And so I am writing you, Dear Heart, for I realize now how near to death I have been, how nearer I may yet be. And maybe another thing makes me write to-night. It is such a story as Clarke, our First Lieutenant, has brought back to me to-night. It has set me to dreaming, and made the camp and men and guns sleeping under the mango trees seem like ghosts from another land. Like ghosts, Dear Heart, for in the dream which is always more real than the real, it is you and Old Tennessee that I see to-night, not slumbering guns under mango trees, nor tropical mountain tops, smoking mistily to the moonlighted skies, nor the palm trees, sentineling the ghostly beach.
Clarke has filled my thoughts to overflowing to-night. So I have left him and the sleeping camp. And I lie alone on the beach looking across the ocean toward home.
He told of a girl in Cebu, where our main hospital is, one of the Red Cross nurses from the States. She came over a month ago. Clarke has talked of her till I can see only you. If I did not know you were ill I'd swear it could be only you, peerless, bravest, gamest, most beautiful woman that ever was. She is a trained nurse, but she rode with old Hawthorne, rode Satan, too, to the relief of the Twenty-third Regulars.
Who could have done what she did but you and Satan, clear a ten-foot fissure of a yawning volcanic abyss, outfooting the Filipino ponies when they thought they had cut her off? And her shooting! Again I saw the brown stubble of Tennessee wheatfields, the blue hills circling the sky line, the flush and whir and the crack of the sweet little twenty gauge! If you are not dead or in the hospital it was you—the only one in all the world—there can be no other!
But I shall not see her, for we leave for the States in the fall. They are sending other boys to relieve us, others who want to serve their country.
I shall go home then to my work. I shall take up the life I left, the life of labor and of love, of love, Dear Heart, love of all loves, love of a Memory. And now good-night and for my pen, good-by, Eloise! ...
CHAPTER VI
THE BATTLE IN THE BACAUE MOUNTAINS
I wrote you last from Iloilo, but no word has come back to me. And toward the late fall, our term of service having expired, and so many others crowding for a chance to serve, we were mustered out and ordered home. The big transport Indiana stood by for our home-taking.
It was good news for the boys, but sad for me. They were going home to wife or sweetheart, but I had no home.