But the lieutenant who had escaped financial disaster and won a miniature fortune had gone on talking to the girl.

Might it not be suspected in these circ.u.mstances that "Plunger"

Spurrier's refusal to treat his accusation seriously was only an att.i.tude? He was sitting in a game now with his neck at stake and the cards running against him. Perhaps he was only bluffing as he had never bluffed before. Possibly he was brazening it out.

It was not until the battalion had hiked back through bosque and over mountains to Manila that the lieutenant faced his tribunal: a court whose simplified methods cut away the maze of technicalities at which a man may grasp before a civilian jury of his peers.

If, when he actually sat in the room where the evidence was heard, his a.s.surance that he was to emerge clean-shriven began to reel under blows more powerful than he had expected, at least his face continued to testify for him with an outward serenity of confidence.

Doctor James told his story with an admirable restraint and an absolute absence of coloring. He had meant to go to Comyn, because he read in his eyes the signs of nerve waste and insomnia; the same things that had caused too many suicides among the men whose nervous const.i.tutions failed to adapt themselves to the climate.

Before he had carried his purpose to fulfillment--perhaps a half hour before--he had gone to look in on the case of Private Grant, who was suffering from just such a malady, though in a more serious degree.

That private, a mountaineer from the c.u.mberland hills of Kentucky, had been to all appearances merely a lunatic, although it was a case which would yield to treatment or perhaps come to recovery even if left to itself. 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 was under guard, he had paused for a word with Private Severance who stood 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 one but himself and the sentries were astir during the twenty minutes he had spent strolling in the moonlight. On rounding a corner he had seen a light in Comyn's window, and he had gone around the angle of the adobe house, since the door was on the farther side, to offer the captain a sleeping potion, too. That was how he chanced on the scene of the tragedy, just a moment too late for service.

"You say," began Spurrier's counsel, on cross-examination, "that you visited Private Grant about half an hour before Captain Comyn was killed and found him apparently resting naturally, although on previous nights you had thought morphia necessary to quiet his delirium?"

The major nodded, then qualified slowly:

"Grant had not, of course, been continuously out of his head nor had he always slept brokenly. There had been lucid periods alternating with exhausting storm."

"You are not prepared to swear, though, that this seeming sleep might not 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 is true, is it not?"

The major bowed. "He had sought to escape before. That was symptomatic of his condition."

"And since then he has not been recaptured, though he was in your opinion 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 did come from that hill county of the Kentucky mountains commonly called b.l.o.o.d.y 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 whom you spoke outside--was Private Severance, also from the so-called Kentucky feud belt and a friend of the sick man?"

"I can testify of my own knowledge only that he was Private Severance and that he and Grant were of the same platoon--Lieutenant Spurrier's."

The defense advocate paused and carefully framed a hypothetical question to be answered by the witness as a medical expert.

"I will now ask you to speak from your knowledge of blood tendencies as affected or distorted by mental abnormalities. Suppose a man to have been born and raised under a code which still adheres to feudal violence and the private avenging of personal grievances both real and fancied. Suppose such a man to have conceived a bitter hatred against his commanding officer and to have brooded over that hatred until it had become a fixed idea--a monomania--a determination to kill; suppose such a man to have known only the fierce influences of his r.e.t.a.r.ded hills until he came into the army and to have encountered there a discipline which seemed to him a tyranny. I will ask you whether such a man might not be apt to react to a homicidal mania under nervous derangement, and whether such a homicidal mania might not develop its own craftiness of method?"

"Such," testified the medical officer, "is a conceivable but a highly imaginative possibility."

Then Private Severance was called and came into the room, where he stood smartly at attention until instructed to take the witness chair.

This dark-haired private from the c.u.mberlands looked the soldier from crown to sole leather, yet his features seemed to hold under their present repose an ancient stamp of sullenness. It was an intangible quality rather than an expression, as though it bore less relation to his present than to some unconquerable survival from generations that had pa.s.sed on; generations that had been always peering into shadows and searching them for lurking perils.

In his speech lingered quaintly remnants of dialect from the laureled hills that army life had failed to eradicate, and in his manner one could note a wariness of extreme caution. That was easy to understand, because Private Severance, too, stood under the charge of having permitted a prisoner to escape, and his evidence would confront him later 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 a barred window, an' every time I peeked through it I could see Bud layin' there asleep. The moon fell acrost his cot so I could see him plain."

"When did you see him last?"

"After Major James had been in and come out--a full fifteen minutes later. I'm able to swear to that, because I noticed the moon just as the major went out, and, when I looked in through the window the last time, 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 by the sun and moon."

"Then you can swear that if Private Grant fired the shot that killed Captain Comyn, he must have escaped and eluded your sight; armed himself, crossed the plaza; turned the corner; accomplished the act and 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_ the pistol went off. There wasn't no way out but by the one door, and I was right at that door all the time until I left it."

"When did you leave?"

The witness gave response without hesitation, yet with the same serious weighing of his words.

"I was standing there, sorter peerin' up at the stars an' beginning to feel right smart tired when I heard the shot. I heard the shout of the corporal 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 away from my post, but it seemed like a sort of a general alarm, an' I went runnin' 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 G.o.d 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 day to 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 entire period of service?"

"It's news to me, if it's true."

"Haven't you often heard Private Grant swear vengeance against Captain Comyn?"

"Not no more than to belly-ache some little."