Ray's Daughter: A Story of Manila Page 5

  CHAPTER V.

  At sunset that evening the regiments destined to embark with theexpedition commanded by General Vinton were paraded for inspection infull marching order, while a dozen other commands less fortunate lookedenviously on. The day had been raw and chilly. The wind blew salt andstrong, sending the fog in dripping clouds sailing in at the GoldenGate, obscuring all the bold northern shore, and streaming up the sandyslopes and over the wide wastes south of Sutro Heights. Men who ownedovercoats were few and far between, so while the designated battalionsstood and shivered in the wet grass, the mass of spectators hoveredabout in ponchos or wrapped in blankets, the down-turned brims of theircampaign hats dripping heavily and contributing much to the weird andunmilitary look of the wearers. Officers had donned Mackintoshes andheavy boots. Badges of rank, except in cases of those provided with theregulation overcoat, were lost to sight. Only among the regulars and oneor two regiments made up from the National Guard were uniforms socomplete that in their foul-weather garb it was possible to distinguishcolonel from subaltern, staff sergeant from private.

  In front of the guard-house at the Presidio a dozen cavalrymen armedwith the new carbine and dressed throughout for winter service, thisbeing San Francisco June, had formed ranks under command of a sergeantand stood silently at ease awaiting the coming of the officer of theday. The accurate fit of their warm overcoats, the cut of their troopertrousers, the polish of their brasses and buttons, the snug, trim "set"of their belts, all combined to tell the skilled observer that thesewere regulars.

  As such they were objects of interest and close scrutiny to the littleknots of volunteers who had sauntered in to pick up points. To theformer it looked odd and out of gear to see the forage-caps and broadwhite stripes of commissioned officers mingling with the slouch hats andill-fitting nether garments of the rank and file.

  It was too early in the campaign for "the boys" to have settled down torealization of the subtle distinction between their status as soldiersof the Nation and citizens of a sovereign State. To private A of the farWesterners his company commander was still "Billy, old boy," or at best"Cap.," save when actually in ranks and on drill or parade.

  To the silently observant volunteer, on the other hand, it was just asodd to note that when a gray-haired veteran sergeant, issuing from theguard-house, caught sight of a trig, alert little fellow, with beardlessface and boyish features and keen, snapping dark eyes, hastening towardshim in the garb of a lieutenant of cavalry, the veteran was suddenlytransformed into a rigid statue in light blue, standing attention and atthe salute--a phenomenon that extracted from the infant officer only aperfunctory touch of finger to cap visor and not so much as a glance.

  How could the "boys" from far Nebraska be supposed to know that thelittle chap had spent his whole life in the shadow of the flag, and hadmany a time in baby days been dandled on the very arm that was now sodeferentially bent and uplifted in soldier homage? What was there in themanner of the youngster to betray the fact that he dreaded old SergeantRigney's criticism even more than that of his commanding officer?

  Then came another phenomenon.

  At a brief, curt "Sergeant, get out your prisoners," from the beardlesslips, there was instant fumbling of big keys and clanking of iron fromthe hidden recesses of the guard-house.

  The dismounted troopers sprang suddenly to attention. The guard split intwo at its middle, each half facing outward, marched half a dozen pacesaway like the duellists of old days from the back to back position,halted, faced front once more, and stood again at ease, with a broad gapof a dozen paces between their inner flanks.

  Into this space, shuffling dejectedly in some cases, stalking defiantlyin others, slinking, shivering, and decrepit in the case of two or threepoor wrecks of the rum fiend, a stream of humanity in soiled soldiergarb came pouring from the prison door and lined up under the eyes ofvigilant non-commissioned officers in front of the young lieutenant incommand.

