Kitabı oku: «Winning the Wilderness», sayfa 18
Thaine Aydelot was only twenty-one, with little need hitherto for experience in reading human nature. Moreover, he was alert in every tingling nerve with the anticipation of an ocean voyage and of strange new sights and daring deeds half a world away. Yet something in Dr. Carey’s strong face seemed to imply a deeper purpose than his words suggested. A faint sense of the nobility of the man gripped him and grew upon him, and never in the years that followed was separate from the memory of the doctor he had loved from babyhood.
When the Ohio woodlands were gorgeous with the frost-fired splendor of October word came to Miss Jane Aydelot, of the old Aydelot farmhouse beside the National pike road, that one Thaine Aydelot had sailed from San Francisco with the Twentieth Kansas Regiment to see service in the Philippine Islands. On board the same transport was Dr. Horace Carey, of the military medical staff. That winter Jane Aydelot’s hair turned white, but the pink bloom of her cheeks and the light of her clear gray eyes made her a sweet-faced woman still, whose loveliness grew with the years.
The kiss of the same October breezes was on the Kansas prairie with the hazy horizon and the infinite beauty of wide, level landscapes, overhung by the infinite beauty of blue, tender skies. Boanerges Peeperville, established as cook in the Sunflower Inn, was at home in his cosy little quarter beside the grape arbor of the rear dooryard.
“Tell me, Bo Peep, why Dr. Carey should enter the army again and go to the Philippines?” Virginia Aydelot asked on the day the news reached the Sunflower Ranch.
Bo Peep did not answer at once. Virginia was busy arranging some big yellow chrysanthemums in a tall cut-glass vase that Dr. Carey had left to be sent down to her when Bo Peep should come to the Aydelots to make his home.
“See, Bo Peep, aren’t they pretty? Set them in the middle of the table there, carefully. The first bouquet we ever had on our table was a few little sunflowers in an old peach can wrapped round with a newspaper. You didn’t answer my question. Why did Horace go so far away?”
The servant took the vase carefully and placed it as commanded. Then he turned to Virginia with a face full of intense feeling.
“Miss Virgie, I done carry messages for him all my days.” The pathos of the soft voice was touching. “I wasn’t to give this las’ one to you less’n he neveh come back. An Mis’ Virgie, Doctoh Carey won’t neveh come back no mo’. But I kaint tell you yet jus’ why he done taken hisself to the Fillippians, not yet.”
“Why do you think he will never come back? You think Thaine will come home again, don’t you?” Virginia queried.
“Oh, yas’m! yas’m! Misteh Thaine, he’ll come back all right. But hit’s done fo’casted in my bones that Doctoh Horace won’t neveh come. An’ when he don’t, I’ll tell you why he leff’n Grass Riveh, Kansas, for the Fillippians.”
CHAPTER XIX
The “fighting Twentieth”
Malolos and Bocaue’s trenches know the Kansas yell;
San Fernando and San Tomas the Kansas story swell;
At Guiguinto’s fiercest battle yon flag in honor flew;
What roaring rifles kept it, all Luna’s army knew;
And high it swung o’er Caloocan, Bagbag and Marilao —
“Those raggedy Pops from Kansas” ’fore God they’re heroes now.
– Lieutenant-Colonel E. C. Little.
Night had fallen on the city of Manila. Before it lay the bay whose waters lapped softly against pier and shipping. Behind it in the great arc of a circle stretched the American line of military outposts, guarded by sentinels. Beyond that line, north, east, and south, there radiated a tangle of roads and trails through little villages of nipa huts, past rice fields and jungles, marshes and rivers, into the very heart of Luzon. Manila was under American military government, but Luzon was in insurrection against all government, and a network of rebellious lines of enemies fretted every jungle, hid in every village, intrenched itself in every rice field, and banked its earthworks beyond every river. While Emilio Aguinaldo, the shrewd leader of an ignorant, half-savage peasantry, plotted craftily with his associates for the seizure of the rich capital of Luzon and dreamed of the autocratic power and heaps of looted treasure that he should soon control. For weeks in sight of the American outposts, the Filipinos had strengthened their trenches, and established their fortifications, the while they bided the hour of outbreak and slaughter of the despised Americanos, and the seizing of the rich booty afterward.
Upon the Tondo road, running north from Manila to Caloocan, Thaine Aydelot, with a Kansas University comrade, was doing silent sentinel duty. The outpost was nearly a mile away from a bridge on the outskirts of Manila. In the attack imminent, this bridge would be one of the keys to the city, and the command had been given to hold it against all invaders at any cost.
