“This is the gal,” said Wantz; “old Justice de Laguna’s daughter, and the same what uster sell beer to the Twenty-eighth over at Tagaloan. She ain’t no beauty, but she’s a good steady trotter; ain’t you, Dell?” The girl looked stupid and embarrassed, and did not reply.
A “rooky,” who had joined the company, stood on the dock disconsolately. His blanket roll and locker had been put off the boat. This was his first appearance in the provinces. He was a stranger in a strange land, a fish out of water, and a raw recruit.
The men were set to work immediately landing the commissary stores. They stripped their shoes and socks off, rolled up their trousers to the knee, and waded through the shallow water, carrying the bales and boxes on their shoulders to the shore.
The road up to the town was lined with nipa houses, shaded with banana-trees and bonga palms. This was the road that was almost impassable during the rainy season. As the ambulance rolled heavily along, scores of half-naked babies, shaped like peanuts, shouted after you a “Hello, baby!” and the pigs, with snouts like coal-scuttles, scattered on either side the thoroughfare. This was the famous “Bolo alley,” down which, only a few months before, the Insurrecto army had come shouting, “A la! á la!” firing as they ran.
You passed the market-place, an open hall filled with the native stalls, where soldiers loafed around, chatting with the Visayan girls—for a freemasonry exists between the Filipino and the soldier—dickering with one for a few dhobie cigarettes, sold “jawbone,” to be paid for when the pay-boat comes.
The troops were quartered in old Spanish buildings, where the sliding windows of the upper floors disclosed the lanes of white mosquito-bar. Back in the courtyard, where the cook was busily preparing mess, a mangy and round-shouldered monkey from the bamboo fence was looking on approvingly. The cook was not in a good humor. All that the mess had had for three weeks was the regulation beans and bacon, without a taste of fresh meat or fresh vegetables.
Things were as bad, however, at the officers’ mess, where the rule was that the first complaint should sentence its author to conduct the mess himself until relieved in a like manner. As might be imagined, such a system naturally discouraged an improvement of affairs. Exasperated, finally, beyond his limit, Lieutenant Breck came out with—“If this isn’t the rottenest apology of an old mess”—saving himself by quickly adding, “But I like it; O, I like it; nobody can tell how much I like this mess!”
There was an officer’s club in a frame building near the headquarters. Here, in the afternoon, the clan would gather for a round of “whisky poker” for the drinks. There was a strapping young Kentuckian whose ancestors had all been army men. “The profession of arms,” said he, “is the noblest profession in the world. And that is the profession that we follow.” It was a rather sad sight, though, a few weeks later, after his wife, a little Southern girl, had gone back to the “States,” to see this giant soldier playing cards and drinking whisky with the teamsters, bar-keeps, and camp-followers, threatening to shoot the man who tried to interfere, and finally being taken down in irons for a court-martial.
The only one of all his friends who did not fall away from him was one, a little, catlike cavalry lieutenant, booted and spurred, and always dressed in khaki riding-breeches, never saying much, but generally considered the most popular young officer in all the service. And there was one other faithful one, but not an officer. The “striker,” who had followed him in many a hard hike, and had learned to admire his courage and to consider him infallible, tried for the sake of the young Southern girl, to keep his master from the wretched drink.
The post of Cagayan that winter was a busy one. On Sunday mornings the stern-visaged officers would go the round of all the barracks on inspection duty. There was still a remnant of the Insurrecto army operating in the hills, and an attack upon the town was threatened nightly. Once a month, when pay-day came around, a reign of terror, which began with early afternoon, lasted until almost a company of miscellaneous marauders could have been recruited from the guard-house. A dozen saloons and poker games were running the night long, and in those days little money was deposited in the paymaster’s bank.