Chapter V: The Greater Discipline (5)

The man looked to be honest and intelligent; and while I could hardly credit such an astounding and abnormal development of the nasal power in a human being, there was nothing else to do; so I told him to take my horse and his own, ride as quickly as possible to camp, and bring old Du Chien with him.

Then we made a litter, and slowly and reverently we bore the corpse of the murdered lady along the difficult road until we reached a point to which it was possible to bring a carriage, in which we placed her in charge of the horrified neighbors, who had by this time collected at the plantation.

Captain Martas insisted on remaining with me and awaiting the coming of Du Chien.

More than two hours elapsed before the soldier whom I had sent for Du Chien, the Man-Dog, returned with that strange creature. He surely deserved his name. He must have been six feet high, but was so lank, loose, flabby, and jumbled-up that it was hard to even guess at his stature. His legs were long and lank, and his hands hung down to his knees. A bristly shock of red hair grew nearly down to his eyebrows, and his head slanted back to a point, sugar-loaf fashion. His chin seemed to have slid back into his lank, flabby neck, and his face looked as if it stopped at the round, red, slobbering mouth. His nose was not remarkably large, but the sloping away of all the facial lines from it, as from a central point, gave his nasal organ an expression of peculiar prominence and significance. When he walked, every bone and muscle about him drooped forward, as if he were about to fall face foremost and travel with his hands and feet.

Briefly I explained what had happened, and thereupon Du Chien, who seemed to be a man of few words, said: “Stay where you are, all of you, for a minute.” Then he started off at his singular dog-trot pace, and followed the edge of the water all the way around, just as I had done, lightly, but with wonderful celerity. Then he came back to us, looking much puzzled. I handed him the coarse, dirty handkerchief which I had taken from the dead woman’s mouth, and Du Chien immediately buried that wonderful nose of his in it, and snuffed at it long and vigorously. Having apparently satisfied himself, he removed the dirty rag from his face and said: “Nigger.”

“No,” said I, thinking of Celia, and looking Du Chien in his little, round, deep-set eyes; “a mulatto.”

“No,” he answered, with quiet assurance; “not mulatto; nigger; black, wool-headed, and old--a buck nigger.”

“What can you do?” said I.

“Wait a minute,” said Du Chien. Then he started off again to make the circuit of the peninsula, but more slowly and deliberately than at first. He threw his head from side to side, like a hound, and smelled at every tree and shrub. He had got about half way around when he reached a mighty tree that grew on the edge of the swamp, leaning out over the water where it was narrowest and deepest, and seemed to mingle its branches with the branches of another tree of a similar gigantic growth that grew upon the other side. He walked up to this tree, saying: “Nigger went up here!” and at once began to climb. The inclination of the great trunk and the lowness of the branches made the task an easy one. Almost instantly, Captain Martas, I, and two or three soldiers followed Du Chien up the tree. Du Chien had gone up some thirty feet into the dense foliage, when all at once he left the body of the tree, and began to slide along a great limb that extended out over the water, holding to the branches around and above him until he got into the lateral branches of the tree on the opposite side, and thence to the trunk of that tree, down which he glided, and stood upon the opposite bank waiting for us to follow. We did so as speedily as possible, and as soon as we were safely landed by his side, Du Chien said: “Single file, all!” and started off, smelling the trees and bushes as he went.

The spot at which we had descended seemed to be a hummock similar to that on the other side, but less regular in its outline; and soon the way by which Du Chien led us became more and more difficult and impassable. Often it seemed that the next step would take us right into the dark and sluggish water, but Du Chien, almost without pausing at all, would smell at the leaves and branches and hurry on, now planting his foot upon a clod just rising out of the water, now stepping upon a fallen and half-rotted log, now treading a fringe of more solid ground skirting the dreary lagoon, but going every moment deeper and deeper into the most pathless and inaccessible portions of the swamp.

For nearly two hours this strange man followed the trail, and we followed him. At last we came to a considerable elevation of ground under which opened a little V-shaped valley made by the water of a branch which drained the high land into the swamp. This valley was rather more than two acres in extent, and seemed to be a clearing. But there was a thick-set growth of sweet gum, holly, and magnolia across the opening toward the swamp, beyond which we could not see.

With quickened steps, and with many of the same signs of excitement manifested by a hound when the trail grows hot, Du Chien followed along this hedge-like line of underbrush, and at its farther end stopped. There, within three feet of where the steep bank ran into the water, which seemed to be of great depth, was an opening in the hedge. He slipped cautiously through it, and we followed him in silence. It was a little garden in the heart of the swamp, lying between the hills and the water. At the apex of the V-shaped valley was a miserable cabin with some fruit trees growing round about it. We gazed upon the scene with profound astonishment.

“Do you know anything of this place, Captain Martas?” said I, in a low tone.

“No,” said he; “several years ago one of my fieldhands, a gigantic Abyssinian, was whipped and ran away to the swamp; I never followed him, and have never seen him since, although every now and then I heard of him by the report of the negroes on the plantation; I suppose he has been living somewhere in the swamp ever since, and, unless this is his home, I can not imagine how such a place came to be here.”

“The nigger is there,” said Du Chien. “If there are a dozen of them I can tell the right one by the smell,” and again he put the old handkerchief to his nose.

“If it is old Todo,” said Captain Martas, “he is a powerful and desperate man, and we had better be cautious.”

We formed a line, and slowly and cautiously approached. We had got within ten or twelve feet of his door, when we saw a gigantic, half-clad negro spring from the floor, gaze out at us an instant with fierce, startled eyes, and then, with a yell like that of some wild beast roused up in its lair, he seized an axe which stood just at the door, and, whirling it around his head with savage fury, darted straight at Captain Martas. It seemed to me that the huge, black form was actually in the air, springing toward the object of its hatred and fear, when one of the soldiers sent a ball from his revolver crushing through old Todo’s skull. With a savage, beastly cry, the huge bulk fell headlong to the earth.

“It is a pity,” said Martas; “I wished to burn the black devil alive.”

At that instant Du Chien cried out: “Look there!” And extending his arm toward the top of the ridge, he started off at full speed. We all looked up and saw Celia flying for dear life toward the forest of the high ground behind the cabin, and we joined in the chase. It was perhaps forty yards up the slope to the highest part, and about the same distance down the other side to the water’s edge. Just as we got to the crest, Celia, who had already reached the water’s edge, leaped lightly into a small canoe and began to ply the paddle vigorously, and with a stroke or two sent the frail bark gliding swiftly away from the shore, while she looked back at us with a wicked smile. In a moment more she would be beyond our reach, and the soldier who had shot Todo leveled his fatal revolver at her head. But Captain Martas knocked the weapon up, saying, in a voice choked with emotion: “No, no! let the girl go! She is my daughter.”

Swiftly and silently the slight canoe swept away over the dark waters of the great, black swamp, now hidden in the shadow, now a moment glancing through some little patch of sunlight, always receding farther and farther, seen less often, seen less distinctly every moment, and then seen no more.

THE AMATEUR REVOLUTIONIST

By John Fleming Wilson

If you should see bronzed men or men with soldierly bearing frequenting a certain office in a small street in San Francisco, and if you knew who the men were or what they represented, you could predict to a nicety the next Central American revolution, its leaders, and its outcome. That is because San Francisco is the place where everything commences, and many have their end in the way of troubles in the “sister republics.”

Three years ago the present government of Guatemala missed overthrow by just a hair. As the man who had been financing the insurrection said bitterly when the bottom fell out: “If it weren’t for women there’d be no revolutions, and if it weren’t for a woman every revolution would be successful.” He said this to the man who knows more about troubles political where there’s money and fighting than any other man in the world. This man nodded his head with a smile not often seen on his spare face. The financier didn’t like the look, and he growled some more: “They might at least have let me hold the government up for my expenses before calling the whole business off. I could have got everything back and interest on my venture.”

The other man kept on smiling. “That’s the way you fellows look at it. If you can’t win, sell out at a good price. But that don’t win in the long run. One woman can spoil the scheme.”

Two years before this a young woman landed from the Pacific Mail steamer _City of Para_, and registered at the Palace as from Mazatlan. She had a little maid who giggled and talked Mexican, some luggage with Vienna and Paris hotel labels over it, and the manner of a deposed queen. She signed herself as “Srta Maria Rivas.”

In due time Señorita Rivas left the hotel for quiet lodgings on Vallejo Street. But before she disappeared from the court, a gentle-mannered old man, with knotty hands, called and introduced a companion. “This is the young man I spoke to your excellency about. I present Señor Thomas Vincent.” Then the gray-haired man slipped away, and Thomas Vincent was left looking down into the dark face of Maria Rivas. He did not know why he was there, nor who she was, nor even the name of the man who had introduced him. But he was not sorry.

She let him stand while she glanced him over. Vincent drew himself up at her somewhat insolent manner, and was rewarded by a smile.

“Will you accept an invitation to supper to-night if I press you very hard?” she asked him in smooth English.

Vincent turned his eyes about the court. Then he looked down at her again, and nodded curtly. “Certainly, madam.” He flushed, and went on, “But I failed to catch your name. I am awfully embarrassed.”

She got to her feet, and held out a slender hand. “I am Miss Mary Rivas,” she said, quietly. “My father was formerly the president of Honduras. I went to school at Bryn Mawr, and I met your sister there. That’s why, when I found you were in San Francisco, I asked to have you brought and introduced.”

Vincent looked at her very soberly, almost pityingly. Then he offered her his arm, and they went into the supper-room, where everybody turned to watch their progress, knowing neither of them.

When she removed to the flat on Vallejo Street, Miss Mary Rivas told Vincent to come and take the first dinner with her. “We’ll christen the new place,” she said gayly, “and, besides, I hope you’ll find that I’m really American and can cook.”

That night at nine o’clock when the Mexican maid had departed giggling to the kitchen, Vincent’s hostess leaned forward over the table at which they sat, and rested her elbows on it. Her bare arms framed her face in a sudden way that took Vincent’s heart out of its regular beat. He leaped to his feet when Maria Rivas, dropping her head, burst into a torrent of sobs, her white shoulders heaving as her agony got the better of her.

As he stood there biting his lips she threw back her head and darted up and to the window. He heard her moan, as if she saw and heard something too awful to comprehend. He walked over and stood back of her till she swung round, and he saw the tear-stained face relax and the swimming eyes close. He carried her to the table, and laid her down across it, and rubbed her hands. Then the maid came in, still giggling hysterically, and together they revived her until she sat up between Vincent’s arms and slid from the big table to the floor. Vincent sent the astonished maid out by a gesture of command.

“Now, what’s the matter?” he demanded, hoarsely. “If you’re in trouble tell me.”

She panted before him. “It was what I remembered,” she replied. “How can I forget?”

“After I had been five years in the States papa sent for me to meet him in Colon. I got off the steamer, and he was waiting on the wharf. I knew he would do it just that way. He put on his glasses with both hands and looked at me as if he were very glad, and oh! I loved it, for it was just like it was when I was a little girl and ran into the big room.

“But trouble came in Panama, and papa thought we’d better come up to San Francisco. ‘I’ve been so busy down here one way and another,’ he said, ‘that I’m always suspected of conspiracy. Your mother is dead, and the fun of life is out of it. We will live peaceably as befits an old man and his daughter.’”

Vincent’s voice broke in on her story. “When was this?”

“Five years ago. And everything went all right till we got to Amapala. There a friend of papa’s came on board and showed me a paper. It said papa was not to be allowed to land in Honduras, as he was plotting an insurrection. He put on his glasses to read it. When he looked up at me, he said: ‘We shan’t see where your mother is buried, nor the place where you were born.’ He shook hands with the friend, and said nothing more.

“On the day we were at Ocos, in the afternoon, I saw the _comandante_ come on the steamer with some soldiers. He said he wanted to arrest papa, but that if papa came along willingly he would not use force.

“‘I am under the American flag,’ papa said. ‘I know who has done this. It would mean my death if I went with you.’ Suddenly I heard a shot and then another. I hurried to papa’s room. Outside there were two soldiers aiming into it. I saw papa sitting on his camp-stool and his two revolvers were in his lap. He was hunting for his glasses, but the chain had slipped down. He could not see to shoot. One of the soldiers, after a long time, fired his gun again, and father suddenly picked up his revolvers, and I cried out again. He didn’t shoot, and I know now that he was afraid of hitting me. Then he fell. The soldiers fired again and ran away, panting and yelling to each other. I went in to papa, and he asked for his glasses, sitting up on the floor very weakly. When I found them and gave them to him, the blood was running very fast down his breast. He put on his glasses with both hands, wrinkling up his forehead in the old way, and looked at me very----He looked.... He said, ‘I am glad I could see you, little one ... before I go.’ That was all.”

She went to the window and stayed there, immobile, while Vincent walked up and down behind her. At last she turned around. “That was five years ago. No one has done anything to punish them.”

Vincent, because she was suddenly to him the woman, did what every man once in his life will do for one woman: he sacrificed his sense of humor. With all seriousness he stiffened up. “It was under my flag he was shot down. I’ve served under it. Give me another flag for Guatemala and I’ll go down there and those murderers shall die against a wall, with your flag flying over their heads, its shadow wavering at their feet on the yellow sand.”

Maria Rivas, because she was the Woman in this case, understood perfectly. “A revolution?” she said, very quietly. He bent over her hand gravely and youthfully. His manner was confident, as if he saw very clearly what was to be done and knew how to do it, not as if he had promised a girl with tear stains on her cheeks to overturn a government because of a murder one afternoon on a steamer in a foreign port.

This was the beginning of the affair. Its continuation was in a little town on the Guatemalan coast, where Vincent landed with a ton of munitions of war, marked “Manufactures of Metal,” and thirty ragged soldiers. A month later he had a thousand insurgents and twenty tons of munitions, and his blood had drunk in the fever that burns up the years in hours. The first thing Vincent did under its spell was to march on Ocos and take it. When the town was his and the _comandante_ in irons, the young man took out of his pocketbook a little list of names, made out in Maria Rivas’s hand. He compared this list with the list of prisoners, and ordered out a firing squad. Half an hour later the shadow of the flag made by the Woman in the Vallejo Street flat wavered over the sand on which lay six men in a tangle. Generalissimo Thomas Vincent went out into the sun and looked at the last postures of the six, and then out across the brimming waters of the Pacific. A mail steamer lay out there in the midst of a cluster of canoes, the American flag drooping from her staff.

An Irishman in a major’s uniform came out of the cool of the barracks and stopped beside Vincent. “Another week ought to see us in the capital,” he said slowly. “But I don’t like this business, general. These beggars don’t amount to anything. Why did you order them shot?”

A barefoot girl of some ten years crept around the corner of the sunbaked wall. She picked her way over the sand, darting hot glances fearfully at the two officers. Suddenly she stooped over the crooked body of one of the motionless ones. She tugged at the sleeve of a shirt, and as the face turned slightly upward to her effort, she fell to beating on the ground with both hands, and sobbed in the heat, dry-eyed.

Vincent strode over to her, and gently picked her up. Her quick sobs did not cease as he carried her into the shade, his own face drawn and white. He looked over at the major, who stood gnawing on his stubby mustache. He did not reply to the question until the major repeated it angrily. “It was because ... they deserved it....” Vincent stopped, and then went on, almost inaudibly, “God knows why I did it, and then there’s ... the----” He stopped once more, for the girl’s hard sobs had ceased, and her lithe hand had darted from the folds of her scanty gown to the young general’s throat, and the major saw him set the burden softly down, and then fall forward, the blood pouring around the blade of a knife deep in his throat.