Between Thaine and the bridge was a stretch of dusty road, flanked on one side by nipa huts. On the other side were scattered dwellings, tall shrubbery, and low-lying rice fields, beyond which lay the jungle.
Before the young sentinel the road made a sharp bend, cutting off the view and giving no hint to the enemy around this bend of how strong a force might be filling the road toward the bridge.
Thaine knew that around that bend and behind the rice dykes and in the nearby trenches were Filipino insurgents with finger on the trigger ready to begin an assault. But until the first gun of the first battle is fired, battle seems impossible to the young soldier.
As Thaine turned from the dim road, he caught the glint of starlight on the edge of a rice swamp. He wanted to fight Filipinos tonight, not memories. But the memory of the Aydelot grove and the water lilies opening their creamy hearts to the moonlight, and Leigh Shirley in her white dress with her cheeks faintly pink in the clear shadows, all swept his mind and challenged him to forget everything else.
The same grip on a principle, coupled with a daring spirit and love of adventure that had brought old Jean Aydelot to the Virginia colony long ago, and had pushed Francis Aydelot across the Alleghanies into the forests of the Ohio frontier, and had called Asher Aydelot to the unconquered prairies of the big West – the same love of adventure and daring spirit and belief in a cause bigger than his own interests had lured Thaine Aydelot on to the islands of Oriental seas. With the military schooling and unschooling where discipline tends to make a soldier, and absence of home influence tends to make the careless rowdy, the sterling uprightness of the Aydelots and the inborn gentility of the Thaines kept the boy from the Kansas prairies a fearless gentleman. Withal, he was exuberantly pleased with life, as a young man of twenty-one should be. He lived mostly in the company of Kansas University men, and with the old University yell of “Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U!” for their slogan, they stood shoulder to shoulder in every conflict.
Lastly, he was a hero-worshiper at the shrine of his colonel, Fred Funston, and his captain, Adna Clarke; while in all the regiment, the fair face of young Lieutenant Alford seemed to him most gracious. Alford was his soldier ideal, type of the best the battlefield may know. And, even if all this admiration did have in it much of youthful sentimentalism, it took nothing from his efficiency when he came to his place on the firing line.
“I wonder where Doctor Carey is tonight,” Thaine’s comrade said in a low voice, as the two came together in the road.
“What’s made you think of him?” Thaine asked.
“I haven’t seen him since Christmas day. A young Filipino and I got into a scrap with a drunken Chinaman who was beating a boy, and the Chink slashed us both. Carey stitched us up, but the other fellow keeps a scar across his face, all right.”
“I know that Filipino,” Thaine said. “He seems like a fine young man. The scar was a marker for him. I’d know him by it anywhere.”
“So should I, and by his peculiar gait. I saw a man slipping along beyond the lines just now who made me think of that fellow, and that made me think of Doctor Carey,” the sentinel said, and turned away.
It was after nine o’clock, and the hours were already beginning to stretch wearily for sentinels, when a faint sound of guns away to the eastward broke on the air. Again and again it came, intermittently at first, but increasing to a steady roar. Down in Manila there was dead quiet, but along the American line of outposts the ripping of Mauser bullets and long streaks of light flashed the Filipino challenge to war in steady volleys.
As Thaine listened, the firing seemed to be creeping gradually toward the north, and he knew the insurgents were swinging toward the Tondo road, down which they would rush to storm the bridge. In that moment civil life dropped off like a garment, and he stood up a soldier. He crept cautiously toward the bend to see what lay beyond, and dropped on his face in the dusty way as a whirl of bullets split the air above his head.
As he sprang back to his place beside his comrade, other sentinels joined them, and behind them loomed the tall form of Captain Clarke.
“What’s around there, Aydelot?” Clarke asked.
“Didn’t you hear?”
Thaine’s reply was lost in a roar of rifles, followed by increased firing along the entire line, massing to the north before the Twentieth’s front.
“There are ten more men on the way up here. We’ll hold this place until reinforcements come,” Captain Clarke declared.
It was such a strategic point as sometimes turns the history of war. But the odds are heavy for sixteen men to stand against swarms of insurgents armed with Mausers and Remingtons. In the thrill of that moment, Thaine Aydelot would have died by inches had this tall, cool-headed captain of his demanded it. Clarke arranged his men on either side of the way, and the return fire began. Suddenly up the road a lantern gleamed. An instant later a cannon shot plowed the dust between the two lines of men.
