Routledge rides alone

by Will Levington Comfort

“No. I want to hear it all, just as it comes to you, with all your thoughts about it—please. Father will be busy for a half-hour in his study. I think I shall understand.”

Routledge leaned back with a cigarette, which with him was only an occasional indulgence. “As I say, I meet him every second year in my wanderings, and I am always healed from the jangle of the world and world-politics after a day with Rawder,” he resumed, watching her. “He had a strangely unattractive face as a boy—slow with that dullness which sometimes goes with the deaf, and a moist, diffused pallor that suggests epilepsy. His original home was away up in a New England village, restricted as a mortise-box in its thought and heart. The Rawders were a large, brief family—six or seven children—the whole in harrowing poverty. Certain of the littler ones were hare-lipped; all were the fright of other children. I never liked New England.... I can see yet the gray, unpainted house of the Rawders, high on a barren hill against the gray, bitter sky—rags in the broken window-panes; voices in the house that you could not forget, yet loathed to remember.... All died in a year except this boy who became my friend. All met the Reaper without pomp or heraldry, the funerals overlapping, so that the village was dazed, and the name of Rawder stands to-day for Old Mortality at his worst. So there was left only this one, a strange, wordless type of Failure in the eyes of the village.

“He was a little older than I—but a sort of slave of mine. I see it now. I had everything that good family and parental wisdom could bless a boy with, and he had nothing. That I pitied him seemed to warm his soul with gratitude. He expected so little and was willing to give so much. I wish I had understood better then.... He aspired to the ministry, but his ordination was long denied him. He was second in his class after years of study in a theological school, earned with incredible penury, but his trial sermon or something about him shocked the community. I know now that it was a wider, gentler piety. About this time I had come in from my first trip around the world. Unable to get a church, he asked for a foreign mission, the smallest mission in the loneliest, most dreadful land. His answer was a whisper through the assembly of preachers, challenging his sanity. Forgive them, as he did, Miss Noreen. I could not have fully understood the features of his tragedy, but I remember that when I parted from him that time, there was a vague desolation in my heart. I could not forget the deep, troubled eyes nor the heavy homely face, all scourged with harshness from a babe, a veritable magnet of evil fortunes.

“Back from England again, I encountered him in Boston under the banners and torches of the Salvation Army. He was thinner, deeper-eyed, richer-voiced, and all animate with love for his race. For the first time I felt the real spell of the man. It was something in his eyes, I think—something that you see in the eyes of a little child that is dying without pain.”

“Visions,” she whispered.

“Yes, that is the word. Some God-touched thing about the man in the streets of Boston. But I am making my story long, Miss Noreen. I did not know that I had all these details. It has become rather an intimate fancy of mine—this story.”

“Please tell me all. I think it is to be the story of a great victory.”

“Yes, the years to come will end it so.... Two years ago, I was riding with Tarrant’s cavalry in southern Luzon when I discovered Rawder among the troopers. It was in the midst of a blistering march of twelve hours from San Pedro Macati to Indang, without a halt for coffee or bacon. He did not see me, and I could not get to him until the column broke formation. What he must have suffered climbing Fool’s Hill as a regular cavalry recruit! There was a fight in the afternoon, and the column was badly jumbled. Every fourth man stayed behind with three horses and his own. The rest advanced, dismounted, into action. Rawder was with the fighting force. I caught a glimpse of him during the early stress of things. There was just as much iron in his jaw as in Tarrant’s, whose valor had vibrated across the Pacific. Even so, I heard a non-commissioned officer abuse him like a cur—God knows why, unless it was because Rawder did not shoot to kill. That night when we entered Indang, I could not find him. He was not in the formation next morning. Tarrant rode on without him. Apparently, I was the only one who cared. I think he was regarded much the same in the cavalry as he was by the Methodist conference and before the committee on foreign missions.

“The next week Tarrant’s column struck war—a bit of real war. I found all that archipelago-service interesting, hit-and-run campaigning, with all the human interest of bigger lines. We were caught on a sunken jungle-trail and fired upon from three sides. Small in numbers, but that fight was of the sort which makes the mess-talk of English regiments for decades, and their flag decorations. I never saw a bit of action at closer range. It was even shown to me—the peculiar way men open their mouths when struck about the belt. I heard souls speak as they passed—strange, befuddled utterances, from brains and lips running down, but full of meaning—sayings of great and memorable meaning. I saw Tarrant stand for thirty seconds under the first volleys, dismayed in the yellow glare. There is no sight for a soldier so terrible as a glimpse of havoc in the face of his chief, but he righted quickly enough. For the moment the men tried to cover themselves in the soiled short straws of their religion.

“It was a voice in the jungle that had startled Tarrant. I tell you the whole story, Miss Noreen, because of that voice in the jungle. The natives were led by a white man, who wore the khaki of an American soldier. It was this white leadership which had herded Tarrant’s column for slaughter in that hot sink of the jungle. The cry of ‘Rawder! Rawder!’ went up from the American command. Something in the voice troubled me—just for a second—with the fear that Rawder might have run mad at the last.... Listen, I think there is no hate in the world so baleful and destructive as that aroused by a deserter who leads the enemy against his own people. And this man led a black force of Malays!... The natives retired finally, and the white man with them. An Indiana soldier was dying in the sun when all was still. I heard him say wearily, ‘Gawd, if I could only have killed Rawder, hell would have been a cinch for me!’