The Code of the Mountains

by Charles Neville Buck

For ten days after that, a company of United States Volunteers drove their way through the mountains and bosques of eastern Luzon, with the hammer-blows of forced marches. Their faces were the bristling, unshaven visages of half-wild men, and their eyes bore the inky cancellation-marks of a fatigue which, in such climates, is courtship of death. They had been bearing a noonday steam-like heat that parboiled them and wasted them in floods of sweat. They had marched and slept in wet khaki when sudden rains drenched the land and the jungle simmered afterward. A demoniacal desire for a reckoning in full with one José Rosario sustained them. The chase had resolved itself into a hellish adaptation of hare and hound, for always ahead of them lay clews and information, and evidences of recent departures. Always, the wily guerilla was just out of grasping and crushing distance. In lonely villages, they found marks of his recent occupancy—with prisoners. In the hills, they found the ashes of his fires, but himself they never found. And, as he taunted them, they followed, "as dust-blown devils go": followed with an artificial and superhuman endurance engendered of mountain hate and an unassuaged thirst for vengeance. In many brains queer nightmare shapes rose and had to be brushed aside with a conscious effort, and in many veins the blood ran hot and feverish. The pursuit had carried them in a long circle like the flight of a fox, and brought them back to a point not so many miles from where they had entered the hills, but as far as ever from their quarry. The pursuing force was too large. The rest of the way they would rake bosque and hill in scattered segments, each acting for itself and seeking to fall upon the enemy while he watched the decoy of the largest detachment.

Major Falkins and a dozen men, including First Sergeant Newton Spooner, were working their way through a jungle which seemed impervious to human progress. For days they had been so working. Step by step they moved lethargically, and in single file. No military order of formation can be kept unbroken where men are weaving their tired bodies in and out through a matted growth of rank bijuca and jungle tangles. Besides, they moved as men half-asleep and indifferent to consequences, dragging leaden feet. The course they had taken had yielded never a sign, never an indication that they had chosen wisely. It led them through an unpeopled country where the valleys were mosquito-infested and malaria-ridden, and where drenching rains brought chill to their aching bones. They forced themselves forward with their hair matted and their brains dull. Clouds of mosquitoes moved with them. They were steadfast and resolute men, but they were also half-insane.

In this fashion, they came to a small, ravine-like channel, which for a little way ran in the direction they wished to go. Through it they could walk upright without fighting vines and cane. Experience had taught the danger of easy ways, but weariness had overcome caution, and for a furlong they plodded silently.

Ahead of them, the dry stream-bed, which was giving them momentary comfort as a roadway, twisted at an angle. Even in their lethargy they observed one rule of military caution. They walked in file with an interval of several yards between each two. Eleven of them had passed out of sight around the turn. Major Falkins, who was number twelve, was just turning the point, and behind him trailed one other. It was Sergeant Spooner, who rarely lagged in the rear. Then the heavy stillness broke into the old familiar thunder, and four men lurched forward and crumpled down on their faces, as useless henceforth to the United States of America as burst bubbles.

"Back here, boys!" yelled Falkins, leaping out of his lethargy into sudden life.

"Git behind this twist—damn ye! Git into ther la'rel!" shrieked Sergeant Spooner in echo, forgetting that the natural cover of the Islands was not the laurel of the Cumberlands. Falkins, standing at the turn, became an instant target, and the sergeant saw his campaign hat fly off spinning; saw the officer set his feet farther apart as one who braces himself, and heard the spiteful bark of his revolver. The sergeant himself was unseen, and it suddenly occurred to him that he might be more effective by remaining so. He saw the men who were still on their feet falling back on the protecting angle with its steep banks, firing doggedly as they came, and one by one he saw them drop short of their goal, except two who reached it only to lie down at the margin of shelter. He saw the major stand for a moment, shaking his head as the voices of the Krags died away and only the Remingtons of the enemy broke the silence.

Then the major, who no longer had a command, stepped back around the angle, and sat down on the ground. He laid his pistol on his knees and wiped blood from his eyes, but, after a moment, as though that posture were not comfortable enough, he stretched quietly out, with one elbow under his cheek, and drew up his knees as a child might lie in a crib when its mother has kissed it good-night. Spooner realized that he alone of that detail remained an efficient. There was no one to save except himself—and Falkins. To save himself was easy. He had not yet been seen.

Cautiously, the sergeant crawled over and possessed himself of all the firearms that lay in reach, without revealing himself; then again he crawled back, burrowing under the overhanging bank. He laid the four Krags in a row with their muzzles roughly trained above the major's body, and waited. At his back rose a bank which would confuse and multiply with echoes any sound.

Finally, the cautious brown heads appeared, and brown bodies flitted among the dead, collecting their spoils. Then Newt cupped both hands at his lips, and let out the mountain yell, a yell which had grown famous in Luzon. At the same instant, as fast as he could work the triggers lying grouped before him, he made the rifles speak from their magazines, as it seemed in unison, and the four reports were magnified by the rocks into a seeming of volley-fire. Instantly and in frenzied consternation, the brown men disappeared, and Newt Spooner worked his way forward, firing as fast as he could until he could peer into the channel. But the white men there would require no attention, and could benefit by none save the impossible courtesy of burial. As for the brown men, they were gone.

In one body, however, there was still life, and that happened to be the body of the battalion commander.