“I should think those Dalzel people would hire somebody to bring up their child for them,” said the doctor. “They don’t seem to know how to do it themselves.”
Presently you would have thought from the talk that one Willie Dalzel had been throwing stones at Peter Washington because Peter Washington had told Doctor Trescott that Willie Dalzel had come into possession of a revolver.
In the meantime Jimmie had gone into the house to await the coming of his father. He was in a rebellious mood. He had not intended to destroy the carriage-lamps. He had been merely hurling stones at a creature whose perfidy deserved such action, and the hitting of the lamps had been merely another move of the great conspirator Fate to force one Jimmie Trescott into dark and troublous ways. The boy was beginning to find the world a bitter place. He couldn’t win appreciation for a single virtue; he could only achieve quick, rigorous punishment for his misdemeanors. Everything was an enemy. Now there were those silly old lamps—what were they doing up on that shelf, anyhow? It would have been just as easy for them at the time to have been in some other place. But no; there they had been, like the crowd that is passing under the wall when the mason for the first time in twenty years lets fall a brick. Furthermore, the flight of that stone had been perfectly unreasonable. It had been a sort of freak in physical law. Jimmie understood that he might have thrown stones from the same fatal spot for an hour without hurting a single lamp. He was a victim—that was it. Fate had conspired with the detail of his environment to simply hound him into a grave or into a cell.
But who would understand? Who would understand? And here the boy turned his mental glance in every direction, and found nothing but what was to him the black of cruel ignorance. Very well; some day they would—
From somewhere out in the street he heard a peculiar whistle of two notes. It was the common signal of the boys in the neighborhood, and, judging from the direction of the sound, it was apparently intended to summon him. He moved immediately to one of the windows of the sitting room. It opened upon a part of the grounds remote from the stables and cut off from the veranda by a wing. He perceived Willie Dalzel loitering in the street. Jimmie whistled the signal after having pushed up the window sash some inches. He saw the Dalzel boy turn and regard him, and then call several other boys. They stood in a group and gestured. These gestures plainly said: “Come out. We’ve got something on hand.” Jimmie sadly shook his head.
But they did not go away. They held a long consultation. Presently Jimmie saw the intrepid Dalzel boy climb the fence and begin to creep among the shrubbery, in elaborate imitation of an Indian scout. In time he arrived under Jimmie’s window, and raised his face to whisper: “Come on out! We’re going on a bear-hunt.”
A bear-hunt! Of course Jimmie knew that it would not be a real bear-hunt, but would be a sort of carouse of pretension and big talking and preposterous lying and valor, wherein each boy would strive to have himself called Kit Carson by the others. He was profoundly affected. However, the parental word was upon him, and he could not move. “No,” he answered, “I can’t. I’ve got to stay in.”
“Are you a prisoner?” demanded the Dalzel boy, eagerly.
“No-o—yes—I s’pose I am.”
The other lad became much excited, but he did not lose his wariness. “Don’t you want to be rescued?”
“Why—no—I dun’no’,” replied Jimmie, dubiously.
Willie Dalzel was indignant. “Why, of course you want to be rescued! We’ll rescue you. I’ll go and get my men.” And thinking this a good sentence, he repeated, pompously, “I’ll go and get my men.” He began to crawl away, but when he was distant some ten paces he turned to say: “Keep up a stout heart. Remember that you have friends who will be faithful unto death. The time is not now far off when you will again view the blessed sunlight.”
The poetry of these remarks filled Jimmie with ecstasy, and he watched eagerly for the coming of the friends who would be faithful unto death. They delayed some time, for the reason that Willie Dalzel was making a speech.
“Now, men,” he said, “our comrade is a prisoner in yon—in yond—in that there fortress. We must to the rescue. Who volunteers to go with me?” He fixed them with a stern eye.
There was a silence, and then one of the smaller boys remarked, “If Doc Trescott ketches us trackin’ over his lawn—”
Willie Dalzel pounced upon the speaker and took him by the throat. The two presented a sort of burlesque of the woodcut on the cover of a dime novel which Willie had just been reading—The Red Captain: A Tale of the Pirates of the Spanish Main.