  There they stood, their eyes shifting nervously from group to group ofhuddling spectators, their shoulders hunched up to their ears--theriff-raff of the garrison--the few desperate, dangerous characters fromthe surrounding camps, an uncouth, uncanny lot at any time, but lookingits worst in the drip of the floating fog-wreaths and the gloom anddespond of the dying day. The boom of the sunset gun from Alcatraz fellsullenly on the ear even as the soft trumpets of the cavalry, close athand, began sounding the "Retreat." At its last prolonged note the sharpcrack of an old three-inch rifle echoed the report from Alcatraz, andfrom the invisible, mist-shrouded top of the staff the dripping folds ofthe storm-flag came flapping down in view, limp and bedraggled, and theguard sprang again to attention as a burly, red-faced, hearty-lookingsoldier, with a captain's insignia in loop and braid on the sleeves ofhis overcoat, broke a way through the group of lookers-on and, barelywaiting for the salute and report of the young lieutenant commanding,began a sharp scrutiny of the prisoners before him.

  Down along the line he went, until at the fourth man from the left inthe front rank he stopped short. A bulky, thick-set soldier stood there,a sullen, semi-defiant look about his eyes, a grim set to the jawsbristling with a week-old beard of dirty black. Then came the snappingcolloquy.

  "Your name Murray?"

  "That's what they call me."

  "What was your name before that?"

  "Jim."

  Whereat there was a titter in the ranks of prisoners. Some of the guardeven allowed their mouths to expand, and the groups of volunteers,chuckling in keen enjoyment, came edging in closer.

  Instantly the voice of the officer of the guard was heard orderingsilence, and faces straightened out in the twinkling of an eye.

  The elder officer, the captain, grew a trifle redder, but he was masterof himself and the situation. It is with school-boys as with soldiers,their master is the man whom pranks or impudence cannot annoy. Theofficer of the day let no tone of temper into his next question. Lookingstraight into the shifting eyes, he waited for perfect silence, and thenspoke:

  "Jim what? I wish the name under which you served in your previousenlistment."

  "Never said I'd served before."

  "No. You declared you had not. But I know better. You're a deserter fromthe Seventh Cavalry."

  The face under the shrouding campaign hat went gray white with suddentwitch of the muscles, then set again, rigid and defiant. The eyessnapped angrily. The answer was sharp, yet seemed, as soldiers say, to"hang fire" a second.

  "Never seen the Seventh Cavalry in my life."

  The officer of the day turned and beckoned to a figure hitherto keptwell in the background, screened by the groups of surroundingvolunteers. A man of middle age, smooth shaven and stout, dressed inbusiness sack-suit, came sturdily forward and took position by thecaptain's side.

  At sight of the new-comer Murray's face, that had regained a bit of itsruddy hue, again turned dirty white, and the boy lieutenant, eying himclosely, saw the twitch of his thin, half-hidden lips.

  "Point out your man," said the captain to the new arrival.

  The civilian stepped forward, and without a word twice tapped with hisforefinger the broad breast of Prisoner Murray and, never looking athim, turned again to the officer of the day.

  "What was his name in the Seventh?" asked the latter.

  "Sackett."

  The captain turned to the officer of the guard. "Mr. Ray," said he,"separate Murray from the garrison prisoners and have him put in a cell.That man must be carefully guarded. You may dismiss the guard, sir."

  And, followed by the stranger, Captain Kress was leaving the ground whenMurray seemed to recover himself, and in loud and defiant voice gavetongue,--

  "That man's a damned liar, and this is an outrage."

  "Shut up, Murray!" shouted the sergeant of the guard, scandalized atsuch violation of military proprieties. "It's gagged you'll be, youidiot," he added between his set teeth, as with scowling face he boredown on the equally scowling prisoner. "Come out of that and step alonghere ahead of me. I'll
put you where shoutin' won't help." And slowly,sullenly, Murray obeyed.

  Slowly and in silence the groups of spectators broke up and saunteredaway as the last of the prisoners dragged back into the guard-house, andthe guard itself broke ranks and went within doors, leaving only thesentry pacing mechanically the narrow, hard-beaten path, the sergeant,and at the turn of the road, the young lieutenant whom Captain Kress hadaddressed as Mr. Ray. This officer, having silently received hissuperior's orders and seen to it that Murray was actually "behind thebars," had again come forth into the gathering twilight, the gloaming ofa cheerless day, and having hastened to the bend from which point theforms of the officer of the day and his associate were still faintlyvisible, stood gazing after them, a puzzled look in his brave youngface.

