Winning the Wilderness Part 49

"I'm glad I'm alive and I'm glad I know that man," Thaine said to his neighbors.

"Alford's a prince. I'll bet he'll clean that woods before he's through.

His work is always well done. Would you listen to that?" his comrade replied.

A tremendous crash of rifle shots seemed to split the jungle as the Kansas troops charged into it. The men in the trenches lay flat to the earth while the b.a.l.l.s fell about them or sang a long whining note through the air over them. Fiercer grew the fray, and louder roared the guns, and wilder the bullets flew, as the fighting lines swept over the enemy's earthworks and struck with deadly force into the heart of its wooded cover.

Then came a lull for s.h.i.+fting the fighting grip. A relief force was hurried to the front and the first companies retired for a brief rest.

They fell back in order, while the aids came trooping out of the brush in groups, bearing the wounded to places of shelter. Thaine Aydelot and his comrades lifted their heads above the earthworks for an instant. Captain Clarke sat near on a little knoll staring hard at a stretcher borne toward him by the aids. The manner of covering indicated a dead body on it.

"How different the captain's face is from what it was before the attack,"

Thaine thought, as he recalled the moment when Clarke had talked with Lieutenant Alford. And then the image of the young lieutenant's face, so full of life and hope and power and gentleness, swept vividly across his mind.

"Who is it, boys?" Clarke called to the soldiers with the stretcher.

"Lieutenant Alford," they answered.

Something black dropped before Thaine Aydelot's eyes and Doctor Carey's words stung like powder burns in his memory.

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

In civil life character builds slowly up to higher levels. In war, it leaps upward in an instant. Thaine sprang to his feet and stood up to his full height in the blaze of the tropical suns.h.i.+ne. He did not see his captain, who had dropped to the ground like a wounded thing, stabbed to the soul with an agony of sorrow. He did not see the still form of the young lieutenant outlined under the cover of the stretcher. He did not see the trenches nor the lines of khaki-clad, sun-browned soldiery plunging forward to rid the jungle of its deadly peril. In that one moment he looked down the years with clear vision, as his father, Asher Aydelot, had learned to look before him, and he saw manhood and a new worth in human deeds. He had been a sentimental dreamer, ambitious for honors fairly earned, and eager for adventure. The first shots in the night attack on the Tondo road made him a soldier. The martyrdom of Lieutenant Alford made him a patriot. Humanity must be worth much, it seemed to him, if, in the providence of G.o.d, such blood must be spilled to redeem it to n.o.bler civilization.

Six weeks after the death of Alford before Caloocan, Dr. Horace Carey came up from the hospital in Manila to the American line to see Thaine Aydelot.

The Kansas boys had been on duty in the trenches north of Caloocan for forty days, living beside the breastworks under the rude shelter of bamboo poles, watching a sleepless enemy--a life as full of wearing monotony and hards.h.i.+p as it was full of constant peril.

"Well, Thaine, how goes the game?" Carey asked, as he sat beside the young soldier from the Gra.s.s River Valley. "I helped you into this world. I'm glad I haven't had to help you out yet."

Carey had never before seen any resemblance to Asher Aydelot in his son's face. It was purely a type of the old Thaine family of Virginia. But today, the pose of the head, the expression of the mouth, the far-seeing gaze of the dark eyes, bespoke the heritage of the house of Aydelot.

"I hope not to have any more help from you, either. You got me into the sc.r.a.pe; I'll see to the rest," Thaine replied. "Don't I look all right? I haven't had a bath, except in swamp mud, since the first of February.

Today is the twenty-third of March. Neither have I seen a razor. Notice my silky beard. Nor a dress suit, nor a--anything else civilized. Six weeks in one hole, killing Filipinos for our amus.e.m.e.nt and dodging their old Remingtons for theirs, living on army rations and respect for the flag of my country, may not improve my appearance, but it hasn't started me to the sick-shack yet. Any news from home?" Thaine ended with the question put so carelessly, with a face so impenetrable that Doctor Carey took notice at once.

"Homesick!" was his mental diagnosis, but he answered with equal carelessness.

"Yes, I had a letter from Leigh s.h.i.+rley."

Thaine's eyes were too full of unspeakable things now for him to hold out.

"She says the alfalfa is doing well. She and Jim have kept up all the interest, and are beginning to reduce the princ.i.p.al. That's why she wrote."

"Brave little soldier," Thaine muttered.

"Yes, civil life has its heroes, too," the doctor responded. "She also says," he continued, "that John Jacobs has had Hans Wyker convicted of running a joint and Hans had to pay a fine and stick in the Careyville jail thirty days. Hans won't love John for that when he gets out."

