CHAPTER II
The situation of John Spurrier, who was Jack Spurrier to every man inthat command, standing under the monstrous presumption of havingmurdered a brother officer, called for a reaccommodation of thebattalion's whole habit of thought. It demanded a new and unwelcomeword in their vocabulary of ideas, and against it argued, with the hotadvocacy of tested acquaintance, every characteristic of the manhimself, and every law of probability. For its acceptance spoke onlyone forceful plea--evidence which unpleasantly skirted the actualityof demonstration. Short of seeing Spurrier shoot his captain down andtoss his pistol through the open window, Major James could hardly havewitnessed a more damaging picture than the hurriedly opened door hadframed to his vision.
Within the close-drawn cordon of a post, held to military accountability,facts were as traceable as entries on a card index--and these factsbegan building to the lieutenant's undoing. They seemed to bring outlike acid on sympathetic ink the miracle of a Mr. Hyde where hiscomrades had known only a Doctor Jekyll.
The one man out of the two skeleton companies of infantry stationedin the interior town who remained seemingly impervious to thestrangulating force of the tightening net was Spurrier himself.
In another man that insulated and steady-eyed confidence might haveserved as a manifest of innocence and a proclamation of cleanconscience. But Spurrier wore a nick-name, until now lightlyconsidered, to which new conditions had added importance.
They had called him "The Plunger," and now they could not forget thenickeled and chrome-hardened gambling nerve which had won for him thesobriquet. There had been the _coup_ at Oakland, for example, when astretch finish had stood to ruin him or suddenly enrich him--anincident that had gone down in racing history and made cafe talk.
Through a smother of concealing dust and a thunder of hoofs, the fieldhad struggled into the stretch that afternoon, tight-bunched, with itssnapping silks too closely tangled for easy distinguishing--but thecerise cap that proclaimed Spurrier's choice was nowhere in sight. Thebookmakers pedestalled on their high stools with field glasses gluedto their eyes had been more excited than the young officer on theclub-house lawn, who put away his binoculars while the horses werestill in the back stretch and turned to chat with a girl.
Three lengths from the finish a pair of distended nostrils had thrustthemselves ahead of the other muzzles to catch the judges' eyes, andbending over steaming withers had nodded a cerise cap.
But the lieutenant who had escaped financial disaster and won aminiature fortune had gone on talking to the girl.
Might it not be suspected in these circumstances that "Plunger"Spurrier's refusal to treat his accusation seriously was only anattitude? He was sitting in a game now with his neck at stake and thecards running against him. Perhaps he was only bluffing as he hadnever bluffed before. Possibly he was brazening it out.
It was not until the battalion had hiked back through bosque and overmountains to Manila that the lieutenant faced his tribunal: a courtwhose simplified methods cut away the maze of technicalities at whicha man may grasp before a civilian jury of his peers.
If, when he actually sat in the room where the evidence was heard, hisassurance that he was to emerge clean-shriven began to reel underblows more powerful than he had expected, at least his face continuedto testify for him with an outward serenity of confidence.
Doctor James told his story with an admirable restraint and anabsolute absence of coloring. He had meant to go to Comyn, because heread in his eyes the signs of nerve waste and insomnia; the samethings that had caused too many suicides among the men whose nervousconstitutions failed to adapt themselves to the climate.
Before he had carried his purpose to fulfillment--perhaps a half hourbefore--he had gone to look in on the case of Private Grant, who wassuffering from just such a malady, though in a more serious degree.That private, a mountaineer from the Cumberland hills of Kentucky, hadbeen to all appearances merely a lunatic, although it was a case whichwould yield to treatment or perhaps come to recovery even if left toitself. On this night he had gone to see if Grant needed an opiate,but had found the patient apparently sleeping without restlessness,and had not roused him. At the door of the place where Grant wasunder guard, he had paused for a word with Private Severance whostood there on sentry duty.
It had been a sticky night following a hot day, and in the _calle_upon which lay the command in billets of nipa-thatched houses, no onebut himself and the sentries were astir during the twenty minutes hehad spent strolling in the moonlight. On rounding a corner he had seena light in Comyn's window, and he had gone around the angle of theadobe house, since the door was on the farther side, to offer thecaptain a sleeping potion, too. That was how he chanced on the sceneof the tragedy, just a moment too late for service.
"You say," began Spurrier's counsel, on cross-examination, "that youvisited Private Grant about half an hour before Captain Comyn waskilled and found him apparently resting naturally, although onprevious nights you had thought morphia necessary to quiet hisdelirium?"
