And there were rafts, hastily made of bamboo poles.
“Somebody must swim across and fasten a cable over there by which to tow the rafts across. Who will volunteer? You see what’s before you,” Funston asserted.
Horace Carey saw two soldiers, Corporal Trembly and Private Edward White, seize the cable, plunge into the river, and strike out directly toward the farther side filled with Filipino forces. Rifle balls split the water about them. 328 Bullet after bullet cut the air above them. Shot after shot from the ambushed enemy hurtled toward them. The two young men surged steadily ahead, bent only on reaching the bank and fastening the cable. They knew only one word, duty, and they did the thing they had agreed to do. Once across the river, they ran nimbly up the bank and made fast the rope’s end, while cheer after cheer rose from their comrades watching them, and the battle cry of the Fighting Twentieth, “Rock Chalk, Jay Hawk, K. U.,” went pulsing out across the waters of the Rio Grande as full and strong as in the days when it rolled out on the university campus on far-away Mount Oread, beside the Kaw.
The rafts sped along the cable, and squad after squad went pell mell into General Luna’s stronghold, under stubborn fire from the frantic rebels.
Thaine Aydelot was on the last raft to cross the river. Doctor Carey watched with eager gaze as the last men reached the farther bank. He saw them scrambling up from the water’s edge. He saw Thaine turn back to lift up a comrade blinded, but not injured, by the smoke of a gun. He saw the two start forward. Then the faint “ping” of a Mauser came to his ears, and Thaine threw up his hands and fell backward into the water and sank from sight, while the other soldiers, unknowing, rushed forward into battle.
For a moment, Horace Carey stood like a statue, then he sprang into the river and swam against the fire of the hidden foe to where Thaine Aydelot had disappeared. Ten minutes later, while Luna’s forces were trying vainly to resist the daring Americans, Thaine Aydelot lay on a raft 329 which Carey, with a Red Cross aid, was pulling toward the south bank.
When the Fighting Twentieth soldiers were relieved from service, and turned their faces gladly toward the Kansas prairies, whither hundreds of proud fathers and mothers and wives and sweethearts were waiting to give eager, happy welcome, Thaine Aydelot lay hovering between life and death in the hospital at Manila. The white-haired doctor who had saved him from the waters of the Rio Grande watched hourly beside him, relying not so much on the ministrations of his calling as in his trust in an Infinite Father, through whom at last the sick may be made whole.