“They’ve turned a cannon loose. Watch out,” Clarke called through the darkness.
A second time and a third the lantern glowed, and each time a cannon ball crashed through a nipa hut beside the little company, or threw a shower of dust about the place.
“They have to load that gun by the light of a lantern. Let’s fix the lantern,” Thaine cried, as the dust cloud settled down.
“Good! Watch your aim, boys,” Captain Clarke replied.
The bullets were falling thick about them. They whizzed through the bushes, they cut into the thatched huts, they flung swirls of dust on the little line of brave soldiers, they poured like stinging sweeps of hail, volley after volley, along the Tondo road. When the lantern flashed again, sixteen bullets riddled it, and without its help the big gun was useless.
“Poor lantern! It fell on the firing line, brave to the last,” Thaine declared as the smoke lifted.
But the loss of the cannon only doubled the insurgents’ efforts, and they threshed at the invincible little band with smoking lead. On the one side was a host of Filipino rebels, believing by the incessant firing of the Kansans that it was facing an equal host. On the other side were sixteen men who, knowing the odds against them, dared the game of war to the limit.
“How many rounds have you left?” Captain Clarke asked.
“Only one,” came the answer.
“Give it to them when I give the word. We won’t run till our guns are empty,” the captain declared grimly.
The last shot was ready to fly, when a wild yell burst from the darkness behind them, the shouts to “remember the Maine,” mingled with the old university yell of “Rock Chalk, Jay Hawk, K. U. oo!” and reinforcements charged to the relief of the invincible sixteen.
What disaster might have followed the capture of the Tondo road and the attack upon the bridge is only conjecture. What did happen is history – type henceforth of that line of history every company of the Twentieth Kansas was to help to build. When daylight came, Thaine Aydelot saw the frontier line that he had proudly felt himself called hither to push back, and the reality of it was awful. He had pictured captured trenches, but he had not put in their decoration – the prone forms of dead Filipinos with staring eyes, seeing nothing earthly any more forever.
Beyond that line, however, lay the new wilderness that the Anglo-American must conquer, and he flung himself upon the firing line, as if the safety and honor of the American nation rested on his shoulders alone; while all his dreams of glorious warfare, where Greek meets Greek in splendid gallantry, faded out before the actual warfare of the days and nights that followed.
Thaine’s regiment, not the “Kansas Scarecrows,” but the “Fighting Twentieth” now, was one of the regiments on which rested the brunt of driving back and subduing the rebellious Filipinos. Swiftly the Kansas boys pushed into the unknown country north of Manila. They rushed across the rice fields, whose low dykes gave little protection from the enemy. They plunged through marshes, waist deep in water. They lay for hours behind their earthworks, half buried in muddy slime. They slept in holes, drenched to the skin. With the University yell for their battle cry of freedom, they tore through tropical jungles with the bullets of the enemy cutting the branches overhead or spattering the dirt about their feet.
The American regiments were six days in reaching Caloocan, a prosperous town only six miles north of Manila; a mile a day, every foot stubbornly contested.
On Sabbath morning in the first day’s struggle, Thaine was running in a line of soldiery toward the Filipino fortification, when he was halted beside a thatched hut that stood between the guns of both armies and was riddled with bullets.
“Help the corporal here, Aydelot, then double quick it ahead,” Lieutenant Krause commanded.
Thaine followed the corporal inside the hut where, shot to pieces, lay the mangled forms of women and children who had caught the storm of bullets from both firing lines. Through a gaping hole in the wall beyond, he saw a shallow pit where wounded and dead men and women were huddled together.
“Help me get out the live ones and send them back to Manila, and we’ll cover the others right here,” the corporal declared.
It was the neighborhood custom of the Grass River Valley for young men to assist at every funeral. Thaine had jokingly dubbed himself “official neighborhood pall-bearer,” and had served at so many funerals that the service had become merely one of silent dignity which he forgot the next hour. He knew just how to place the flowers effectively, when to step aside and wait, and when to come forward and take hold. And these were the only kinds of services he had known for the dead.
As he bent over the blood-smeared bodies to take up the wounded and dying now, the horror of war burst upon him, and no dead face could be more ashy gray than the young soldier’s face as he lifted it above a dying Filipino woman whom he stretched tenderly beside the hut. The next victim was a boy, a deserter from Manila, whom Thaine recognized by a scar across his cheek as the young Filipino whose wound Doctor Carey had dressed.
