Winning the Wilderness

by Margaret Hill McCarter

As Thaine turned from the dim road, he caught the glint of starlight on the edge of a rice swamp. He wanted to fight Filipinos tonight, not memories. But the memory of the Aydelot grove and the water lilies opening their creamy hearts to the moonlight, and Leigh Shirley in her white dress with her cheeks faintly pink in the clear shadows, all swept his mind and challenged him to forget everything else.

The same grip on a principle, coupled with a daring 313 spirit and love of adventure that had brought old Jean Aydelot to the Virginia colony long ago, and had pushed Francis Aydelot across the Alleghanies into the forests of the Ohio frontier, and had called Asher Aydelot to the unconquered prairies of the big West—the same love of adventure and daring spirit and belief in a cause bigger than his own interests had lured Thaine Aydelot on to the islands of Oriental seas. With the military schooling and unschooling where discipline tends to make a soldier, and absence of home influence tends to make the careless rowdy, the sterling uprightness of the Aydelots and the inborn gentility of the Thaines kept the boy from the Kansas prairies a fearless gentleman. Withal, he was exuberantly pleased with life, as a young man of twenty-one should be. He lived mostly in the company of Kansas University men, and with the old University yell of “Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U!” for their slogan, they stood shoulder to shoulder in every conflict.

Lastly, he was a hero-worshiper at the shrine of his colonel, Fred Funston, and his captain, Adna Clarke; while in all the regiment, the fair face of young Lieutenant Alford seemed to him most gracious. Alford was his soldier ideal, type of the best the battlefield may know. And, even if all this admiration did have in it much of youthful sentimentalism, it took nothing from his efficiency when he came to his place on the firing line.

“I wonder where Doctor Carey is tonight,” Thaine’s comrade said in a low voice, as the two came together in the road.

“What’s made you think of him?” Thaine asked.

“I haven’t seen him since Christmas day. A young 314 Filipino and I got into a scrap with a drunken Chinaman who was beating a boy, and the Chink slashed us both. Carey stitched us up, but the other fellow keeps a scar across his face, all right.”

“I know that Filipino,” Thaine said. “He seems like a fine young man. The scar was a marker for him. I’d know him by it anywhere.”

“So should I, and by his peculiar gait. I saw a man slipping along beyond the lines just now who made me think of that fellow, and that made me think of Doctor Carey,” the sentinel said, and turned away.

It was after nine o’clock, and the hours were already beginning to stretch wearily for sentinels, when a faint sound of guns away to the eastward broke on the air. Again and again it came, intermittently at first, but increasing to a steady roar. Down in Manila there was dead quiet, but along the American line of outposts the ripping of Mauser bullets and long streaks of light flashed the Filipino challenge to war in steady volleys.

As Thaine listened, the firing seemed to be creeping gradually toward the north, and he knew the insurgents were swinging toward the Tondo road, down which they would rush to storm the bridge. In that moment civil life dropped off like a garment, and he stood up a soldier. He crept cautiously toward the bend to see what lay beyond, and dropped on his face in the dusty way as a whirl of bullets split the air above his head.