With an oath the major leaped over to him and lifted his head. Vincent’s eyes looked clearly into his. Then the wounded man looked over at the little girl, poised for flight, a dozen feet away. He nodded at her with an air of absolute comprehension, and then died.

THE BLOOD OF A COMRADE

By Neil Gillespie

“A short, severe war is less cruel than a long drawn-out fight,” said the captain, easily. “Of course it is! Everybody knows it! So why do the people at home criticise us, and libel and court-martial us because we use every means in our power to prevent further rebellion?”

“They ought to be thankful we don’t use Spanish methods,” said Wilcox, the junior member of the mess. He was only six weeks out of his cadet gray, and a new arrival at Camp Chicobang.

The captain smiled, pleasantly. “No?” he said. “Haven’t we a _reconcentrado_ system similar to theirs? Haven’t we a blockade? We’re merely taking up affairs where they left them, and following Spanish methods in our own way. When this rebellion began, we tried to treat the natives as civilized creatures, but, thank heaven, we’re learning sense at last.”

The subaltern flushed to the roots of his close-cropped hair. “Do you mean to say that any measure, however cruel, is justifiable in war?”

“About that,” said the captain, amused at the boy’s interest in a subject which was a stale one to the rest of the mess. “This business has got to be straightened out, and that’s exactly what you and I are here for. War is wrong; therefore it is cruel and brutalizing. ‘Benevolent assimilation’ talk is all rot, and as for civilized warfare, there’s no such thing. The measures used are adopted as circumstances arise, and must be cruel or barbarous, as the necessity calls for.”

Wilcox was staring at him, half in horror, half in fascination. “And men can talk that way in the twentieth century,” he murmured.

The captain smiled again. “The only way to carry on war with this people is to do to them as they first did to us. As long as we spare them, they’re going to think we’re weaklings, and grow bolder by result. They haven’t any honor; you can’t treat them as white men. Their own methods are what they expect, and their own methods are the only means by which this fighting will ever be stopped. It may involve an awful lot of suffering for non-combatants, but we can’t help that. When the people cry out ‘Enough!’ then the insurgents will lose their support and the rebellion will be at an end--for a while.”

Wilcox was playing nervously with his fork, and biting his lips as if to keep back words he would not speak. He was young, and his high ideals of the calling he had chosen had made him blind to the hard facts with which he was now brought face to face. It was impossible to believe that his own countrymen--officers of the United States army--could be so cruel, so barbarous. He did not care what the captain said; bloody treatment must serve only to alienate this struggling people. If the rebellion had once been handled differently, what was the cause of this reversion to the savage? Had the lust of blood so crazed the white men that they forgot their race, their civilization, their upbringing? Wilcox pitied the Filipinos; they, at least, were fighting for their liberty.

“By the way,” said the captain, “did any of you fellows hear that the general expects to catch Luiz Maha, who killed our policeman down at Binaran, and tried to murder the port commander?”

“Been wounded?” asked some one.

“No, but his wife had a baby recently, so he probably won’t move his quarters so easily. They’ll shoot him on sight.”

“Well, I hope they see him soon,” said the medico. “He’s made more trouble for us than any other _insurrecto_ in that part of the island.”

A sudden sound of running feet was heard through the din of the rain outside. The door of the mess-hall rasped open, and a dripping figure appeared on the threshold.

“The colonel’s compliments to the commanders of K and O Troops, and will they please report to him immediately? Outpost No. 2 has been cut up by _insurrectos_, and Lieutenant Ellard and men at No. 4 have been captured.”

* * * * *

In the blackness of the night before dawn, a long line of men, lying flat on the soggy earth, wormed their way through the tall, rank grass. On the crest of a steep ascent the leading figures halted cautiously, and one by one the men came to a standstill, each with a hand on the foot of the man ahead. A light was beginning to streak the east when the captain consulted the native guide in a soundless colloquy.

“What does he say?” asked Wilcox, the subaltern. He was wallowing in the mud like a carabao, and his clothes were coated with dirt.

“The _hacienda_ of the _insurrecto comandante_ is just below us,” returned the captain. “They’ll be perfectly unsuspecting, and unless they’ve had time to move on, it’s likely we’ll find our men hidden there.”

In the gray dawn the Americans drew their lines about the little plantation, and lay in an unseen circle a stone’s throw from the brown nipa-hut. The subaltern saw a frowsy woman with two naked children go into the shack. A tall man in ragged white was putting out the wash to dry.

“By the eternal,” whispered the captain, excitedly, “if it isn’t a Spaniard! We’ve had rumors that the Gugus were keeping some prisoners up here as slaves.”

The tall man glanced toward the jungle and saw a line of blue and khaki-clad figures spring into view. His eyes bulged from his head, and he stood motionless with amazement. Suddenly, with a shout of “Vivan los Americanos! Viva la Libertad!” he dashed forward, open-armed. A burly sergeant met him with a knock-out blow on the chin, and the Spaniard staggered back, rubbing his face without resentment. He understood that silence was demanded.

“Over the hill!” he cried, dancing about with pain and excitement. “They’ve just left here with three _Americano_ prisoners. Hurry and you will catch them! Hurry, hurry, but take me with you.”