“You poor fellow!” Thaine said softly.
The boy’s eyes opened in recognition.
“For liberty,” he murmured in Spanish, with a scowling face. Then the scowl faded to a smile, and in a moment more he had entered eternal liberty.
A detachment of the Red Cross with a white-haired surgeon just then relieved the corporal of the wounded, and Thaine saw Dr. Horace Carey coming toward him.
“I know what you are thinking. Maybe your gun did a good deal of it. This is war, Thaine.”
The young man’s dark eyes burned with agony at the thought.
“Forget it,” Carey added hurriedly. “It is the lost cause here. I worked that line myself for four years long ago. I know the feeling. But this is the only medicine to give the islands here. They can’t manage liberty for themselves. You are giving them more freedom with your rifle today than they could get for themselves in a century. Don’t wet your powder with your tears. You may need it for the devil that’s after you now. Wait till you see a Kansas boy brought in and count the cost again. Good-by.”
The doctor hastened away with the wounded, and Thaine helped to straighten out the forms about him and to fill the pit where they were placed in one common grave.
“Wait till you see a Kansas boy brought in and then count the cost.”
Somehow, the words, ringing again and again down his mind, could not take away the picture of the thing he had just witnessed. And the dying gasp, “For liberty!” seemed to stab his soul, as he ran forward.
Two days later his company had orders to hold the trenches before a jungle filled with sharpshooters. All day the sun had blazed down upon them and the humid atmosphere had scalded them. All day the murderous “ping! ping!” of the hidden Mauser in the jungle had stung the air about them.
Late in the afternoon Thaine lay crouched behind his low defense with a college comrade on either side. Colonel Funston had just given the command to rid the woods of the sharpshooters, and the force ordered to the attack came racing by. Captain Clarke stood near Thaine’s post, and as the soldiers rushed forward, Lieutenant Alford halted beside him. Even in the thrill of the hour, the private down in the trenches felt a sense of bigger manhood as he looked at the young officer, for Alford was every inch a king; his soldier uniform became him like a robe of royalty. His fine face was aglow now with the enthusiasm of the battle and the assurance of victory.
Thaine did not hear the words of the two officers, for the jungle was beginning to roar with battle cries and bursting fire from many guns. But he knew the two had been boyhood friends, university chums, and military comrades, and the love of man for man shone in their faces.
Alford tarried but a moment with Clarke. As he spied Thaine and his comrades, he gave an instant’s glance of kindly recognition to the admiring young privates, and was gone. The three involuntarily rose to their feet, as if to follow him, and from three lusty throats they sent after him the beloved battle yell of the regiment, “Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K. U.!” then dropped to their places again and hugged the earth as the rifle balls whizzed about them.
“I’m glad I’m alive and I’m glad I know that man,” Thaine said to his neighbors.
“Alford’s a prince. I’ll bet he’ll clean that woods before he’s through. His work is always well done. Would you listen to that?” his comrade replied.
A tremendous crash of rifle shots seemed to split the jungle as the Kansas troops charged into it. The men in the trenches lay flat to the earth while the balls fell about them or sang a long whining note through the air over them. Fiercer grew the fray, and louder roared the guns, and wilder the bullets flew, as the fighting lines swept over the enemy’s earthworks and struck with deadly force into the heart of its wooded cover.
Then came a lull for shifting the fighting grip. A relief force was hurried to the front and the first companies retired for a brief rest. They fell back in order, while the aids came trooping out of the brush in groups, bearing the wounded to places of shelter. Thaine Aydelot and his comrades lifted their heads above the earthworks for an instant. Captain Clarke sat near on a little knoll staring hard at a stretcher borne toward him by the aids. The manner of covering indicated a dead body on it.
“How different the captain’s face is from what it was before the attack,” Thaine thought, as he recalled the moment when Clarke had talked with Lieutenant Alford. And then the image of the young lieutenant’s face, so full of life and hope and power and gentleness, swept vividly across his mind.
“Who is it, boys?” Clarke called to the soldiers with the stretcher.
“Lieutenant Alford,” they answered.
Something black dropped before Thaine Aydelot’s eyes and Doctor Carey’s words stung like powder burns in his memory.
“Wait till you see a Kansas boy brought in, and count the cost again.”