  Not yet a month in possession of his commission, here was a lad to whomevery iota of the routine of a lieutenant's life was as familiar asthough he had drawn the pay for a decade.

  Born and bred in the army, taught from early boyhood to ride and shoot,to spar and swim, spending his vacation in saddle and his schooldays inunwilling study, an adept in every healthful and exhilarating sport,keen with rifle and revolver, with shotgun and rod, with bat andracquet, with the gloves and Indian clubs, the nimblest quarter-back anddodger, the swiftest runner of his school, it must be owned that Mr.Sanford Ray was a most indifferent scholar. Of geography, history, andlanguages he had rather more than a smattering because of occasionaltours abroad when still at an impressionable age. Yet Sandy "took morestock," as he expressed it, and "stawk," as he called it, in Sioux andthe sign language than he did in French or German, knew far more of theRockies and Sierras than he did of the Alps, studied the Europeancavalry with the eye of an accomplished critic, and stoutly maintainedthat while they were bigger swells and prettier to look at, they couldneither ride nor shoot to compare with the sturdy troopers of hisfather's squadron.

  "As to uniforms," said Sandy, "anybody could look swagger in the lancerand huzzar rig. It takes a man to look like a soldier in what ourfellows have to wear."

  It wasn't the field garb Sandy despised, but the full dress, the blueand yellow enormity in which our troopers are compelled to appear.

  It had been the faint hope of his fond parents that Master Sandy wouldgrow up to be something, by which was meant a lawyer, an artist,architect, engineer,--something in civil life that promised home andfortune. But the lad from babyhood would think of nothing but the armyand with much misgiving, in Sandy's fifteenth year, his father shippedhim to Kentucky, where they were less at home than in Kansas, and gavehim a year's hard schooling in hopes of bracing up his mathematics.

  Sandy was wild to go to West Point, and at the bottom of his heart MajorRay would have rejoiced had he thought it possible for Sandy to pullthrough; but ruefully he minded him how hard a task was his own, and howclose he came to failure at the semi-annual exams. "Sandy hates Math.even more than I did," said he to Marion, his devoted wife. "It was allI could do to squirm through when the course was nowhere near as hard asit is to-day, so don't set your heart on it, little woman."

  The appointment was not so hard to get, for Major Billy had a host offriends in his native State, and an old chum at the Point assured him hecould coach young Sandy through the preliminary, and indeed he did.Sandy scraped in after six months' vigorous work, managed to hold hisown through the first year's tussle with algebra and geometry, which hehad studied hard and faithfully before, was a pet in his class, and thepride and joy of his mother's and sister's heart in yearling camp, wherehe blossomed out in corporal's chevrons and made as natty and active afirst sergeant as could be found while the "furlough class" was away.

  But the misery began with "analytical" and the crisis came withcalculus, and to the boy's bitter sorrow, after having been turned backone year on the former and failing utterly on the latter, the verdict ofthe Academic Board went dead against him, and stout old soldiers thereoncast their votes with grieving hearts, for "Billy Ray's Boy" was a ladthey hated to let go, but West Point rules are inexorable.

  So too were there saddened hearts far out on the frontier where themajor was commanding a cavalry post in a busy summer, but neither he norMarion had one word of blame or reproach for the boy. Loving arms, andeyes that smiled through their sorrow, welcomed him when the little chapreturned to them. "Don't anybody come to meet me," he wrote. "Just letmother be home." And so it was settled.

  He sprang from the wagon that met him at the station, went hand in handwith his father into the hall, and then, with one sob, bounded intoMarion's outstretched arms as she stood awaiting him in the little armyparlor.