The major nodded, then qualified slowly:
"Grant had not, of course, been continuously out of his head nor hadhe always slept brokenly. There had been lucid periods alternatingwith exhausting storm."
"You are not prepared to swear, though, that this seeming sleep mightnot have been feigned?"
"I am prepared to testify that it is most unlikely."
"Yet that same night he did make his escape and deserted. That istrue, is it not?"
The major bowed. "He had sought to escape before. That was symptomaticof his condition."
"And since then he has not been recaptured, though he was in youropinion too ill and deranged to have deceived you by feigning sleep?"
"Quite true."
"Have you ever heard Grant threaten Captain Comyn's life?"
"Never."
"Whether he had made such threats to your knowledge or not, he didcome from that hill county of the Kentucky mountains commonly calledBloody Brackton, did he not?"
"I believe so. His enlistment record will answer that."
"You do know, though, that the man on guard duty--the man with whomyou spoke outside--was Private Severance, also from the so-calledKentucky feud belt and a friend of the sick man?"
"I can testify of my own knowledge only that he was PrivateSeverance and that he and Grant were of the same platoon--LieutenantSpurrier's."
The defense advocate paused and carefully framed a hypotheticalquestion to be answered by the witness as a medical expert.
"I will now ask you to speak from your knowledge of blood tendenciesas affected or distorted by mental abnormalities. Suppose a man tohave been born and raised under a code which still adheres to feudalviolence and the private avenging of personal grievances both real andfancied. Suppose such a man to have conceived a bitter hatred againsthis commanding officer and to have brooded over that hatred until ithad become a fixed idea--a monomania--a determination to kill; supposesuch a man to have known only the fierce influences of his retardedhills until he came into the army and to have encountered there adiscipline which seemed to him a tyranny. I will ask you whether sucha man might not be apt to react to a homicidal mania under nervousderangement, and whether such a homicidal mania might not develop itsown craftiness of method?"
"Such," testified the medical officer, "is a conceivable but a highlyimaginative possibility."
Then Private Severance was called and came into the room, where hestood smartly at attention until instructed to take the witness chair.This dark-haired private from the Cumberlands looked the soldier fromcrown to sole leather, yet his features seemed to hold under theirpresent repose an ancient stamp of sullenness. It was an intangiblequality rather than an expression, as though it bore less relation tohis present than to some unconquerable survival from generations thathad passed on; generations that had been always peering into shadowsand searching them for lurking perils.
In his speech lingered quaintly remnants of dialect from the laur
eledhills that army life had failed to eradicate, and in his manner onecould note a wariness of extreme caution. That was easy to understand,because Private Severance, too, stood under the charge of havingpermitted a prisoner to escape, and his evidence would confront himlater when he in turn occupied the dock.
"I didn't have no speech with Bud Grant that night," he testified,"but I'd looked in some several times through the window. It was abarred window, an' every time I peeked through it I could see Budlayin' there asleep. The moon fell acrost his cot so I could see himplain."
"When did you see him last?"
"After Major James had been in and come out--a full fifteen minuteslater. I'm able to swear to that, because I noticed the moon just asthe major went out, and, when I looked in through the window the lasttime, the moon was a full quarter hour lower down to'rds settin'."
After a moment's pause the witness volunteered in amplification:"Where I come from we don't have many clocks or watches. We goes bythe sun and moon."
"Then you can swear that if Private Grant fired the shot that killedCaptain Comyn, he must have escaped and eluded your sight; armedhimself, crossed the plaza; turned the corner; accomplished the actand gotten clean away, all within the brief period of five minutes?"
"I can swear to more than that. He didn't get past me till _after_ thepistol went off. There wasn't no way out but by the one door, and Iwas right at that door all the time until I left it."
"When did you leave?"
The witness gave response without hesitation, yet with the sameserious weighing of his words.
"I was standing there, sorter peerin' up at the stars an' beginning tofeel right smart tired when I heard the shot. I heard the shout of thecorporal of the guard, too, an' then it was that I made my mistake."He paused and went on evenly. "I hadn't ought to have stirred awayfrom my post, but it seemed like a sort of a general alarm, an' I wentrunnin' to'rds it. That was the first chanst Bud had to get away.When I got back he was gone."
"You are sure he was still there when the shot sounded?"
"As God looks down, I can swear he was!"
Then the defense took the witness.
"When does your enlistment expire?"
"Two months, come Sunday."
"You know to the day, don't you? You are keenly anxious for that dayto come, aren't you?"
"Why wouldn't I be? I've got folks at home."
"Haven't you and Grant both been malcontents throughout your entireperiod of service?"