In civil life character builds slowly up to higher levels. In war, it leaps upward in an instant. Thaine sprang to his feet and stood up to his full height in the blaze of the tropical sunshine. He did not see his captain, who had dropped to the ground like a wounded thing, stabbed to the soul with an agony of sorrow. He did not see the still form of the young lieutenant outlined under the cover of the stretcher. He did not see the trenches nor the lines of khaki-clad, sun-browned soldiery plunging forward to rid the jungle of its deadly peril. In that one moment he looked down the years with clear vision, as his father, Asher Aydelot, had learned to look before him, and he saw manhood and a new worth in human deeds. He had been a sentimental dreamer, ambitious for honors fairly earned, and eager for adventure. The first shots in the night attack on the Tondo road made him a soldier. The martyrdom of Lieutenant Alford made him a patriot. Humanity must be worth much, it seemed to him, if, in the providence of God, such blood must be spilled to redeem it to nobler civilization.
Six weeks after the death of Alford before Caloocan, Dr. Horace Carey came up from the hospital in Manila to the American line to see Thaine Aydelot. The Kansas boys had been on duty in the trenches north of Caloocan for forty days, living beside the breastworks under the rude shelter of bamboo poles, watching a sleepless enemy – a life as full of wearing monotony and hardship as it was full of constant peril.
“Well, Thaine, how goes the game?” Carey asked, as he sat beside the young soldier from the Grass River Valley. “I helped you into this world. I’m glad I haven’t had to help you out yet.”
Carey had never before seen any resemblance to Asher Aydelot in his son’s face. It was purely a type of the old Thaine family of Virginia. But today, the pose of the head, the expression of the mouth, the far-seeing gaze of the dark eyes, bespoke the heritage of the house of Aydelot.
“I hope not to have any more help from you, either. You got me into the scrape; I’ll see to the rest,” Thaine replied. “Don’t I look all right? I haven’t had a bath, except in swamp mud, since the first of February. Today is the twenty-third of March. Neither have I seen a razor. Notice my silky beard. Nor a dress suit, nor a – anything else civilized. Six weeks in one hole, killing Filipinos for our amusement and dodging their old Remingtons for theirs, living on army rations and respect for the flag of my country, may not improve my appearance, but it hasn’t started me to the sick-shack yet. Any news from home?” Thaine ended with the question put so carelessly, with a face so impenetrable that Doctor Carey took notice at once.
“Homesick!” was his mental diagnosis, but he answered with equal carelessness.
“Yes, I had a letter from Leigh Shirley.”
Thaine’s eyes were too full of unspeakable things now for him to hold out.
“She says the alfalfa is doing well. She and Jim have kept up all the interest, and are beginning to reduce the principal. That’s why she wrote.”
“Brave little soldier,” Thaine muttered.
“Yes, civil life has its heroes, too,” the doctor responded. “She also says,” he continued, “that John Jacobs has had Hans Wyker convicted of running a joint and Hans had to pay a fine and stick in the Careyville jail thirty days. Hans won’t love John for that when he gets out.”
“What a hater of whisky John Jacobs is. He’s always on the firing line and never misses his aim, bless him!” Thaine declared.
“Yes, Jacobs’ battle is a steady one. He told me just before I left Kansas how his mother was killed in a saloon in Cincinnati when she was trying to get his father out of it. John wouldn’t live in a state that had no prohibitory law,” the doctor commented.
“Did Leigh write anything else?” Thaine asked.
“Yes. Jo Bennington and Todd Stewart are married. Pryor Gaines is in Pekin, and he writes that there are rumblings of trouble over there. Shall we go over and settle it when we finish the Filipino fuss?”
“Might as well. I’d like to see old Pryor. I’m glad Todd and Jo had sense enough to take each other. I suppose Jo overcame her notions of living only in the city. What else?” Thaine replied.
“Nothing else. That’s your message.” Carey’s black eyes held a shrewd twinkle.
“Why mine?” The impenetrable face was on Thaine again.
“See here, boy, don’t think I haven’t read her story, page by page. If Leigh had sent you a single line, I’d have begun to doubt.”
Thaine threw one arm about the doctor’s shoulder and said not a word. Then Carey read his story also.
“I nearly forgot to tell you that Leigh is doing well with her drawings. She sent me this, for which she had a good price paid her.”
Doctor Carey unfolded the paper back of a magazine having a bit of prairie landscape for a cover design. In the distance, three headlands swam in the golden haze of a Kansas October sunset, and their long purple shadows fell wide across the brown prairie and fields of garnered harvests.
Thaine studied it carefully, but offered no comment.
“Doctor Carey, what brought you to the Philippines?” he asked suddenly.
