"It's perfectly true, sir," said he. "Right across the bridge in front of the block-house you can hear him plainly. It's a white man giving orders to the Filipinos." The general nodded.
"We'll get him presently. Do they understand the orders on the left?"
"Everywhere, sir. All are ready and eager," and even the native pony ridden by the aide seemed quivering with excitement as, horse and rider, they fell back and joined the two officers following their chief.
"Hot in front, Stuyvie?" queried the first in undertone, as a Mauser zipped between their heads to the detriment of confidential talk, and a great burst of cheers broke from the blue line crouching just ahead across the open field. "Why, d—n it, man, you're hit now!"
"Hush!" answered Stuyvesant imploringly, as he pressed a gauntleted hand to his side. "Don't let the general know. I want to join Vinton in a moment. It's only a tear along the skin." But blood was soaking through the serge of his blue sack-coat and streaking the loose folds of his riding-breeches, and the bright color in his clear skin was giving way to pallor.
"Tear, indeed! Here! Quick, orderly! Help me there on the other side!" and the captain sprang from saddle. A soldier leaped forward, turning loose his pony, and as the general, with only one aide and orderly, rode on into the smoke-cloud overhanging the line, Gerard Stuyvesant, fainting, slid forward into the arms of his faithful friends.
A few hours later, "lined up" along the river-bank, a great regiment from the far West, panting and exultant, stood resting on its arms and looking back over the field traversed in its first grand charge. Here, there, everywhere it was strewn with insurgent dead and sorely wounded. Here, there, and everywhere men in American blue were flitting about from group to group, tendering canteens of cold water to the wounded, friend and enemy alike.
Far back towards the dusty highway where the ambulances were hurrying, and close to the abutments of a massive stone bridge that crossed a tributary of the Pasig, three officers, a surgeon, and half-a-dozen soldiers were grouped about a prostrate form in the pale blue uniform, with the gold embroidery and broad stripes of a Filipino captain, but the face was ghastly white, the language ghastly Anglo-Saxon.
With the blood welling from a shothole in his broad, burly chest and the seal of death already settling on his ashen brow, he was scowling up into the half-compassionate, half-contemptuous faces about him. Here lay the "Capitan Americano" of whom the Tagal soldiers had been boasting for a month—a deserter from the army of the United States, a commissioned officer in the ranks of Aguinaldo, shot to death in his first battle in sight of some who had seen and known him "in the blue."
Lieutenant Stuyvesant, revived by a long pull at the doctor's flask, his bleeding stanched, had again pressed forward to take his part in the fight, but now lay back in the low Victoria that the men had run forward from the village, and looked down upon the man who in bitter wrath and hatred had vowed long months before to have his heart's blood,—the man who had so nearly done him to death in Honolulu. Even now in Sackett's dying eyes something of the same brutal rage mingled with the instant gleam of recognition that for a moment flashed across his distorted features. It seemed retribution indeed that his last conscious glance should fall upon the living face of the man to whom he owed his rescue from a fearful death that night in far-away Nevada.