At Sabey, a hopeless town half-way up the east coast of the island, Company B of the 41st was stationed, as hard-fisted, hard-mouthed, hard-living, hard-fighting a set of terriers as ever was enlisted. Its Captain, one Burrell, delighted in catching his pets wild and taming them to his peculiar taste. B's ranks, for the most part, were filled by transfer from other organizations whose officers were glad to turn over their black sheep. Burrell, by some method of his own, speedily made soldiers, his sort of soldiers, of them, and they swore by him.
It was unusual for B to sit in garrison when the 41st was afield, for the company had a reputation consonant with its character, and was welcome at the front whenever there was action. But all that autumn it was held in quarters, while the rain drummed on the iron roof and reports came in of little battles north and south and west.
"Ev'rybody had a man's size grouch on, fr'm th' Old Man down," they reported afterward. "Ev'rybody but just John Henry Sullivan, him we called Peaceful Henry. You couldn't hammer a grouch onto Peaceful with an axe."
Sullivan was the humorist of the company, a long, lank, freckled figure-of-fun who was tolerated, ordinarily, though unmercifully mocked, for a certain likable simplicity of mind and a childish friendliness for everything. But that fall his antics palled on B. "They was times when we'd a been glad to kill him," as they said, "if it hadn't been for havin' to look forrard to a long enlistment with him down below."
But at the very end of the year a hope of cornering the enemy appeared, and the spirits of B Company rose accordingly. Midway of its length, Samar narrows till a scant thirty-five miles separates the long rollers of the Pacific shore from the quieter waters of the Visayan Sea. So, at least, the triangulation of the Coast Survey bore witness, then. Until that winter there was no record of men who had crossed the savage island. But a local tradition asserted that an old and long-abandoned trail led from Sabey on the east coast, that very Sabey where B was stationed, to Nalang on the west.
If that ancient trail could be opened once more, Samar would be cut in two, the activity of the skulking outlaws would be impeded, and a scheme of effective reconcentration would be possible at last. The men of B Company felt that their old luck was with them when the duty of making the first reconnaissance of the old trail fell to them.
They were ready to move at once, and soon after reveille, on the morning of December 25th, Captain Burrell, Lieutenant Roberts, and twenty men, all dressed in the blue and khaki of field service, and bearing haversacks bulging with four days' rations, assembled on the beach at Sabey to make an attempt at crossing Samar.
It was an inauspiciously gray and threatening morning. Behind the explorers, breakers crashed thunderously on the sand, and a roaring northeast monsoon whipped spume about in frothy sheets. Before them, the wilderness lay grim and forbidding, in the cold light. But they accepted the rawness and the gloom with the indifference of long acquaintance. Four marches straight westward, of ten miles each at most, child's play to men like them, should bring them to Nalang. There was no breath of adventure in the air.
Yet of the party which faced the hills that morning, seven lie within the shadow still, and only one came out again unaided, seventeen days later, to report that somewhere behind him fourteen men of B, including the Old Man who made it B, lay starving and delirious with fever.
On the morning of the start, they had of course no premonition of all this. Burrell and Roberts waved careless farewells to the one lady of Sabey, the post surgeon's young wife, the men grumbled aimlessly at the prospect of a wet march and a wet camp, and Sullivan, settling his haversack strap more comfortably, grinned at the disappointed ones in front of quarters who could not go. "Reckon we'll locate that overland route for the Sumner this time, sure," he remarked, with a fatuous attempt at humor.