Anting-Anting Stories by Sargent Kayme (read full novel .TXT) 📕

The next day the young soldier’s mother saw the General and told her story to him. In the mean time, apprised by the Colonel of the regiment of the woman’s errand, the General had had a report of the case brought to him. Heber Smith had been sent out with a small scouting party. They had been ambushed, and instead of trying to fight, he had left the men and had run back to cover.

“But that don’t necessarily make him a coward,” the young man’s mother pleaded with the General. “A coward is a man who plans to run away. He lost his head that time. Wasn’t that the first time he had been put in such a place?”

The officer admitted that it was.

“Well, then he can live it down. He has got to, for the sake of his father’s reputation as well as his own. His father was a soldier, too,” she said proudly. “He was in the Union army four years, and had a medal given to him for bravery, and every spring since he died the members of his Grand Army Post have decorated his grave. When Heber comes to think of that, I know he will come back.”

The General was not an old man;—that is he was not so old but that, back in her prairie home in a western state, there was a mother to whom he wrote letters, a mother whom he knew to value above his life itself his reputation. The thought of her came to him now.

“I will do what I can, Mrs. Smith” he said, “to help you find your boy. I fear I cannot give you any hope, though, and if he should be found I cannot promise you anything as to his future.”

“Thank you,” said the woman. “That is all I can ask.”

And so it came about that Mrs. Hannah Smith was enrolled as a nurse, and assigned to duty as near the front in the island of Luzon as any nurse could go.

Six months passed, and then another six came near to their end. Mrs. Smith renewed the lease of the farm back among the New England hills for another year, and wrote to a neighbor’s wife to see that her woolen clothes and furs were aired and then packed away with a fresh supply of camphor to keep the moths out of them.

In this year’s time Mrs. Smith had picked up a wonderful smattering of the Spanish and Tagalog languages for a woman who had lived the life she had before she came to the East. The reason for this, so her companions said, was her being “just possessed to talk with those native prisoners who are brought wounded to the hospital.” The other nurses liked her. She not only was willing to take the cases they liked least—the natives—but asked for them.

And sometime in the course of their hospital experience, all Mrs. Smith’s native patients—if they did not die before they got able to talk coherently—had to go through the same catechism:

Was there a white man among the people from whom they had come; a white man who had come there from the American army?

Was he a tall young man with light hair and a smooth face?

Did he have a three-cornered white scar on one side of his chin, where a steer had hooked him when he was a boy?

Did he look like this picture? (A photograph was shown the patient)

From no one, though, did she get the answer that her heart craved. Some of the prisoners knew white men that had come among the Tagalog natives, but no one knew a man who answered to this description.

One day a native prisoner who had been brought in more than a week before, terribly wounded, opened his eyes to consciousness for the first time, after days and nights of stupor. He was one of these who naturally fell, now, to “Mrs. Smith’s lot,” as the surgeons called them. As soon as the nurse’s watchful eyes saw the change in the man she came to him and bent over his cot.

“Water, please,” he murmured

The woman brought the water, her two natures struggling to decide what she should do after she had given it to him. As nurse, she knew the man ought not to be allowed to talk then. As mother, she was impatient to ask him where he had learned to speak English, and to inquire if he knew her boy.

The nurse conquered. The patient drank the water and was allowed to go to sleep again undisturbed.

In time, though, he was stronger, and then, one day, the mother’s questions were asked for the hundredth time; and the last.

Yes, the prisoner patient knew just such a man. He had come among the people of the tribe many months ago. He was a tall, fair young man, and he had such a scar as the “señora,” described. He was a fine young man. Once, when this man’s father had been sick, the white man had doctored him and made him well. It was this white man, the patient said, who had taught him the little English that he knew.

“Yes,” when he saw the photograph of Heber Smith, “that is the man. He has a picture, too,” the patient said, “two pictures, little ones, set in a little gold box which hangs on his watch chain.”

The hospital nurse unclasped a big cameo breast pin from the throat of her gown and held it down so that the man in bed could see a daguerreotype set in the back of the pin.

“Was one of the pictures like that?” she asked.

