The Law of Hemlock Mountain.

by Hugh Lundsford.

CHAPTER I

The officer whose collar ornaments were the winged staff and serpents of the medical branch, held what was left of the deck in his right hand and moistened the tip of his thumb against the tip of his tongue.

"Reenforcements, major?" he inquired with a glance to the man at his left, and the poker face of the gentleman so addressed remained impervious to expression as the answer was given back:

"No, I'll stand by what I've got here."

If the utterance hung on a quarter second of indecision it was a circ.u.mstance that went unnoted, save possibly by a young man with the single bars of a lieutenant on his shoulder straps--and Spurrier gave no flicker of recognition of what had escaped the others.

Between the whitewashed walls of the room where the little group of officers sat at cards the Philippine night breeze stirred faintly with a fevered breath that scarcely disturbed the jalousies.

The pile of poker chips had grown to a bulkiness and value out of just proportion to the means of army officers below field rank--and except for the battalion, commander and the surgeon none there held higher grade than a captaincy. This jungle-hot weather made men irresponsible.

One or two of the faces were excitedly flushed; several others were morosely dark. The lights guttered with a jaundiced yellow and sweat beaded the temples of the players. Sweat, too, made slippery the enameled surfaces of the pasteboards. Sweat seemed to ooze and simmer in their brains like the oil from overheated asphalt.

These men had been forced into a companionship of monotony in a climate of unhealth until their studied politeness, even their forced jocularity was rather the effort of toleration than the easy play of comradeship. Their arduously wooed excitement of draw-poker, which had run improvidently out of bounds, was not a pleasure so much as an expedient against the boredom that had rubbed their tempers threadbare and put an edgy sharpness on their nerves.

Captain Comyn, upon whose call for cards the dealer now waited, was thinking of Private Grant out there under guard in the improvised hospital. The islands had "gotten to" Private Grant and "locoed" him, and he had breathed sulphurous maledictions against Captain Comyn's life--but it was not those threats that now disturbed the company commander.

Of late Captain Comyn had been lying awake at night and wondering if he, too, were not going the same way as the unfortunate file. Horribly quiet fears had been stealing poisonously into his mind--a mind not given to timidities--and the word "melancholia" had a.s.sumed for him a morbid and irresistible compulsion. No one save the captain's self knew of these secret hauntings, born of climate and smoldering fever, and he would not have revealed them on the torture rack. For them he entertained the same shame as that of a boy grown too large for such weakness, who shudders with an unconfessed fear of the dark. But he could no more shake them loose and be free of them than could the Ancient Mariner rid himself of the bird of ill-omen tied about his neck. Now he pulled himself together and tossed away a single card.

"I'll take one in the place of that," he commented with studied carelessness, and Lieutenant John Spurrier, with that infectious smile which came readily to his lips, pointed a contrast with the captain's abstraction by the snappy quickness of his announcement:

"If I'm going to trail along, I'll need three. Yes, three, please, major."

"When Spurrier sits in the game," commented a player who, with a dolorous glance at the booty before him, threw down his hands, "we at least get action. Myself, I'm out of it."

The battalion commander studied the ceiling with a troubled furrow between his brows which was not brought there by the hazards of luck.

He was reflecting that whenever a game was organized it was Spurrier who quickened its tempo from innocuous amus.e.m.e.nt to reckless extravagance. Spurrier, fitted for his life with so many soldierly qualities, was still, above all else, a plunger. That spirit seemed a pa.s.sion that filled and overflowed him. Temperate in other habits, he played like a nabob. The major remembered hearing that even at West Point Jack Spurrier had narrowly, escaped dismissal for gambling in quarters, though his cla.s.s standing had been distinguished and his gridiron record had become a tradition.

This sort of game with "the roof off and deuces wild," was not good for the _morale_ of his junior officers, mused the major. It was like spiking whisky with absinthe. Yes, to-morrow he would have Spurrier at his quarters and talk to him like a Dutch uncle.

There were three left battling for the often sweetened pot now, with three more who had dropped out, looking on, and a tensity enveloped the long-drawn climax of the evening's session.