"What a hater of whisky John Jacobs is. He's always on the firing line and never misses his aim, bless him!" Thaine declared.

"Yes, Jacobs' battle is a steady one. He told me just before I left Kansas how his mother was killed in a saloon in Cincinnati when she was trying to get his father out of it. John wouldn't live in a state that had no prohibitory law," the doctor commented.

"Did Leigh write anything else?" Thaine asked.

"Yes. Jo Bennington and Todd Stewart are married. Pryor Gaines is in Pekin, and he writes that there are rumblings of trouble over there. Shall we go over and settle it when we finish the Filipino fuss?"

"Might as well. I'd like to see old Pryor. I'm glad Todd and Jo had sense enough to take each other. I suppose Jo overcame her notions of living only in the city. What else?" Thaine replied.

"Nothing else. That's your message." Carey's black eyes held a shrewd twinkle.

"Why mine?" The impenetrable face was on Thaine again.

"See here, boy, don't think I haven't read her story, page by page. If Leigh had sent you a single line, I'd have begun to doubt."

Thaine threw one arm about the doctor's shoulder and said not a word. Then Carey read his story also.

"I nearly forgot to tell you that Leigh is doing well with her drawings.

She sent me this, for which she had a good price paid her."

Doctor Carey unfolded the paper back of a magazine having a bit of prairie landscape for a cover design. In the distance, three headlands swam in the golden haze of a Kansas October sunset, and their long purple shadows fell wide across the brown prairie and fields of garnered harvests.

Thaine studied it carefully, but offered no comment.

"Doctor Carey, what brought you to the Philippines?" he asked suddenly.

"To look after you," Carey replied frankly.

"Me! Do I need it?"

"You may. In that case I'll be first aid to the injured," Carey answered.

"I'm to go with the 'Fighting Twentieth' when it starts out of these hog wallows toward the insurgents' capital. I must get back to Manila and pack for it. I have my orders to be ready in twenty-four hours."

In twenty-four hours the "Fighting Twentieth" left its six-weeks'

habitation in the trenches and began its campaign northward, and the young-hearted, white-haired physician with magnetic smile and skillful judgment found a work in army service so broad and useful that he loved it for its opportunity.

Fortunately, Thaine had no need for "first aid" from Doctor Carey, and he saw the doctor only rarely in the sixty days that followed. When the two had time for each other again, Colonel Fred Funston's name had been written round the world in the annals of military achievement, the resourceful, courageous, beloved leader of a band of fighters from the Kansas prairies who were never defeated, never driven back, never daunted by circ.u.mstances. Great were the pen of that historian that could fittingly set forth all the deeds of daring and acts of humanity of every company under every brave captain, for they "all made history, and left records of unfading glory."

The regiment had reached the Rio Grande, leaving no unconquered post behind it. Under fire, it had forded the Tulijan, shoulder-deep to the shorter men. Under fire, it had forged a way through Guiguinto and Malolos. Under fire, it had swam the Marilao and the Bagbag. And now, beyond Calumpit, the flower of Aguinaldo's army was ma.s.sed under General Luna, north of the Rio Grande. A network of strong fortifications lay between it and the river, and it commanded all the wide water-front.

As the soldiers waited orders on the south side of the river, Doctor Horace Carey left his work and sought out Thaine's company, impelled by the same instinct that once turned him from the old Sunflower Trail to find Virginia Aydelot lost on the solitary snow-covered prairie beyond Little Wolf Creek.

"What's before you now?" the doctor asked, as he and Thaine sat on the ground together.

"The Rio Grande now. We must be nearly to the end if we rout General Luna here," Thaine replied.

"You've stood it well. I guess you don't need me after all," Carey remarked.

"I always need you, Doctor Carey," Thaine said earnestly. "Never more than now. When I saw Captain Clarke wounded and carried away on the other side of the Tulijan, and could only say 'Captain, my captain,' I needed you.

When Captain Elliot was killed, I needed you; and when Captain William Watson was shot and wouldn't stay dead because we need him so, and when Metcalf, Bishop, Agnew, Glasgow, Ramsey, and Martin, and all the other big-brained fellows do big things, I need you again. Life is a great game; I'm glad I'm in it."

Horace Carey had never before seen Thaine's bright face so alert with manly power and beauty and thoughtfulness. War had hardened him. Danger had tried him. Human needs, larger than battle lines alone can know, had strengthened him. Vision of large purposes had uplifted him. As he stood before the white-haired physician whom he had loved from earliest memory, Carey murmured to himself:

"Can the world find grander soldiers to fight its battles than these sun-browned boys from our old Kansas prairies?"