CHAPTER XXI
Months in the isolation of a tropic garrison bring to the minds of men strange vagaries. When the work is that of hunting down elusive little traitors, who present faces of friendship by day and develop ingenious and atrocious deviltries at night, the effects are neither softening nor humanizing.
The presence of Mrs. Henry Falkins was to the men of the battalion like the steady freshening of a clean and fragrant breeze into a miasma. Had they had their way, they would have set her up, a living image, in the place of the patron saint above the bullet-scarred altar of the church. But even saints have defects, virtuous and noble defects perhaps, such as erring on the side of too great faith in humanity, when humanity is treacherous.
One native woman, whose face bore more strongly the characteristics of some far-off Castilian ancestor than of immediate forbears and mixed race, came to headquarters, and ingratiated herself with the commander's lady. When she brought in the week's washing, her smile was a dazzling flash of milky teeth and lips touched with Spanish carmine.
And it fell to pass that, though he had always been an immune to feminine blandishments, the tall sergeant-major was seen frequently strolling between the nipa houses with the mestiza girl.
The Deacon, who had always been reserved, even melancholy in the thoughtfulness of his expression, was in these days more deeply somber than before.
Newt Spooner, alone in the command, recognized that there was some secret gnawing within his kinsman and that it was not a pleasant secret.
Deaths in the battalion had claimed several lieutenants, and left vacancies which carried commissions. Sergeant-major Spooner felt the time ripe for him to cross the line from non-com to commissioned officer. He could, in the old militia days, have had captain's bars for the taking. Now it would need the mandate of Washington, but the fact that nothing was said about it secretly grieved him. His officers from major down had bragged endlessly of his efficiency, yet the thought that was constantly in his mind never seemed to occur to them, and he doggedly refused to suggest it. It should not be inferred that the non-commissioned giant went sulking about his work. On the contrary, whatever rancor he felt was inward and unworded, and for that reason the more dangerous.
Newt, too, was feeling the influences of marrow-pinching days and jungle-burrowing and mountain-climbing on chases that came to nothing. More and more prominently, the haunting presence of his private grudge thrust itself to the front of his brain and grew sinister.
The boy held his peace, though he knew that Sergeant-Major Spooner had received a letter from one of the Insurgent "generals" offering him a captain's commission "in the service and just cause of the Republic." Black Pete himself believed that this proffer was in reality an effort to lure him into the power of the enemy for torture and death, and he mentioned the incident only to his major.