"It's news to me, if it's true."
"Haven't you often heard Private Grant swear vengeance against CaptainComyn?"
"Not no more than to belly-ache some little."
"Is it not a fact that since you and Grant ran amuck on the transportcoming over, and Comyn put you both in irons, the two of you had swornvengeance against him; that you had both taken the blood oath to gethim?"
Severance looked blankly at his questioner and blankly shook hishead.
"That's all new tidings ter me," he asserted with entire calmness.
"Don't you know that you deliberately let Grant out immediately afterthe visit of Major James and slipped him the pistol with which hefired the shot? Didn't you do that, knowing that when the reportsounded you could make it your excuse for leaving your post, and thenperjure yourself as to the time?"
"I know full well," asserted the witness with an unshaken composure,"that nothing like that didn't happen."
Fact built on fact until even the defendant's counsel found himselfarguing against a growing and ugly conviction. The pistol had beenidentified as Spurrier's, and his explanation that he had left ithanging in his holster at his quarters, whence some unknown personmight have abstracted it, lacked persuasiveness. The defense built astructure of hypothesis based upon the fact that the open door ofSpurrier's room was visible from the house where Grant had beentossing on his cot. The claim was urgently advanced that a skulkinglunatic might easily have seen the glint of blued steel, and have beenspurred in his madness by the temptation of such an implement ready tohis hand. But that, too, was held to be a fantastic claim. So theverdict was guilty and the sentence life imprisonment. It must havebeen death, had the case, for all its warp of presumption and woof oflogic, been other than circumstantial.
The defendant felt that this mitigation of the extreme penalty was amisplaced mercy. The disgrace could be no blacker and death would atleast have brought to its period the hideousness of the nightmarewhich must now stretch endlessly into the future.
It was to a prisoner, sentenced and branded, that Major Withers cameone afternoon when the court-martial of Lieutenant Spurrier had runits course as topic-in-chief for the Officers' Club at Manila. Othermatters were already crowding it out of the minds it had profoundlyshocked.
"I want to talk to you, Jack," began the major bluntly. "I want totalk to you with a candor that grows out of the affection we all feltfor you--before this damnable thing upset our little world. My God,boy, you had life in your sling. You had every quality that makes thesoldier; you had every social requisite except wealth. This besettingpassion for gambling has brought the whole train of disaster--aslogically as if you had killed him at the card table itself."
"You are overlooking the fact, major," interrupted the prisoner dryly,"that I didn't kill him. Moreover, it's too late now for the warningto benefit me. I dare say in Leavenworth I shall have no troublecurbing my passion for gaming." He paused and added with an irony ofdespairing bitterness: "But I suppose I should thank you and say, likethe negro standing on the gallows, 'dis hyar is surely g'wine to be agreat lesson ter me.'" Suddenly the voice broke and the young manwheeled to avert his face. "My God," he cried out, "why didn't you letthem hang me or shoot me? Any man can stiffen his legs and his spinefor five minutes of dying--even public dying--but back of those wallswith a convict's number instead of a name----" There he broke off andthe battalion commander laid a hand on his heaving shoulder.
"I didn't come to rub in preachments while you stood at the edge ofthe scaffold or the jail, Jack. My warning may not be too late, afterall. We've passed the matter up to the war department with a strongrecommendation for clemency. We mean to pull every wire that canhonorably be pulled. We're making the most of your good recordheretofore and of the conviction being based on circumstantialevidence."
He paused a moment and then went on with a trifle of embarrassment inhis voice:
"You know that Senator Beverly is at the governor general'spalace--and that his daughter is with him."
Spurrier wheeled at that and stood facing his visitor with eyes thathad kindled, but in which the light at once faded as he commentedshortly:
"Neither the senator nor Augusta has made any effort to see me since Iwas brought to Manila."
"Perhaps the senator thought that was best, Jack," argued Withers."For the daughter, of course, I'm not prepared to speak--but I knowthat Beverly has been keeping the cable hot in your behalf. Your namehas become so familiar to the operators between here and Washingtonthat they don't spell it out any more: they only need to rap out Sp.now--and if I needed a voice to speak for me on Pennsylvania Avenue oron Capitol Hill, there's no man I'd pick before the senator."
When he had gone Spurrier sat alone and to his ears came the distantplaying of a band in the plaza. Somewhere in that ancient town was thegirl who had not been to see him, nor written to him, even though,just before his battalion had gone into the bosques across themountains, she had let him slip a ring on her finger, and had answered"yes" to his question--the most personal question in the world.
The Law of Hemlock Mountain Page 2