Once more they dashed into the forest. The subaltern, running beside the rescued man, noticed that his shirt was stained with blood, and the fluttering rags gave glimpses of the raw, flayed skin beneath.

“What does that mean?” he asked in his school-boy Spanish.

The man smiled. Past sorrows were nothing to him now.

“I have been two years a prisoner,” he said. “One receives many beatings.”

“Have you never tried to escape?”

“What was the use? My friend tried, but they caught him and cut off his head--after roasting his legs.”

Wilcox said nothing, but there was a strained look about his eyes. To him the last twenty-four hours had been horribly unreal. Stopping only for food and drink, the troop had followed the track of the _insurrectos_ deeper and deeper into the hills. He had seen his men surprise and shoot down a native in sight of his wife, and as excuse the captain had said that the man was a war traitor, a leader of insurgents, and a persecutor of _Americanistas_. But Wilcox felt sickened. The captain and the men became repulsive to him. They were like a lower order of beings to which he refused to be degraded. The army was his only outlook, but could he ever be in sympathy with such things as he was experiencing every day?

Suddenly a man in the ranks cried out, and the column came to a jolting halt. The subaltern looked, and turned pale. By the trunk of a moss-grown tree, his arms bound above his head, a rope about his half-naked body, stood an American soldier. Across his mouth from corner to corner a _bolo_ had slashed, and the bleeding flesh hung loosely over the jaw. His head was sunk forward, but he was not dead as his captors had intended he should be after a few days’ lingering.

His “bunkie,” who had first seen the pitiful figure, cut the heavy hemp with his bayonet, but the column waited only a moment. A hospital corps man was left behind with a detail, and the troop took up its march the more cautiously for knowing that it was hot on the trail.

The subaltern felt that his nerves were strained to the breaking point. Through the throbbing whirl of his brain came a sickening thought. If the natives were capable of such a deed as this, how would they treat the other two prisoners? Surely they would not dare to harm an American officer. His mind refused to comprehend the thought of Ellard cold and lifeless. The image of his classmate and chum was too fresh, too vividly active to be rendered null. No, the natives could not be so cruel, they could not be so inhuman. And yet that bound figure by the tree! How slowly the men moved! Why did they linger when every minute might mean life or death to the prisoners?

The men passed over another spur and dropped into the valley below. With every step they moved more cautiously. Tense and alert, the subaltern crept onward, braced for he knew not what. He saw the captain, crawling on all fours, become entangled in a trailing vine, and felt an uncontrollable desire to laugh. It was broad day now, and the heat grew stifling in the breathless woods.

A shout and distant laughter echoed across the valley, and the captain halted abruptly. After a moment’s consultation, the troop divided, and at the head of his creeping file, the subaltern turned to the right. Nearer and nearer sounded the native voices, and the men knew that they were close to the insurgent camp. For ten heartbreaking minutes they wormed their way over the damp, brown loam, now and again catching a glimpse of the little clearing, until they had made a complete half circle.

Slowly they drew near the edge of the trees, and the subaltern heard the sound of hasty digging. A strange look appeared on the set faces of the men, but Wilcox did not notice. He wondered what the natives were doing, fearing to look for dread of what he might have to see, and yet impatient to know if Ellard was alive. He moved his body until, dirt-color himself, he could watch unseen.

Thank God! At the opposite end of the clearing stood Ellard, upright and unharmed. Before him, in the centre of the field, was a rectangular hole like a grave, and the natives were throwing the earth clods into it. Evidently they were burying some one who had died, but why did they seem amused? Brady was nowhere in sight. Was it his body they were burying?

Yelling like an army of blue fiends, the captain’s detachment burst into the clearing. Surprised and confused, the _insurrectos_ turned to flee, and met the fixed bayonets of the subaltern’s men.

As soon as he could break away, Wilcox ran to one side. Ellard was standing as before, still bound hand and foot. His face was half averted, but on it the subaltern saw a look of the most intense horror and dread. With a cry of dismay, he dashed forward, but a naked, brown figure was before him. Twice the shining _kris_ flashed in the air as the defenseless prisoner toppled backward. Then, dodging the subaltern’s bullet, the native turned and fled. Two privates cornered and disarmed him, but before they could put in a finishing blow, Wilcox had shouted: “Hold on there! Wait till I come!”

“As you have mercy, put me out of this life!” moaned Ellard.

The tall, strong, young athlete of a moment before lay helpless on the ground, a bleeding, legless trunk. Sobbing, the subaltern dropped to his knees beside his friend, and beat passionately at the earth with clenched fists.

“Don’t, don’t!” almost shrieked the wounded man. “I stood here powerless to move while they first cut up and then buried Brady alive, but I didn’t cry! Kill me, shoot me, have mercy on me for Christ’s sake, but don’t cry!”

A hospital sergeant came running, the captain, white with horror, at his heels. The fight was over, and a group of men were working at the grave.

Wilcox staggered to his feet, a strange curse on his lips. The beads of sweat plowed deep courses through the grime on his cheeks. Slowly, with infinite deliberation, he reloaded his revolver and strode to where the troopers held the _insurrecto_ on the ground. As he went, he muttered, like a man searching for some forgotten thought, “The measures used are adopted as circumstances arise, and must be cruel or barbarous as the necessity calls for ... as the necessity calls for....”