“You are a coward!” said Willie, through his clenched teeth.
“No, I ain’t, Willie,” piped the other, as best he could.
“I say you are,” cried the great chieftain, indignantly. “Don’t tell me I’m a liar.” He relinquished his hold upon the coward and resumed his speech. “You know me, men. Many of you have been my followers for long years. You saw me slay Six-handed Dick with my own hand. You know I never falter. Our comrade is a prisoner in the cruel hands of our enemies. Aw, Pete Washington? He dassen’t. My pa says if Pete ever troubles me he’ll brain ’im. Come on! To the rescue! Who will go with me to the rescue? Aw, come on! What are you afraid of?”
It was another instance of the power of eloquence upon the human mind. There was only one boy who was not thrilled by this oration, and he was a boy whose favorite reading had been of the road agents and gunfighters of the great West, and he thought the whole thing should be conducted in the Deadwood Dick manner. This talk of a “comrade” was silly; “pard” was the proper word. He resolved that he would make a show of being a pirate, and keep secret the fact that he really was Hold-up Harry, the Terror of the Sierras.
But the others were knit close in piratical bonds. One by one they climbed the fence at a point hidden from the house by tall shrubs. With many a low-breathed caution they went upon their perilous adventure.
Jimmie was grown tired of waiting for his friends who would be faithful unto death. Finally he decided that he would rescue himself. It would be a gross breach of rule, but he couldn’t sit there all the rest of the day waiting for his faithful-unto-death friends. The window was only five feet from the ground. He softly raised the sash and threw one leg over the sill. But at the same time he perceived his friends snaking among the bushes. He withdrew his leg and waited, seeing that he was now to be rescued in an orthodox way. The brave pirates came nearer and nearer.
Jimmie heard a noise of a closing door, and turning he saw his father in the room, looking at him and the open window in angry surprise. Boys never faint, but Jimmie probably came as near to it as may the average boy.
“What’s all this?” asked the doctor, staring. Involuntarily Jimmie glanced over his shoulder through the window. His father saw the creeping figures. “What are those boys doing?” he said, sharply, and he knit his brows.
“Nothin’.”
“Nothing! Don’t tell me that. Are they coming here to the window?”
“Y-e-s, sir.”
“What for?”
“To—to see me.”
“What about?”
“About-about nothin’.”
“What about?”
Jimmie knew that he could conceal nothing. He said, “They’re comin’ to—to—to rescue me.” He began to whimper.
The doctor sat down heavily.
“What? To rescue you?” he gasped.
“Y-yes, sir.”
The doctor’s eyes began to twinkle. “Very well,” he said presently. “I will sit here and observe this rescue. And on no account do you warn them that I am here. Understand?”
Of course Jimmie understood. He had been mad to warn his friends, but his father’s mere presence had frightened him from doing it. He stood trembling at the window, while the doctor stretched in an easy-chair near at hand. They waited. The doctor could tell by his son’s increasing agitation that the great moment was near. Suddenly he heard Willie Dalzel’s voice h
iss out a word: “S-s-silence!” Then the same voice addressed Jimmie at the window: “Good cheer, my comrade. The time is now at hand. I have come. Never did the Red Captain turn his back on a friend. One minute more and you will be free. Once aboard my gallant craft and you can bid defiance to your haughty enemies. Why don’t you hurry up? What are you standin’ there lookin’ like a cow for?”
“I—er—now—you—” stammered Jimmie.
Here Hold-up Harry, the Terror of the Sierras, evidently concluded that Willie Dalzel had had enough of the premier part, so he said: “Brace up, pard. Don’t ye turn white-livered now, fer ye know that Hold-up Harry, the Terrar of the Sarahs, ain’t the man ter—”
“Oh, stop it!” said Willie Dalzel. “He won’t understand that, you know. He’s a pirate. Now, Jimmie, come on. Be of light heart, my comrade. Soon you—”
“I ’low arter all this here long time in jail ye thought ye had no friends mebbe, but I tell ye Hold-up Harry, the Terrar of the Sarahs—”
“A boat is waitin’—”
“I have ready a trusty horse—”
Willie Dalzel could endure his rival no longer.