  The major softly closed the door and with blinking eyes stole away tostables. There had been another meeting a little later when Marion thesecond was admitted, and the girl stole silently to her brother's sideand her arms twined about his neck. Her love for him had been somethinglike adoration through all the years of girlhood, and now, though he wastwenty and she eighteen, its fervor seemed to know no diminution. Theyhad done their best, all of them, to encourage while the strugglelasted, but to teach him that should failure come, it would come withoutreproach or shame.

  The path to success in other fields was still before him. The road tothe blessed refuge of home and love and sympathy would never close.

  It was hard to reconcile the lad at first. The major set him up as ayoung ranchman in a lovely valley in the Big Horn Range, and there hewent sturdily to work, but before the winter was fairly on the countrywas rousing to the appeals of Cuba, and before it was gone the Maine hadsunk, a riddled hulk, and the spring came in with a call to arms.

  Together with some two hundred young fellows all over the land, SanfordRay went up for examination for the vacant second lieutenancies in thearmy, and he who had failed in analytical and calculus passed withoutgrave trouble the more practical ordeal demanded by the War Department,was speedily commissioned in the artillery, and, to his glory anddelight, promptly transferred to the cavalry.

  Then came the first general break up the family had really known, forthe major hurried away to Kentucky to assume command of the regiment ofvolunteers of which he had been made colonel. Billy, junior, a lad ofbarely seventeen, enlisted at Lexington as a bugler in his father'sregiment, and swore he'd shoot himself if they didn't let him serve. TheKentuckians were ordered to Chickamauga, the young regular to thePresidio at San Francisco, and Mrs. Ray, after seeing her husband andyoungest son started for the South, returned to Leavenworth, where theyhad just settled down a week before the war began, packed and stored thehousehold furniture, then, taking "Maidie" with her, hurried westward tosee the last of her boy, whose squadron was destined for service atManila.

  The lieutenant, as they delighted in calling him, joined them at Denver,looking perfectly at home in his field uniform and perfectly happy. Theyleft Maidie to spend a week with old army friends at Fort Douglas, andas soon as Sandy was settled in his new duties and the loving mother hadsatisfied herself the cavalry would not be spirited away before July,she accepted the eager invitation of other old friends to visit them atSacramento, and there they were, mother and daughter, again united thisvery raw and foggy evening, when Mr. Ray, as officer of the guard, stoodat the bend of the roadway east of the Presidio guard-house, gazingafter the vanishing forms of Captain Kress and the burly stranger incivilian clothes, and wondering where on earth it was he had seen thelatter before.

  So engrossed was he in this that it was only when a second timeaddressed that he whirled about and found himself confronting a tall andslender young officer, with frank, handsome blue eyes and fine,clear-cut face, a man perhaps five years his senior in age and one gradein rank, for his overcoat sleeve bore the single loop and braid of afirst lieutenant.

  He was in riding boots and spurs, as Ray noted at first glance, andthere behind him stood an orderly holding the horses of both.

  "Pardon me. I am Lieutenant Stuyvesant of General Vinton's staff. Thisis the officer of the guard, I believe, and I am sent to make someinquiry of a
prisoner--a man named Murray."

  "We have such a man," said Ray, eying the newcomer with soldierlyappreciation of his general appearance and not without envy of hisinches. "But he's just been locked in a cell, and it will take an orderfrom the officer of the day to fetch him out--unless you could see himin there with other prisoners within earshot."

  "Not very well," answered Stuyvesant, looking curiously into the darkeyes of the youngster. "Perhaps I'd better see the officer of the day atonce."

  "You'll find him at the club. He's just gone in," said Ray, mindful ofthe fact that this was the captain's time for a cocktail, and with acourteous salute the aide-de-camp hastened away.

  In five minutes he was back with a pencilled scrawl from Kress to theeffect that Lieutenant Stuyvesant was to be permitted to interview theprisoner Murray outside the guard-house, but sentries must be placed toprevent escape.