Three times he fired into the prostrate body. “One for Brady, one for Wright, and one for Ellard!” and then he began to laugh.

UNDER FLYING HOOFS

By Bertrand W. Sinclair.

“Mormon Jack” stretched his generous length in the shade of the bed-wagon, thereby disturbing the sonorous slumbers of Johnny Layton, who muttered imprecations as he rolled over to make room.

“You blasted Mormon renegade,” he growled.

“Why don’t you go and lie down where you won’t be disturbin’ a fellow that has to stand guard to-night?”

“You’re a cantankerous cuss,” Mormon Jack calmly returned. “If I wasn’t a stranger in a hostile camp I’d climb your carcass for them insultin’ observations. Besides, it aint good for a kid to sleep too much. I don’t see how you got the heart to lay here snorin’ like a cayuse chokin’ down, when you could be sittin’ up enjoyin’ this here beautiful scenery that’s bein’ desecrated with bawlin’ cows and buckin’ bronks and greasy, old round-up wagons. You aint got no sense of nacheral beauty, Kid. You’re just about as ornery a varmint as old man Hartley, what once inhabited this same flat.”

“I’ve heard of him,” answered the now thoroughly awakened Layton. “He happened before my time, though. Were you in the country when they cleaned him out?”

“You bet I was!” Mormon Jack replied. “I knew him before he came over here, and I was here and saw his finish. There was high old jinks on this little green bottom that day.”

“So I’ve heard. He wanted to make a sheep-feedin’ ground of the east bench, didn’t he? How was it?” Layton propped himself up on his elbow to listen.

Mormon Jack settled his head comfortably against a rolled-up bed. He rolled a cigarette daintily and inhaled many breaths of smoke before replying.

“Old man Hartley was a bone-headed cuss,” he began, at length, “that wouldn’t learn better--even by experience. He was like a fool buck-sheep that persists in buttin’ everything that gets in his way, no matter how much he hurts his head. It aint the sheep’s fault; it’s the breed of him, and the way he was raised--and I guess that was the trouble with old Hartley.

“I come across him, first time, over in the Hash-Knife country, a little while after they quit drivin’ herds up the Long Trail. The railway come in, and you could bring a bunch of cattle from the Panhandle up there in a week--it took five months on the trail. Likewise, the railway brought farmers and pilgrims and woolly-backs by the train-load, and turned ’em loose promiscus on the country, where they made more trouble with their homestead rights and barb-wire fences than all the Injuns that ever run buffalo or lifted hair.

“It wasn’t long till there was heaps of trouble on the range. A tenderfoot would file on a claim, prove up, and as soon as he got his papers a big sheep outfit would own the land--you know how they do. Pretty soon the big sheepmen began to fence the water-holes, claim or no claim, and hell broke loose. After considerable killin’ and burnin’ and layin’ for each other, they patched up a peace; the sheepmen that didn’t get killed off stayed on the creeks where they was settled, and the cow outfits held what was left of the open range.

“That was where old Hartley got in his work. He had a bunch of sheep, and stay where he belonged he wouldn’t. He’d slip out on good grass and fence up a spring or little lake that might be waterin’ a thousand head of cattle. If a bunch of cows come in to water, he’d sic his dogs on ’em till they’d quit the earth. If a round-up swung his way he’d knock down his fence and move out. It was a big country and hard to watch, but they caught him once or twice, and drove him back where he belonged. They give him all the show in the world to be on the square, but he wouldn’t--he wasn’t built that way. He swore ‘by God’ that he had as much right to drive his blatin’, stinkin’ woolly-backs all over the range as the cowmen had to turn their longhorns loose on the country. He was a big, burly, noisy-mouthed cuss, with the muscle of a pack-mule and the soul of a prairie-dog. He was game, for all his low-down ways, but he went up against the cowmen once too often; a round-up headed him north one day with his sheep and a camp-wagon, and sent a couple of riders along to see that he kept a-goin’. Then they swung around to his home ranch and made a bonfire of it, to show the rest of the ca-na-na’s that there’d be no monkey business on the Hash-Knife range.

“I didn’t see nor hear of him no more till that fall. Then the layout I was workin’ for bought a bunch of cattle over here and sent me to rep for ’em--same as I’m doin’ now. I was huntin’ for the Big Four wagon, which was supposed to be workin’ on the upper part of the White Mud, when I struck his trail. Comin’ north along the creek one day I turned a bend and come on a fellow talkin’ to a girl. It was Stella Hartley. I met her once at a dance on Powder River, and I knowed her the minute I laid eyes on her. She was about as nice a little girl as ever struck Custer County.

“I rode up and says ‘Howdy’ to her, and then I see it was Bobby Collins she was talkin’ to. I knew him, too--one of the whitest boys on earth, and the swiftest woddy that ever turned a cow. ‘Hash-Knife Bob’ they called him, over in Custer.

“‘M’ son,’ says I, ‘I’m sure glad to see you. But how’d you come to stray off into this wilderness?’

