“I did not know Tarrant’s prowess until that day. One man might falter in his command, but the lines were rigid as steel. His trumpeter interpreted every movement of the commander’s lips. I pawed the matting of the hut, but could not lift the anchorage of my hips. Rawder stood above me, watching, the lines of his sweating face weaving with sorrow. The thing was growing upon me—what the end of the fight would mean to him—but his sad face was clean of all fear. Years ago, when I was a boy and loved physical courage, I should have worshipped that clean look of his. Tears in his eyes for the men who had brutalized him!...
“There is always a last minute to a fight, Miss Noreen,—when each force puts forth its final flicker of courage, and the lesser zeal is killed. The last drain of gameness wins the battle, when strength and strategy are gone. It wins for spiders and boys and armies. Tarrant had it.... When it was all over, the men of Rawder’s troop saw him in the doorway and rushed forward.
“‘Mr. Routledge,’ he said softly, ‘they are coming for me. The boys have spoiled my mission here.’
“His hand touched my forehead. The ghastly illness left me.... I don’t believe in telling a lady a story which one would refrain from telling his fellow war-scribes, Miss Noreen, but believe me, you have impelled it with perfect listening——”
“His hand touched your forehead,” she repeated.
“Yes, and there was something about the touch that a dealer in war-stuff could not very well enlarge upon in print. At one moment I was but the shell of a man—and the next I could rise.
“Rawder’s old troop was running forward to finish him—Tarrant in the lead. I tried to make them hear—these white men, as they rushed in, full of the hang-over hell of a fight. But they would not hear me. The men saw only the crown of a great day—to kill the deserter who had led the Tagals against them in Luzon—Rawder, the renegade, whom they believed stood also behind the deaths of last night and this day. To kill him after whipping the Mindayans would call down the glory of the Pantheon.... Rawder stepped back, smiling, empty of hand. I managed to trip Tarrant and yell the story in his ears as he fell. A top-sergeant went by me with a native-knife.... The fluids were running from the man who had saved me, before Tarrant or I could intervene, but the rest were stopped.
“Hours afterward, in the night, he regained consciousness. At least, consciousness wavered in his eyes, and I bent to hear, ‘I am not yet to die.’...
“And it was true, Miss Noreen, in spite of a fearful wound—but that is all healed.... Tarrant was relieved from Minday. Back in Manila, we learned that the real renegade of lower Luzon had been captured alive by volunteer infantry. His name is Devlin, and he is since notorious in Luzon story. Through Tarrant, whom I saturated with the substance of Rawder’s character, my bravest man was discharged for disability.... A month ago, I left him on the Hong Kong water-front. He had found night-work among the sailors—saving them from the human vultures who prey upon poor Jack-ashore-with-money-in-his-pocket—hard, evil-judged work, but the only kind that Rawder knows so far. Many a drugged or drunken sailor has awakened on board his own ship with a tithe of his earnings and a whole skin left, to wonder vaguely in after voyages who was his strange-voiced, gentle-handed protector—the last he remembered in Hong Kong.... Rawder told me I should find him in India next—said that he was called to the heart of India by a dream. He is to find his teacher.... Is it beyond belief to you, Miss Noreen, that there is a great meaning in this Indian shadow which has fallen upon my bravest man? I have known Hindus who could look beyond the flesh of men—despised by their own race—and discover souls of stirring evolution and inspiring purity.”
Jerry Cardinegh entered. Noreen caught her breath quickly, as if suddenly awakened from a dream.