"Fall in," the Captain ordered, and the little column set its front westward and swung off along the drenched banks of Sabey River.
Four days later, as an early nightfall was closing down, eighteen of the party struggled to the summit of a half-wooded ridge in the interior of the island, and the worn-out men straightened up with momentary eagerness to peer into the cloud-hung west. Only the blankness of further up-tumbled ridges and black waves of forest veiled in sheets of rain lay before them, and to north, south, and east as well. Nowhere on the circle of the horizon was a leaden gleam of the guiding sea.
The men seemed dazed. They had made their four marches, of far more than ten miles each, it seemed, at such cost of strength and courage as no one who has not travelled in that land can comprehend. They had made the last march on all but a remnant of their food, and the baffling trail they followed had led them nowhere. An hour before it had vanished in a thicket. Since then they had cut a trail with their bayonets, pushing for this ridge in the hope that from its summit they might see the coast at last. Instead, they found that they were lost in the Samar hills. Faint from hunger and exertion, chilled to the bone from tramping in clammy clothing and sleeping in drenched blankets, with shoes that burst from their swollen feet like pulp and hung in shreds, already halting of speech and step with the burning weakness of fever, half a dozen of them, they stood there in the beating downpour, stunned, and daunted.
All this had come to them in four days,—that was the paralyzing fact. It appalled them that all their pride of strength should have vanished in that little space, when other days were coming, how many no one knew, of uglier promise. Foiled, while they still had food and strength, by the task they had set themselves, each day of increased weakness and privation now would call them to increased exertion till the sea was reached—the sea which might, and might not, lie beyond the furthest of those mountains to the west, if it was west. Dumbly they stared at them, avoiding each other's eyes.
Captain Burrell, still weakened by the wound he got in front of Tientsin, was one of the hardest-hit of the fever-victims, and his teeth chattered when he talked, but he retained a humor dryer than the weather. "I reckon we'll camp right here," he said. "H'm. We can't quite fetch the coast to-night, and this ridge is well-drained, anyway. H'm."
The least weary of the men smiled forlornly in response to the spirit that lived in their Old Man, and Sullivan laughed outright. "I've been lookin' for a well-dreened place like this to start my cactus-farm in, sir," he remarked. Already the formalities of rank had vanished, and discipline meant obedience for the common good, not ceremony.
"Might do it, by irrigating," said the Captain. "H'm." He cast a sharp glance at his one unapprehensive subordinate. "The rest of you camp right here," he ordered. "Sullivan and I are going back along to stir up those loafers who fell out."
"See here, sir," Lieutenant Roberts cried, in half-hearted protest, for every inch of his six feet of young body was aching dully, "that leg of yours—"
"Is a corker," said the Captain shortly. "H'm. Come along, Sullivan."
An hour later the two, staggering with sleep, herded the last of the sodden, half-delirious stragglers up to the fire which spluttered in the wet and gloom, and the sick men sprawled obediently among their unconscious fellows. For an instant the officer stared down at them. "Hopeful lot, ain't they?" he muttered. "H'm."