“He told me, then, the whole deal, Stella sittin’ on her horse tryin’ to smile, though she was nearer cryin’ than anything else; she’d been sheddin’ tears pretty considerable, as it was. Away along in the winter Stella ’d promised to marry him, but when the old man got to hear of it he just tore up the earth and swore he’d rather see her dead than married to a cowpuncher. Hash-Knife was for tellin’ him to go to the devil and gettin’ married anyway, but Stella wouldn’t have it that way. His wife bein’ dead, she was the only womankind the old man had, and she couldn’t bear to leave him like that. She said to wait awhile and the old man would come around. So in the spring Bob goes to the head of Powder River, and while he was gone the cow outfits put the run on the old man. When Hash-Knife comes back, Stella and the whole Hartley outfit had vanished plum off the earth.

“But Hash-Knife Bob was no quitter. He followed ’em up and located ’em on Milk River. Then he got a job with the Big Four, so’s to be near the girl. He had it figured out that when round-up was over that fall he’d take up a ranch on Milk River, marry Stella, and settle down. But he hadn’t more’n made his plan when old man Hartley breaks out in a fresh place.

“As I said before, old Hartley was a bull-headed old bucko. He was worse’n that; he was pig-headed and sheep-headed; he had the contrary stubbornness of all the no-account animals on God’s green earth. You’d ’a’ thought he’d ’a’ taken a tumble to himself after livin’ so long in a sagebrush country, and ’specially after bein’ run out of one part of it. But, no, sir! his way was _the_ way. He wasn’t content on Milk River--he wanted a whole blamed county to graze over. So he went pokin’ around on the north side, and stumbled onto the Crossin’ here. It looked good to him, and without sayin’ a word to anybody but his herder--who was a knot-head like himself and crazy after Stella--he picks up his traps and sashays in here.

“There was probably seven or eight big cow outfits rangin’ east of the White Mud then, and they’d just got through havin’ a scrap with the sheep-wranglers, alongside of which the fuss in Custer County was about knee-high. Both of ’em had lots of men and money, but the advantage was on the cowmen’s side, for their boys was fightin’ for their livin’, for outfits they’d been raised with, and the sheepherders was in it for coin and because they didn’t know any better. Anyway, the sheepmen backed off after awhile and made peace--said they’d be good, they’d had enough. The cowmen made the White Mud the dead line; there was to be no sheep-camps on the creek or east of it. And the cowpunchers rode the high pinnacles to see that no sheep crossed the line.

“This here, Hash-Knife explained to me, was the way things stood: Hartley was located on the Crossin’ with a bunch of sheep--about twenty-five hundred head. He’d built him a cabin, and had likewise strung a four-strand barb-wire fence across the coulée that led down to the flat. And he was goin’ to stay there, he said. He had a squatter’s right, and if he wanted to live there and fence his place he’d do it. It was government land, and to hell with the cow outfits! He was from Missouri, he was! And up on the bench, about six or seven miles back, the Big Four and the Ragged H was swingin’ up to the Crossin’ with a beef herd apiece, and the wagon-bosses was mad, for they’d heard of old man Hartley.

“‘Old “Peek-a-Boo” Johnson’s runnin’ the Big Four,’ Hash-Knife told me. ‘I got him to let me ride ahead and see if I couldn’t talk some sense into the old man. But it’s no go. He’s got his neck bowed, and he’s fool ’nough to try and run a whizzer on Peek-a-Boo’s riders; they’ll clean him out if he does. I saw Stella ride off as I was comin’ down to the ranch, and when I got through with him I rambled down this way and found her. I want her to stay away from the flat for two or three hours, till the thing is settled one way or the other, but she’s bound to go home. So I guess we’d better be goin’. The wagons ought to hit the Crossin’ pretty soon.’

“We went up on the bench. Stella and Hash-Knife and me, and loped along toward the Crossin’. Pretty soon we could see the two sets of wagons and a bunch of riders headin’ for the creek, the two herds--big ones--trailin’ along behind, about a mile apart. At the head of the coulée I turned my string loose for the horse-wrangler to pick up. With Stella cryin’ and Hash-Knife tryin’ to comfort her, we swung down the coulée to the shack.

“When we got there we found the herder had brought the sheep in to water. They’d moved back off water and was bedded down, bunched close, about half-way between the cabin and the creek. There was three of ’em at the cabin; old Hartley, the herder, and a pilgrim that’d come out to work on the ranch.

“Old Hartley looked pretty black at us as we rode up, but he didn’t have time to say much before the wagons come rollin’ out the mouth of the coulée. They was almost at the house before he knowed it. Then he ducked into the cabin and come out with a Winchester across his arm. The outfit went past without battin’ an eye at him. They went round the sheep and started to pitch camp on the creek-bank. Then Peek-a-Boo and Tom Jordan, the Ragged H boss, come a-ridin’ up to the cabin.

“They was nice and polite about it. They told old Hartley that seein’ he was a stranger they thought he’d probably made a mistake and got over on the wrong side of the ridge. They didn’t want to make any trouble for him, but he’d have to take his sheep off the creek. Sorry to bother him, but it was range law.

“‘You can’t bluff _me_,’ says Hartley. ‘This here’s government land. I got as much right here as anybody. You dassent run me out.’

“Then old Tom Jordan tells him about the big scrap they’d had with the sheepmen, and how they’d agreed to stay the other side of the ridge, but the old bonehead kept a-shootin’ off about his rights, and how they couldn’t bluff _him_, till Tom got mad and rode off, sayin’ that he’d see his blasted sheep was across the ridge by sundown.

