I went quickly to the bivouac of the Regulars. They remembered the two men, but thought they had returned, as they went off toward the right of the little village Colena, two miles in our front and through which the enemy had fled.
"If they aren't here now," said an old sergeant, "no use to look for 'em again; when we come back through that village, there wasn't a sound, not a kid, nor a chicken, nor a coon, nor a dog; and when you don't hear nothin' in a Filipino village, when you go through, look out for hell when you come back."
I looked at my watch. It had been full three hours since the Regulars had returned.
"I am going after them," I said, turning to go.
"Ballington," it was the swarthy old Captain, of the Nineteenth who spoke, "you'd be a fool to risk it." He pointed silently to a faint glow across the valley on the side of the mountain beyond. I had thought it was a rising star. "Yonder," he said, "see that other one on the mountain top, that's the signal fire of the little yellow hyenas, that means guerrilla bands in them mountains, they go in packs like wolves, and the night is their time. They know every foot of the mountain, every gorge, valley and crevasse. Why, two men lost over there ain't got no more show than a pair of fool goats in a jungle. Why, if them little hyenas couldn't see 'em, which they can—for they see better by night than by day—they can smell 'em, like all jungle breeds."
"Boy," he said again, looking at me kindly and smiling an apology for the title which we both bore, "I wouldn't let you go. I'd go to old Hawthorne and have you arrested first. You Tennessee fellows," he said, laying his big rough hand on my shoulder, "have done the whitest thing ever done in this war. It ain't often we old Regulars that never go home and have to serve 'till the last taps, takes much notice of you volunteer fellows that fights awhile for fun and quits when the time is up; but when you biled out of that transport and came over them mountains an' cut through to us, you done a thing that'll warm the cockles of our boys till the last tattoo and the taps. Now I ain't goin' to let you go out there in no such fool thing. I'm an old soldier, I fought with Miles and Cook on the plains, and I tell you now, Sitting Bull and his Sioux were lambs to them little mountain savages. You go back now," he said kindly, taking my hand in his own, "go back and go to sleep. You are a boy yet, though you proved you are full grown to-day, my lad, and ain't even got up a beard. Of course you have got a sweetheart waiting in Tennessee. Go back to her, and the next year send old Brawley of the Nineteenth a picture of her and the kid. He ain't never had no time to marry, it's been fighting all his life with him from hell to breakfast."
I smiled, saluted, and went back to camp.
Moriarty was waiting for me, and, when Moriarty does not smile, I know what to expect.
"Cap'n," he said, "it's not Moriarty that can sleep peaceful the night till we find them, dead or alive."
"And I, too, if you please, Cap'n," said Davis, my corporal, who had been listening.