“To look after you,” Carey replied frankly.
“Me! Do I need it?”
“You may. In that case I’ll be first aid to the injured,” Carey answered. “I’m to go with the ’Fighting Twentieth’ when it starts out of these hog wallows toward the insurgents’ capital. I must get back to Manila and pack for it. I have my orders to be ready in twenty-four hours.”
In twenty-four hours the “Fighting Twentieth” left its six-weeks’ habitation in the trenches and began its campaign northward, and the young-hearted, white-haired physician with magnetic smile and skillful judgment found a work in army service so broad and useful that he loved it for its opportunity.
Fortunately, Thaine had no need for “first aid” from Doctor Carey, and he saw the doctor only rarely in the sixty days that followed. When the two had time for each other again, Colonel Fred Funston’s name had been written round the world in the annals of military achievement, the resourceful, courageous, beloved leader of a band of fighters from the Kansas prairies who were never defeated, never driven back, never daunted by circumstances. Great were the pen of that historian that could fittingly set forth all the deeds of daring and acts of humanity of every company under every brave captain, for they “all made history, and left records of unfading glory.”
The regiment had reached the Rio Grande, leaving no unconquered post behind it. Under fire, it had forded the Tulijan, shoulder-deep to the shorter men. Under fire, it had forged a way through Guiguinto and Malolos. Under fire, it had swam the Marilao and the Bagbag. And now, beyond Calumpit, the flower of Aguinaldo’s army was massed under General Luna, north of the Rio Grande. A network of strong fortifications lay between it and the river, and it commanded all the wide water-front.
As the soldiers waited orders on the south side of the river, Doctor Horace Carey left his work and sought out Thaine’s company, impelled by the same instinct that once turned him from the old Sunflower Trail to find Virginia Aydelot lost on the solitary snow-covered prairie beyond Little Wolf Creek.
“What’s before you now?” the doctor asked, as he and Thaine sat on the ground together.
“The Rio Grande now. We must be nearly to the end if we rout General Luna here,” Thaine replied.
“You’ve stood it well. I guess you don’t need me after all,” Carey remarked.
“I always need you, Doctor Carey,” Thaine said earnestly. “Never more than now. When I saw Captain Clarke wounded and carried away on the other side of the Tulijan, and could only say ’Captain, my captain,’ I needed you. When Captain Elliot was killed, I needed you; and when Captain William Watson was shot and wouldn’t stay dead because we need him so, and when Metcalf, Bishop, Agnew, Glasgow, Ramsey, and Martin, and all the other big-brained fellows do big things, I need you again. Life is a great game; I’m glad I’m in it.”
Horace Carey had never before seen Thaine’s bright face so alert with manly power and beauty and thoughtfulness. War had hardened him. Danger had tried him. Human needs, larger than battle lines alone can know, had strengthened him. Vision of large purposes had uplifted him. As he stood before the white-haired physician whom he had loved from earliest memory, Carey murmured to himself:
“Can the world find grander soldiers to fight its battles than these sun-browned boys from our old Kansas prairies?”
“We are going across to Luna’s stronghold in a few minutes. Watch him go into eclipse before Fred Funston. If you stand right here, you’ll see me helping at the job. Good-by,” Thaine declared, and, at the bugle call, fell into his place.
Beyond the river a steady fire was opened on the American forces, and no bridge nor boat was there by which to cross. Doctor Carey stood watching the situation with a strange sense of unrest in his mind.
“There must be rafts,” declared Colonel Funston.
And there were rafts, hastily made of bamboo poles.
“Somebody must swim across and fasten a cable over there by which to tow the rafts across. Who will volunteer? You see what’s before you,” Funston asserted.
Horace Carey saw two soldiers, Corporal Trembly and Private Edward White, seize the cable, plunge into the river, and strike out directly toward the farther side filled with Filipino forces. Rifle balls split the water about them. Bullet after bullet cut the air above them. Shot after shot from the ambushed enemy hurtled toward them. The two young men surged steadily ahead, bent only on reaching the bank and fastening the cable. They knew only one word, duty, and they did the thing they had agreed to do. Once across the river, they ran nimbly up the bank and made fast the rope’s end, while cheer after cheer rose from their comrades watching them, and the battle cry of the Fighting Twentieth, “Rock Chalk, Jay Hawk, K. U.,” went pulsing out across the waters of the Rio Grande as full and strong as in the days when it rolled out on the university campus on far-away Mount Oread, beside the Kaw.