“Peek-a-Boo stayed talkin’ to him, tryin’ to persuade him to be reasonable, and showin’ him how foolish he was to run up against the cowmen after they’d fought a dozen big sheep outfits to a standstill and whacked up the range fair and square. They talked and talked, old Hartley gettin’ more and more on the peck. Neither of ’em noticed that the lead of the first herd had strung down the coulée--the cowpunchers had done business with the fence. There was probably a thousand head of big, rollicky steers bunched on the flat, and the rest of the herd was pourin’ out the mouth of the draw. Two point-riders was holdin’ ’em up so they wouldn’t scatter.

“Old Hartley saw ’em first. The sight of that big bunch of longhorns on what he called his land made him see red, I reckon. He shoved the lever of his gun forward and back, clickity-click, and started on a run for the bunch, hollerin’ as he went: ‘You can’t drive them cattle across my flat! I’ll kill you, by God, if you do!’

“Peek-a-Boo stuck the spurs in his horse, and started after him, callin’ to him to keep away from the herd. Hartley kept a-goin’ till Peek was about twenty feet from him, then he whirled with his gun to his shoulder, and cut loose, bang--bang! and Peek-a-Boo tumbled off his horse.

“Things happened then. Stella had started after the old man, but Hash-Knife grabbed her and made her stop. When old Hartley dropped Peek-a-Boo, Bob says to me: ‘Mormon, take Stella over to camp. I got to get Peek out of there. Maybe he aint killed, and them steers’ll be a-runnin’ over him in about ten seconds.’

“Hash-Knife had the situation sized up correct. I helped Stella onto her horse and started for the wagons. A lot of riders come like hell across the flat toward the herd, but they was too late to do any good. Just as Hash-Knife picked old Peek-a-Boo up and flopped him across his horse, Hartley begin to smoke up the two riders that was holdin’ the herd--which was bunched tight, ready to run. But he missed first shot, and when he fired the second time they was scuddin’ for the tail-end of the herd, layin’ low along the backs of their horses. As they run they jerked the slickers off the backs of their saddles, swingin’ ’em round their heads, and, yellin’ like Gros Ventre braves strikin’ the war-post, they rode into the herd.

“When them cattle surged first one way and then the other, and then swept across the flat, tramplin’ old Hartley down like he was a lone stalk of bunch-grass stickin’ up out of the prairie, Stella screeched and hid her face in her hands. But I watched; it was horrible and fascinatin’. You’ve seen the ice gorge in the Big Muddy, when it breaks up in the spring; it jams at some narrow place and piles up and piles up till the river below is bone dry. Then the weight of the water’ll bust the jam and there’ll be a grindin’, smashin’ uproar for a minute, and all of a sudden the river is flowin’ peaceful again.

“That was the way them cattle did. They passed over old Hartley like he was nothin’, and struck that bunch of slumberin’ sheep like a breakin’ ice jam. Two thousand strong they was, runnin’ like scared antelope, packed shoulder to shoulder, with horns and hoofs clatterin’ like a Spanish dancer’s castanets, and the gallopin’ weight of ’em made the flat tremble. This wise they passed over the band of sheep, wipin’ ’em out like the spring floods wipe out the snow in the low places, and thunderin’ by the round-up camp hit the creek with a rush that knocked it dry for a hundred yards. The lead of ’em had hardly got to the level before the riders was turnin’ ’em. In fifteen minutes them cattle was standin’ bunched on the flat, puffin’ and blowin’, the big steers starin’ round as if they were wonderin’ what had scared ’em. But they’d done the trick. There was no sheep left to quarrel over--nary one. It was an Alamo for the woolly-backs!

“After we’d found and buried what was left of old man Hartley, we moved up the creek to camp. The herder and the pilgrim hit the trail for Milk River. Poor little Stella sure felt bad on account of the old man, and the boys was all sorry for her. But she had Hash-Knife, and Peek-a-Boo--who wasn’t hurt bad enough to make him cash in--said he’d brand a hundred calves for her on the spring round-up. So I guess she was winner on the deal.

“That’s been eleven years,” Mormon Jack concluded, reminiscently, “and I aint been here since. I didn’t make no protracted visit the first time, but I want to tell you, m’ son, it was sure excitin’.”

THE COLONEL AND “THE LADY”

By Kathleen Thompson

About an hour before sunset, Colonel Jerry rode furiously into the post. Her sweating pony was streaked with dust, and the colonel was covered with it from head to foot. Except for the rumpled and brief little corduroy skirt and bloomers, her clothing was an exact, if miniature, copy of her father’s. Her wide felt hat had its regulation cord and tassels, there were gauntlets on her small hands, and gaiters on her small legs. The sleeve of her boyish skirt carried its device, and she wore a cartridge belt, a little pistol, and a sword.

She drew her dancing pony sharply up before the group on the porch, and saluted severely.

“And just in time, too!” said the major, who was also the colonel’s father. He looked at her reproachfully. “We were about to send a company out after you! Leave Baby at the side door and go straight upstairs. When you’re presentable come down, and I’ll introduce you to your Boston uncle and aunt. We’ve been watching for you all afternoon. What kept you, you vagabond?”