“Look here, Henry, you’re spoilin’ the whole thing. We’re all pirates, don’t you see, and you’re a pirate too.”
“I ain’t a pirate. I’m Hold-up Harry, the Terrar of the Sarahs.”
“You ain’t, I say,” said Willie, in despair. “You’re spoilin’ everything, you are. All right, now. You wait. I’ll fix you for this, see if I don’t! Oh, come on, Jimmie. A boat awaits us at the foot of the rocks. In one short hour you’ll be free for ever from your ex—excwable enemies, and their vile plots. Hasten, for the dawn approaches.”
The suffering Jimmie looked at his father, and was surprised at what he saw. The doctor was doubled up like a man with the colic. He was breathing heavily. The boy turned again to his friends. “I—now—look here,” he began, stumbling among the words. “You—I—I don’t think I’ll be rescued today.”
The pirates were scandalized. “What?” they whispered, angrily. “Ain’t you goin’ to be rescued? Well, all right for you, Jimmie Trescott. That’s a nice way to act, that is!” Their upturned eyes glowered at Jimmie.
Suddenly Doctor Trescott appeared at the window with Jimmie. “Oh, go home, boys!” he gasped, but they did not hear him. Upon the instant they had whirled and scampered away like deer. The first lad to reach the fence was the Red Captain, but Hold-up Harry, the Terror of the Sierras, was so close that there was little to choose between them.
Doctor Trescott lowered the window, and then spoke to his son in his usual quiet way. “Jimmie, I wish you would go and tell Peter to have the buggy ready at seven o’clock.”
“Yes, sir,” said Jimmie, and he swaggered out to the stables. “Pete, father wants the buggy ready at seven o’clock.”
Peter paid no heed to this order, but with the tender sympathy of a true friend he inquired, “Hu’t?”
“Hurt? Did what hurt?”
“Yer trouncin’.”
“Trouncin!” said Jimmie, contemptuously. “I didn’t get any trouncin’.”
“No?” said Peter. He gave Jimmie a quick shrewd glance, and saw that he was telling the truth. He began to mutter and mumble over his work. “Ump! Ump! Dese yer white folks act like they think er boy’s made er glass. No trouncin’! Ump!” He was consumed with curiosity to learn why Jimmie had not felt a heavy parental hand, but he did not care to lower his dignity by asking questions about it. At last, however, he reached the limits of his endurance, and in a voice pretentiously careless he asked, “Didn’ yer pop take on like mad erbout des yer cay’ge-lamps?”
“Carriage-lamps?” inquired Jimmie.
“Ump.”
“No, he didn’t say anything about carriage-lamps—not that I remember. Maybe he did, though. Lemme see.—No, he never mentioned ’em.”
February, 1900
[Harper’s Magazine, Vol. 100, pp. 366–372.]
* Whilomville Stories.
THE KICKING TWELFTH*
[“Kim up, the Kickers!”]
The Spitzbergen army was backed by tradition of centuries of victory. In its chronicles, occasional defeats were not printed in italics, but were likely to appear as glorious stands against overwhelming odds. A favorite way to dispose of them was frankly to attribute them to the blunders of the civilian heads of government. This was very good for the army, and probably no army had more self-confidence. When it was announced that an expeditionary force was to be sent to Rostina to chastise an impudent people, a hundred barrack squares filled with excited men, and a hundred sergeant majors hurried silently through the groups, and succeeded in looking as if they were the repositories of the secrets of empire. Officers on leave sped joyfully back to their harness, and recruits were abused with unflagging devotion by every man, from colonels to privates of experience.
The Twelfth Regiment of the Line–the Kicking Twelfth–was consumed with a dread that it was not to be included in the expedition, and the regiment formed itself into an informal indignation meeting. Just as they had proved that a great outrage was about to be perpetrated, warning orders arrived to hold themselves in readiness for active service abroad-in Rostina. The barrack yard was in a flash transferred into a blue-and-buff pandemonium, and the official bugle itself hardly had power to quell the glad disturbance.
