Fagan emerged at the end of his month still a child, but a sullen child now, moping over a bitter sense of injustice. "I ain' nevah gwine to stay in theah anothah night," he told his friend the Sergeant. "All I want is a fayah deal, an' I'll use ev'rybody straight. But no one ain't gwine to keep me in theah again." The Sergeant, wise as most old soldiers, made no answer. If the Lieutenant and Wild Fagan were to fight it out, it was no affair of the Sergeant's.
But Fagan, over the drinks, repeated his ultimatum to other men, who waited joyously for the clash, and were surprised and disappointed when Fagan went quietly to the guard-house once again, placed there to await the sitting of a general court martial. The quietness was only because he was learning to plan. When the silence of midnight came, he stole over to an inner window, braced a shoulder and a knee, and the rusted bars yielded noiselessly. He crept up-stairs to his squad-room and took the rifle and the belt, heavy with two hundred rounds of ammunition, from the head of his bunk, and crept as silently down. He tried to steal by the guard at the gate, but the man turned and leveled his rifle, hardly six feet away.
"Halt! Who goes theah?" he challenged, with the mechanical lilt of the sentry.
"You min' you' business, Sam, an' I'll ten' to mine," Fagan growled.
But the man persisted, though with a tremor in his voice. "Yo' halt, Fagan. Ah've got to fin'—"
Fagan gripped his rifle by the muzzle, and stepped swiftly toward the leveled one. "You git out o' heah, Sam," he ordered. "Git, or I'll smash you."
The sentry dropped his rifle. "Ah ain' nevah troubled you all, Fagan," he whined. "Ah'm a frien' o' you all's. You lait me alone." He sank to his knees. "You lait me alone. Don' you touch me, don' you touch—" His voice rose to a shriek, but he was talking to empty air. Fagan had picked up the extra rifle and slipped away toward the town.
"Ah couldn' he'ep it, sah. He done come up out o' the dahk, with his eyes a buhnin', an' he sa-ays, 'Ah'll maash you, Sam.' Ah couldn' he'ep mase'ef. Ah've seen him maash these yere Fillypeenos." Thus the sentry to the Lieutenant next morning, with heartfelt earnestness. "Ah wouldn' cared if he was gwine to shoot, but he comes a grinnin', an' he sa-ays, 'Ah'll maash you, Sam.' That's what he sa-ays, an' he'd a done it," he explained later, to a group of sympathizing men. "Ah don' min' gettin' shot, but Ah suah don' wantah git maashed. So Ah dropped ma rifle. Ah've seen him maash these yere Fillypeenos. He ain' no man, he's a plumb bawn devil, tha's what he is," and Sam wiped the sweat drops from his throat with the back of his big, shaking hand.
Then ensued many tentative pushings at the bars, to prove that no two mere men could spring them back into position, and many side-long glances at Fagan's ownerless cot and the chest which stood beside it, closed and mysterious. When the men turned in, no one objected that Sam placed a lighted candle on it. "They don' come roun' wheah it's light," he explained vaguely to the room, and every one knew what "they" meant. Even the old Sergeant, coming through at roll-call, apparently did not see the forbidden light.
And now the United States Army lapsed into a state of hysteria which often amused and puzzled those who witnessed it. It became haunted by a big black man who mashed people instead of shooting them decently. There happened to be a recrudescence of fighting, and the Army imputed it to Fagan. That stupid, brooding, grown-up child became a tactician, a strategist, a second De Wet of guerilla warfare.