The Code of the Mountains

by Charles Neville Buck

CHAPTER XIX

That inflexible grip which the service takes upon its units and fractions of units, had slowly and unconsciously altered the view-point of The Fifth Kentucky foot. Back there in the stagnant riffle of a life which for a century had not taken a forward step, their motto had been, "Let us alone," and every man had been a law to himself; despot over his own affairs and the affairs of his family. Now, because they obeyed in a common cause and of their own volition, obedience no longer irked them, and they had come to think of themselves less as individuals than as bricks mortared together in a military arch.

The second day after the outbreak of insurrection passed with no greater excitement than occasional and desultory firing from the front. Night fell with utter quiet as though both armies were exhausted and ready for sleep. The stars overhead were bright and close, and the men, sprawling on the earth, were thinking softened thoughts, or crouching around campfires in rehearsal of recent events.

Near the spot where Newt Spooner lay stretched on his blanket, a bearded, gaunt man, with a sprinkling of gray in his beard, was writing a letter home. It was Uncle Jerry Belmear, whose forge and smithy stood at the forks of Squabble Creek. The yellow flare from a shaded lantern fell in sharp high lights on his lean cheekbones and on the cramped hand, laboriously pushing its pencil. His lips moved, automatically spelling out the words of difficult composition. Newt was watching him with the reflection that there was nowhere anyone to whom he himself could send a thrill of pleasure with a letter. Then, since strange influences were working in the boy's starved heart, he wondered if, after all, "Clem's gal" might not be glad to hear from him. Minerva was "eddicated," and in her head were cogitations which he could never hope to comprehend. She took medals for "larnin'"—he ground his teeth as he thought from whose hand she had taken one. He was ignorant and "pizen-mean." The contrast was obvious. Yet, she had looked at him with a friendly glance, and had been grateful for his championship.

But these idle thoughts were violently interrupted by a sudden staccato outburst and the darting of Mauser tongues through the dark. Recumbent figures came to their feet. Uncle Jerry Belmear rose with the half-finished letter in his hand, and as he stood up he was struck. Had the same man been wounded in a charge or lying in his trench, he would have fallen silently, but that messenger out of the night, coming when his thoughts were all back in the silent Cumberlands, startled him into outcry. He wheeled, and from his lips broke a sound that started as an oath and ended in a weird shriek, heard along the whole battalion front.

As though they had wanted only that cue, the battalion, hitherto patient to await orders, sprang to the trenches and began pumping their Springfields frantically into the night. Buglers were madly blowing "Cease firing"; officers and sergeants were carrying profanity and strong language the length of the line, but the panic spirit had to spend itself before the men heard or obeyed—and realized with chagrin that stray bullets had upset them.

But that mild disgrace of showing nerves, instead of nerve, must be lived down, and it served to put the newly made veterans the more on their mettle.

Almost every day that followed brought its clash with the enemy, and once or twice the Shirt-tailers came into hand-to-hand struggles, where it was bayonet and butt, and "fist and skull," and where their barbaric yell drowned the bugles. They grew accustomed to the thunderous roar with which the cruisers in the harbor shelled the Insurgent positions in preparation for their advance, and so day by day, and step by step, the still parallel lines of the brown men gave back, and those of the American force hitched forward.

And in these, by no means idle days, the word went abroad among them that they were only waiting here to be relieved by fresh troops from the States, and were to be a part of the force designated to push on to the Insurgent capital.

But the rumor went ahead of the actuality. Sometimes there were days of quiet and even brief informal truces at certain sections of the front, when the open rice-fields became a common playground. Then the straw hats that had heretofore bobbed up only to fire and bob down again, moved about in the open, and watched the Americanos playing baseball. Once a band came out from Manila, and, when the heat of the day was spent, gave a concert in the rice-fields, and at its end, as the national air swelled out and the troops from home stood at attention and uncovered, the straw hats across the open fields were also doffed. Though he did not quite understand why, that incident caused a strange and new emotion to pulse through the arteries of Private Newton Spooner; an emotion in no way kin to the "pizen-meanness" for which he was justly notorious. But the courteous enemy never allowed these pleasant recesses to endure long, and after a lesson or two in treachery they ended.