  Quickly young Ray called out the corporal and two men, warned them ofthe duty demanded, stationed them up and down the road and opposite theguard-house, but just out of ear-shot, ordered the prisoner broughtforth, and then, leaving Stuyvesant standing at the post of Number One,stepped a dozen yards away into the mist.

  A minute later out came the sergeant, marshalling Murray after him, asentry at his heels. Then in the gathering darkness the tall officer andthe short, thick-set soldier met face to face, and the latter recoiledand began glancing quickly, furtively about him.

  Just how it all happened Ray could never quite tell. The light was nowfeeble, the lamps were only just beginning to burn. There was a momentof low-toned talk between the two, a question twice repeated in firmertone, then a sudden, desperate spring and dash for liberty.

  Like a centre rush--a charging bull--the prisoner came head on straightto where young Ray was standing, heedless of a yell to halt, and in lesstime than it takes to tell it, the lithe little athlete of West Point'scrack football team had sprung and tackled and downed him in his tracks.

  Biting, cursing, straining, the big bully lay in the mud, overpowerednow by the instant dash of the guard, while their bantam officer, risingand disgustedly contemplating the smear of wet soil over his newovercoat, was presently aware of Stuyvesant, bending forward, extendinga helping hand, and exclaiming:

  "By Jove, but that was a neat tackle! You must have been a joy to _your_team. What was it?"

  "West Point--last year's."

  "And may I ask--the name?"

  "My name's Ray," said Sandy with beaming smile, showing a row of even,white teeth under the budding, dark mustache, and Stuyvesant felt thewarm blood surging to his forehead, just as it had before that day inthe general's tent.

  "I think I should have known that," he presently stammered. "It was MissRay who so skilfully treated those poor fellows burned out on our train.I suppose you heard of it."

  "Why, yes," answered the youngster, again curiously studying the face ofhis tall visitor. "Then it was you she--I heard about. Wish I weren't onduty. I'd be glad to have you over at my quarters or the club."

  "I wish so too, and yet I'm lucky in finding you here, since"--and hereStuyvesant turned and looked resentfully towards the bedraggled figureof Murray, now being supported back to the cells--"since that fellowproved so churlish and ungrateful. He's all wrath at being put behindthe bars and won't answer any questions."

  "What else could he expect?" asked Ray bluntly. "He's a deserter."

  "A deserter!" exclaimed Stuyvesant in surprise. "Who says so?"

  "Captain Kress, officer of the day, or at least a cit who came with himto identify him. They say he skipped from the Seventh Cavalry."

  At this piece of information Mr. Stuyvesant whirled about again in addedastonishment. "Why," said he, "this upsets--one theory completely. Ideclare, if that's true we're all at sea. I beg pardon," he continued,but now with marked hesitancy--"you know--you've heard, I suppose,about--Foster?"

  "What Foster?"

  "Why, the recruit, you know, the one we lost at Port Costa," and theblue eyes were curiously and intently studying the face of the youngersoldier, dimly visible now that the guard-house lamps were beginning toglow.

  "I knew there was a recruit missing, and--seems to me that was thename," answered Ray.

  "And--didn't you know who he was--that it was--pardon me, the manwho--lived near you--had a ranch----"

  "Great Scott! You don't mean Wally Foster! _He_ enlisted and in thecavalry? Well, I'm----" And now Mr. Ray's merriment overcame him. "Inever thought there was that much to Wally. He was a lackadaisical sortof a spook when I saw him. What possessed him to enlist? He's no stufffor a soldier."

  Stuyvesant hesitated. That letter of old Colonel Martindale's was shownhim in confidence. But Ray's next impetuous outburst settled it.

  "Oh, by Jove! I see it,--it's----" And here the white teeth gleamed inthe lamplight, for Mr. Ray was laughing heartily.

  "Yes? It's what?" smiled Stuyvesant sympathetically.

  "It's--my sister, I reckon," laughed Ray. "She once said she wouldn'tmarry outside of the army, and he heard it."

  "Oh,--did she?" said Stuyvesant reflectively, and then he was silent.