debut in the army had been culinary. The remark about the fate of the inhabitants of Cabayan was harmless; the little gurgle was not.

"And what business is that of yours?" asked the Commandant, with a snort.

"Not much. Thought you'd like to know, so as to get ready----"

"Sir," interrupted the Commandant, pompously, "the American Army is always ready."

"I was speaking of your Scouts, sir," the Maestro corrected, suavely.

He had been maneuvering toward the door during the latter part of the dialogue, and with the last word he waved an airy good-by and hop-skipped-jumped down the stairs.

The next day Papa Isio was in town.

The Commandant and his Second Lieutenant were aware of the fact at the same time. For, startled out of their morning slumbers by a screeching tumult, they sprang to their windows to see the whole population of Balangilang driving past as if the demon were after them--men, women, children, half-dressed, dishevelled, their eyes bursting out of their sockets, carrying bundles of hastily s.n.a.t.c.hed goods or squalling babies.

And from this mult.i.tude, flying by like nightmare creatures, there came one long, wailing cry: "Papa Isio! Papa Isio!"

Against the black-blue background of the mountains, over which one golden ray of sun was just sliding like a long rapier lunging toward the heart of the city, volutes of smoke were rising heavily in the water-logged air. Beneath, spiteful red tongues leaped up and out again with explosive cracklings. The whole eastern part of the pueblo was burning.

The officers ran to the cuartel. The men were in an uproar. With the force of habit, acquired through the countless parade drills which had been their sole military experience, they had made a concerted rush and were ferociously fighting among themselves for the combs and brushes and shoe-blacking.

"Here, here," thundered Roberts, while Hafner fumbled at the iron door of the storeroom where was the carefully guarded ammunition; "here, here, you don't need to comb your hair. Get your guns and cartridge-belts."

His additional persuasion was physical and evidently potent, for when the men filed past Hafner to get their ammunition they all had their rifles in hand and their belts around their waists, though some had not had time to don other garments generally regarded, in more social crises at least, as indispensable. They poured out, were rapidly formed in front of the cuartel, and, as they deployed across the plaza, from the smoke ahead Papa Isio's mad mountaineers emerged in convulsive charge. A drainage ditch cut the town transversely and the Scouts dropped neatly into it; then their rifles slid out between the gra.s.s tufts like venomous things.

"Fire at will!" bellowed the Commandant.

Here the Regulations, which hitherto had unwaveringly rewarded Hafner for his respect of them, suddenly went faithless.

"During the final rush of the attacking party," they say, categorically, "firing should be at will, for then the rapidity of fire and the flatness of trajectory are more to be relied upon than accuracy."

But--alas!--the peculiar moral characteristics of the Balangilang Scouts had not been considered when the Regulations were elaborated.

The flatness of trajectory worked poorly. At first pop the majority of the Scouts emptied their magazines like bunches of firecrackers. Most of the bullets sped towards the rising sun, to whisper the story of their masters' unsteady nerves to the trees in the hills. To be just, however, it must be recorded that some ploughed up the ground directly beneath the marksmen's noses. Even then the mere noise--which was positively tremendous--might have checked the advance of the attackers had they not been Papa Isio's own Dios-Dios crew of mad, weird fellows, hurled on by that religious spirit which kills so finely. Their Mad Pope was sending them to everlasting glory, and Death would only expedite the voyage. On they came, howling, mouth-distorted, muscles convulsively tense, a foaming, maniacal band. At their head a big black man with rolling eyeb.a.l.l.s bounded, waving a long lance ending in a blood-dipped standard.

The war drums hummed in rhythm.

The Scouts were not at ease. Some were still peppering at the sun, but the majority were fighting their rifles, trying to reload them with stiff, clutching fingers that did not work expeditiously, or pounding at them with a rage that told of something jammed. Running up and down behind the line, the two officers were waving their swords, shouting and cursing in an attempt to reinstill in their men that automatic regularity which had been their fond pride. But the strings were broken and the puppets worked spasmodically. The incoming rush was only a hundred yards away. Suddenly, with a wonderful burst of speed, the big standard-bearer spurted ahead of his companions. A Scout rose from the trench and aimed his rifle, when the blood-dripping rag described a rapid parabola and was sticking flaccidly on the soldier's khaki, the handle quivering behind. Hafner saw the hands go up, clutching at the sun.

"With the bayonet--charge," he bellowed.

"Hold on," screamed Roberts, in frenzied warning; "they haven't had that yet!"

And then he found himself surrounded, pushed, jostled, swept away in a furious stampede. Though they "hadn't had it," the men were charging, but it was in the wrong direction. Across the plaza they avalanched, toward the stone church, and when Roberts flowed in with the tumultuous current, he had a vision of the Commandant, purple and spitting with rage, at his elbow. The heavy doors clanged shut behind them.

There was a moment of silence. The men were panting in a corner with the "I-couldn't-help-it" air of a young dog whose inherited tendencies have proved too strong for his acquired characteristics. The officers looked at each other blankly.

"Well," said Roberts, "we ought to hold 'em here, sure."

"Hold them!" screeched the Commandant. "Why, blank, blankety, blank, blank, these forsaken, evil-parented, divinity-doomed curs should drive the measly, meanly-pedigreed carabao thieves clean off this evil earth.

Why, doom my soul----"

"Well, let's see about it," said Roberts, briskly, while his superior choked in a befuddlement of rage.

He ran up the gallery steps to one of the six great windows which overlooked the plaza. He peered out guardedly, then with more confidence; his nose went out, then his head; his shoulders followed, his whole bust, and he was standing in the opening, his whole wide area in full view. His lower jaw hung in limp astonishment.

For what he saw was not at all what he had expected to see.

The Dios-Dios men were not surrounding the church. For some inexplicable reason they had stopped at the ditch. From his elevated position the Lieutenant could see them inside the trench, huddled like fish in a basket. Their fine ardour had singularly cooled. Grovellingly they flattened themselves at the bottom of the ditch, fighting for the underneath position, squirming in such convulsions as are ascribed to a certain gentleman of mediaeval legends when sprinkled with holy water.

And when Roberts searched for some possible explanation, a fresh surprise puckered his lips in a low whistle. For, strewn over a s.p.a.ce extending some fifty yards on the near side of the trench, there were six or seven bodies lying face downward, with arms outstretched toward the church. The Dios-Dios men had not stopped at the trench; they had pa.s.sed it and had been driven back to it by some mysterious catastrophe.

Among the bodies Roberts recognised that of the big epileptic leader of the charge, his gory standard a red spot in a bunch of cogon.

The movements in the trench were increasing in vehemence. Suddenly Roberts knew the cause. To his ears, inattentive from the very intensity of his visual observation, there now came a significant sound. At regular, business-like intervals the sharp ping-ing of a Mauser carbine split the air, dying off in a long-drawn whistle. The Lieutenant succeeded in locating the sound. It came from a deserted hut--seemingly from its roof--at the upper end of the ditch.

The thing was clear now. The mysterious sharpshooter had the Dios-Dios men enfiladed. And the movements in the ditch were not all actuated by search for shelter. They were convulsive somersaults; stiff hands clutched at earth and gra.s.s. A little red stream began to trickle out of the lower end of the ditch.

The Dios-Dios men were becoming demoralised. The report of a Mauser is difficult to locate to the most experienced; to the fanatics the thing was impalpable mystery. And the plaza was deserted. If there had been only some human presence to rekindle their rage, they might have gone on in their mad race. But there was nothing. The Scouts were secure in the big stone church. The long, flat plaza was dead; the sun dripped into craniums like molten lead, and from the nowhere hailed the weird missiles, shattering arms, puncturing bodies, bursting open heads. One man crawled back, two followed, ten in a bunch, and in another minute the tall gra.s.s was all alive with sinuous movements and there was n.o.body in the trench, nothing except limp heaps of what looked like cast-off clothing.

The door of the hut marked by Roberts flew open as if by explosion and the Maestro burst out, a smoking gun in his right hand, a revolver in his left, another revolver and a bolo in his belt. With a piratical yell he raced across the plaza, his long legs working smooth as well-greased machinery, his red hair flying behind him. When midway along the trench he leaped upon a mound left by the excavators and stretched out in bold relief. A strange war-cry, beginning with something about some husky wow-wow (whoever he might be), pa.s.sing on to a no less interesting fact about a whisky wee-wee, rising through a tremulous crescendo about some sort of a yah, and culminating in a long, shrill whoop, reverberated atrociously over the deserted battlefield. Then the gun that had waved through these vocal convulsions dropped back to the Maestro's shoulder, and a rapid fusilade gave a p.r.o.nounced accentuation to the waving of the gra.s.s along the line of smouldering nipa-huts.