The Tagalog looked at the picture, a likeness of a middle-aged man wearing the coat and hat of the Grand Army of the Republic. In the picture a medal pinned on to the breast of the man’s coat showed.

“Yes,” said he, “one of the pictures is like that.”

Then he looked up curiously at the woman sitting beside his bed. “The other picture is that of a woman,” he went on, “and—yes—” still studying her face, “I think it must be you. Only,” he added, “it doesn’t look very much like you.”

“No,” said the woman, with a grim smile, “it doesn’t. It was taken a good many years ago, when I was younger than I am now, and when I hadn’t been baked for a year in this heathen climate. It’s me, though.”

In time, Juan, that was the man’s name, was so far recovered of his wound that he was to be discharged from the hospital and placed with the other able-bodied prisoners. The hospital at that time occupied an old convent. The day before Juan was to be discharged, Mrs. Smith managed her cases so that for a time no one else was left in one of the rooms with her but this man.

“Juan,” she said, when she was sure they were alone, and that no one was anywhere within hearing, “do you feel that I have done anything to help you to get well?”

The man reached down, and taking one of the nurse’s hands in his own bent over and kissed it.

“Señora,” he said, “I owe my life to you.”

“Will you do something for me, then? Something which I want done more than anything else in the world?”

“My life is the señora’s. I would that I had ten lives to give her.”

The woman pulled a letter from out the folds of her nurse’s dress. The envelope was not sealed, and before she fastened it she took the letter which was in it out and read it over for one last time. Then, pulling from her waist a little red, white and blue badge pin—one of those patriotic emblems which so many people wear at times—she dropped this into the letter, sealed the envelope, and handed it to the Tagalog. The envelope bore no address.

“I hav’n’t put the name of the place on it you said you came from,” she told the man, “because goodness only knows how it is spelled; I don’t. Besides that, it isn’t necessary. You know the place, and you know the man; the man who has got my picture and his father’s in a gold locket on his watch chain. I want you to give this letter into his own hands. I expect it will be rather a ticklish job for you to get away from here and get through the lines, but I guess you can do it if you try. Other men have. Don’t start until you are well enough so you will have strength to make the whole trip.”

A week or so after that, one of the surgeons making his daily visit reported that Juan had made his escape the previous night, and up to that time had not been brought back.

“What a shame!” said one of the other nurses. “After all the care you gave that man, Mrs. Smith. It does seem as if he might have had a little more gratitude.”

Mrs. Smith said nothing aloud. But to herself, when she was alone, she said: “Well, I suppose some folks would say that I wasn’t acting right, but I guess I’ve saved the lives of enough of those men since I’ve been here so that I’m entitled to one of them if I want him.”

Then she went on with her work, and waited; and the waiting was harder than the work.

An American expedition was slowly toiling across the island of Luzon to locate and occupy a post in the north. Four companies of men marched in advance, with a guard in the rear. Between them were the mule teams with the camp luggage and the ever present hospital corps. No trace of the enemy had been seen in that part of the island for weeks. Scouts who had gone on in advance had reported the way to be clear, and the force was being hurried up to get through a ravine which it was approaching, so it could go into camp for the night on high, level ground just beyond the valley.

Suddenly a man’s voice rang out upon the hot air; an English, speaking voice, strong and clear, and coming, so it seemed at first to the troops when they heard it, from the air above them:

“Halt! Halt!” the voice cried.

“Go back! There is an ambush on both sides! Save yourselves! Be—”

The warning was unfinished. Those of the Americans who had located the sound of the words and had looked in the direction from which they came, had seen a white man standing on the rocky side of the ravine above them and in front of them. They had seen him throw up his arms and fall backward out of sight, leaving his last sentence unfinished. Then there had come the report of a gun, and then an attack, with scores of shouting Tagalogs swarming down the sides of the ravine.

The skirmish was over, though, almost as soon as it had begun, and with little harm to any of the Americans except to such of the scouts as had been cut off in advance. The warning had come in time—had come before the advancing column had marched between the forces hidden on both sides of the ravine. The Tagalogs could not face the fire with which the Americans met them. They fled up the ravine, and up both sides of the gorge, into the shelter of the forest, and were gone. The Americans, satisfied at length that the way was clear, moved forward and went into camp on the ground which had