Thus it was that early in the spring the Kicking Twelfth—sixteen hundred men in service equipment—found itself crawling along a road in Rostina. They did not form part of the main force, but belonged to a column of four regiments of foot, two batteries of field guns, a battery of mountain howitzers, a regiment of horse, and a company of engineers. Nothing had happened. The long column had crawled without amusement of any kind through a broad green valley. Big white farmhouses dotted the slopes; but there was no sign of man or beast, and no smoke from the chimneys. The column was operating from its own base, and its general was expected to form a junction with the main body at a given point.
A squadron of the cavalry was fanned out ahead, scouting, and day by day the trudging infantry watched the blue uniforms of the horsemen as they came and went. Sometimes there would sound the faint thuds of a few shots, but the cavalry was unable to find anything to engage.
The Twelfth had no record of foreign service, and it could hardly be said that it had served as a unit in the great civil war, when His Majesty the King had whipped the Pretender. At that time the regiment had suffered from two opinions, so that it was impossible for either side to depend upon it. Many men had deserted to the standard of the Pretender, and a number of officers had drawn their swords for him. When the King, a thorough soldier, looked at the remnant, he saw that they lacked the spirit to be of great help to him in the tremendous battles which he was waging for his throne. And so this emaciated Twelfth was sent off to a corner of the kingdom to guard a dockyard, where some of the officers so plainly expressed their disapproval of this policy that the regiment received its steadfast name, the Kicking Twelfth.
At the time of which I am writing the Twelfth had a few veteran officers and well-bitten sergeants; but the body of the regiment was composed of men who had never heard a shot fired excepting on the rifle range. But it was an experience for which they longed, and when the moment came for the corps’ cry—“Kim up, the Kickers”—there was not likely to be a man who would not go tumbling after his leaders.
Young Timothy Lean was a second lieutenant in the first company of the third battalion, and just at this time he was pattering along at the flank of the men, keeping a fatherly lookout for boots that hurt and packs that sagged. He was extremely bored. The mere faraway sound of desultory shooting was not war as he had been led to believe it.
It did not appear that behind that freckled face and under that red hair there was a mind which dreamed of blood. He was not extremely anxious to kill somebody, but he was very fond of soldiering—it had been the career of his father and of his grandfather—and he understood that the
profession of arms lost much of its point unless a man shot at people and had people shoot at him. Strolling in the sun through a practically deserted country might be a proper occupation for a divinity student on a vacation, but the soul of Timothy Lean was in revolt at it. Sometimes at night he would go morosely to the camp of the cavalry and hear the infant subalterns laughingly exaggerate the comedy side of the adventures which they had had out with small patrols far ahead. Lean would sit and listen in glum silence to these tales, and dislike the young officers—many of them old military school friends—for having had experience in modern warfare.
“Anyhow,” he said savagely, “presently you’ll be getting into a lot of trouble, and then the Foot will have to come along and pull you out. We always do. That’s history.”
“Oh, we can take care of ourselves,” said the Cavalry, with good-natured understanding of his mood.
But the next day even Lean blessed the cavalry, for excited troopers came whirling back from the front, bending over their speeding horses, and shouting wildly and hoarsely for the infantry to clear the way. Men yelled at them from the roadside as courier followed courier, and from the distance ahead sounded in quick succession six booms from field guns. The information possessed by the couriers was no longer precious. Everybody knew what a battery meant when it spoke. The bugles cried out, and the long column jolted into a halt. Old Colonel Sponge went bouncing in his saddle back to see the general, and the regiment sat down in the grass by the roadside and waited in silence. Presently the second squadron of the cavalry trotted off along the road in a cloud of dust, and in due time old Colonel Sponge came bouncing back and palavered his three majors and his adjutant. Then there was more talk by the majors, and gradually through the correct channels spread information which in due time reached Timothy Lean.
The enemy, 5000 strong, occupied a pass at the head of the valley some four miles beyond. They had three batteries well posted. Their infantry was entrenched. The ground in their front was crossed and lined with many ditches and hedges; but the enemy’s batteries were so posted that it was doubtful if a ditch would ever prove convenient as shelter for the Spitzbergen infantry.