Roberts tried to dodge away from the window, but he was too late. The Maestro, through with his flourish, had turned and spied him. Roberts could see the tooth-lacking mouth agape in a broad grin. The Maestro waved his hand amiably. "Come on," said the gesture, rea.s.suringly. "Come on; it's all right now." A violent blush rose to the officer's face.

But he had not time for self-a.n.a.lysis. Along the ruins, at the farther edge of the plaza, the Dios-Dios men were reforming. The panic-stricken groups were being coalesced in a triple line, and between these lines a strange being, in a long robe and incongruous helmet, was slowly pa.s.sing in weird ceremony. It was the Mad Pope himself. He was locking the lines hand in hand. As he pa.s.sed before his followers, each took his bolo between his teeth and grasped the hand of the man to the right; and over the clasp the illumined leader made the sign of the cross. It was grotesque, but not laughable. The puerility of garb and ceremonial was lost in the significance of the result. The Dios-Dios hysteria flamed anew. It was as if a monkey had invoked the Death Angel and the Death Angel had answered.

Roberts was leaving the window in haste when his last sweeping glance over the plaza froze him again in attention.

It seemed to him that the red rag which signalled the position of the leader of the first charge had moved. It seemed nearer, fully ten paces nearer, to the ditch than when he had first espied it. And now, even as he looked, the thing advanced sinuously and a bronze body glistened between the bunches of gra.s.s in a rapid crawl of ten feet or more toward the unconscious schoolmaster who, with his back to the subtle danger, was now watching alertly ahead.

The Lieutenant's hands went to his mouth in a warning halloo.

"Hey, there," he shouted, "look out in back there. In back, in back."

But the Maestro did not understand. The word "back," which he caught, was not to his liking.

"Oh, h.e.l.l!" floated back the irreverent answer. "_I'm_ all right. Come on, you fellows. _I'll_ hold them."

Roberts desisted. There was no time for further dialogue. The Dios-Dios lines were beginning to move forward. And besides, at that particular moment, the Lieutenant did not care much what happened to the amiable pedagogue. He clattered downstairs.

The men were lined up, blinking before the flashes of Hafner's sword and language. The doors were thrown open and the company rushed out. Almost at the same time, from the other side of the plaza, the triple line of hand-locked fanatics began to move forward.

It was a race for the ditch and the Maestro, and a comfortable one, seemingly, for the Scouts, who had but half of the distance to go. But Roberts, through with the temporary vexation caused by the Maestro's peculiar ways, led his men at a furious pace. His sword in his left hand, his revolver in his right, his whole big frame vibrating with the effort, he raced ahead with an energy that seemed very unnecessary to Hafner, who, puffing, was falling farther and farther behind. For the Dios-Dios men were being seriously hampered in their advance. The Papa's hand-locked formation doubtless had its advantages morally, but it had also its disadvantages materially. The Maestro's carbine was working busily, and soon there were dents in the Dios-Dios lines, and some of the handclasps were strong with the tenacity not of life, but of death.

The Scouts had the race well in hand, but still Roberts tugged ahead, snarling with the effort. Behind the Maestro he could see a tell-tale undulation of the high gra.s.s, nearer and nearer. He was only a few yards from the trench now. Suddenly a panther-lithe form bounded from the ground behind the schoolmaster and a big black man with upraised arms, terminating in a kriss, stood out in relief. Roberts's revolver spit.

The black arms whizzed down with a velocity hardly lessened by the limpness of death. There was a dull thud; the schoolmaster rolled slowly into the ditch, and the big black man pitched headlong down upon him.

"By ----, too bad," muttered Roberts, and then his revolver spluttered.

The situation was not bad. The Scouts had gained the trench in good time. Bunched together and firing by platoon, they were doing better.

The Dios-Dios line received each volley with a s.h.i.+vering bow, and if this involuntary courtesy proved the firing to be still too high, it no less showed that it was at least within whistling distance. The ardour of the advance waned gradually; at last the lines stopped in indecision.

The more rabid fanatics were still tugging forward, the others were holding back, and the lines vibrated between the two impulses without advancing. It was the psychological moment.