Captain Comyn's cheek bones had reddened and his irascible frown lines deepened. For the moment his fears of melancholia had been swallowed up in a fitful fury against Spurrier and his smiling face.

At last came the decisive moment of the final call and the show-down, and through the dead silence of the moment sounded the distant sing-song of a sentry:

"Corporal of the guard, number one, relief!"

Over the window sill a tiny green lizard slithered quietly and hesitated, pressing itself flat against the whitewash.

Then the major's cards came down face upward--and showed a queen-high straight.

"Not quite good enough, major," announced Comyn brusquely as his breath broke from him with a sort of gasp and he spread out a heart flush.

But Spurrier, who had drawn three cards, echoed the captain's words: "Not quite good enough." He laid down two aces and two deuces, which under the cutthroat rule of "deuces wild" he was privileged to call four aces.

Comyn came to his feet and pushed back his chair, but he stood unsteadily. The fever in his bones was playing queer pranks with his brain. He, whose courtesy had always been marked in its punctilio, blazed volcano-fashion into the eruption that had been gathering through these abnormal days and nights.

Yet even now the long habit of decorum held waveringly for a little before its breaking, and he began with a queer strain in his voice:

"You'll have to take my IOU. I've lost more than I can pay on the peg."

"That's all right, Comyn," began the victor, "Pay when----" but before he could finish the other interrupted with a frenzy of anger:

"No, by G.o.d, it's not all right! It's all wrong, and this is the last game I sit in where they deal a hand to you."

Spurrier's smiling lips tightened instantly out of their infectious amiability into a forbidding straightness. He pushed aside the chips he had been stacking and rose stiffly.

"That's a statement, Captain Comyn," he said with a warning note in his level voice, "which requires some explaining."

The abrupt bursting of the tempest had left the others in a tableau of amazement, but now the authoritative voice of Major Withers broke in upon the dialogue.

"Gentlemen, this is an army post, and I am in command here. I will tolerate no quarrels."

Without shifting the gaze of eyes that held those of the captain, Spurrier answered insistently:

"I have every respect, major, for the requirements of discipline--but Captain Comyn must finish telling why he will no longer play cards with me."

"And I'll tell you _p.r.o.nto_," came the truculent response. "I won't play with you because you are too d.a.m.ned lucky."

"Oh!" Spurrier's tensity of expression relaxed into something like amus.e.m.e.nt for the anticlimax. "That accusation can be stomached, I suppose."

"Too d.a.m.ned lucky," went on the other with a gathering momentum of rancor, "and too continuously lucky for a game that's not professional.

When a man is so proficient--or lucky if you prefer--that the card table pays him more than the government thinks he's worth, it's time----"

Spurrier stepped forward.

"It's time for you to stop," he cautioned sharply. "I give you the fairest warning!"

But Comyn, riding the flood tide of his pa.s.sion--a pa.s.sion of distempered nerves--was beyond the reach of warnings and his words came in a bitter outpouring:

"I dare say it was only luck that let you bankrupt young Tillsdale, but it was as fatal to him as if it bore an uglier name."

The sound in Spurrier's throat was incoherent and his bodily impulse swift beyond interference. His flat palm smote Captain Comyn's cheek, to come away leaving a red welt behind it, and as the others swept forward to intervene the two men grappled.

They were torn apart, still struggling, as Major Withers, unaccustomed to the brooking of such mutinies, interposed between them the bulk of his body and the moral force of his indignantly blazing eyes.

"I will have no more of this," he thundered. "I am not a prize-fight referee, that I must break my officers out of clinches! Go to your quarters, Comyn! You, too, Spurrier. You are under arrest. I shall prefer charges against you both. I mean to make an example of this matter."

But with a strange abruptness the fury died out of Comyn's face. It left his pa.s.sion-distorted features so instantly that the effect of transformation was uncanny. In a breathing s.p.a.ce he seemed older and his eyes held the dark dejection of utter misery. His anger had flared and died before that grimmer emotion which secretly haunted him--the fear that he was going the way of climate-crazed Private Grant.