Routledge rides alone

by Will Levington Comfort

“That’s how they hated him that day. The story of Rawder, the deserter, went around the world. It had the eternal grip of interest of a scapegoat who turns into a fire-brand. Manila sent column after column of infantry into the Indang country and down below to the Camarines, but the renegade was not to be captured just yet.

“I continued to ride with Tarrant for awhile after that. He found action when there was any; moreover, I felt that the real story of Rawder had not been written. He was big to me, and I could not believe the voice from the jungle was his. Tarrant was ordered with his troop and two others, dismounted, to Minday, a little island south of Luzon, which Nature has punished in various ways. I remember the empty, sun-blinded inlet, as our little transport stirred the sand. Not a banco or casco came out to meet us. We were in the midst of a people who put up no front for peace. There is a Spanish tradition that each male native of Minday is possessed of seven devils and the leaders ten.

“‘Best fighting men on the islands—these Mindayans,’ Tarrant told me. ‘The price of life here is to kill first, to kill all the time, snakes and men.’ That night I wandered about the deserted port in the Crusoe silence. At the edge of the town, I was ‘put out’ by the route of flashing stars—a blow on the head from behind.

“Oddly enough, Miss Noreen, the natives let me live. In the morning I awoke in a bungalow and discovered Rawder sitting in the doorway.

“His queerly-cut eyelids were drawn together by the intensity of light. Outside, the sunlight waved in pure white flame. It was the vividest time of the day, of the hottest time of the year, in the fieriest island of the globe. Minday is insidious. You can breathe and walk outside, but if you don’t get under cover when your scalp warns you with its prickling, you will likely be buried at eventide by the wild dogs of Minday. Or, possibly, if your vitality is immense, the sun will spare your life, but fry the contents of your brain-pan, which is rather worse than losing an arm.

“Rawder did not note that I was awake. He was exchanging ideas with a young Mindayan whose skin was the color of the dead wet oak leaves which floor the woods at home in the spring. It appears that this stained one had been in Luzon and learned eighteen or twenty words of English. Through these, and the signs which clasp the world, Rawder was amassing Mindayan for the purpose of—administering Methodism to the natives.

“I had been unconscious for many hours. I could not rise, and my brain seemed to be working on a little boy’s shift. For ages, it seemed, I watched the hand and lip converse, too weak to call, to ask why I lived—my skull filled with sick-room wonderings. Rawder labored on with the language, calm, gentle, homely unto pain. He was leaner, stronger, than before; untanned, but the pasty pallor was gone from his face. Years had outgrown the heritage of physical disorder. I had always noted how his thoughts formed, slowly, thoroughly, without adornment, but each thought straining his limitations to the roof of his brain. If an action were involved in any of Rawder’s thoughts, he carried out that action, as good hounds run—to the death. I saw now that wonderful look about him, that Heaven-warmed something which distinguishes a man who has great work to do in the world. Perhaps I alone could see it. They say God never sends a great soul among men without some one to recognize it. It may be that the honor is mine in the case of Rawder. Stricken as I was, I could not help noting his endurance of concentration. This, as you know, is the gift only of mystics. He was driving the monkey-mind of the Mindayan interpreter to the beds of torture with it.... He saw, at last, that my eyes were open, and came to me, kneeling down to take my hand. The native seized the moment to escape.

“It transpired I was in the real village, two miles back from the port. The Mindayans had brought me with several American soldiers who had wandered the night before over the edge of camp, to furnish a bright torture-entertainment in the town-plaza. Rawder had saved my life, but the others had gone out in unmentionable ways.

“‘I was awake when they brought you in,’ he said. ‘These people have not rallied to me very strongly yet, or I could have saved the boys who were captured.... But you—I begged for your life through the interpreter, saying that you were a great teacher and not a soldier, showing them the difference in your garments—and your face.’

“Perhaps you can picture, Miss Noreen, his struggle with the natives, while I had lain unconscious that night.... I explained to him that Tarrant’s command took him for a deserter and a renegade, whose leadership had made fiends of the Tagals. He stared out in the open for a long time without speaking. He was not whipped nor enraged, as a lesser man would be. I think I shall always remember his words: