The situation of John Spurrier, who was Jack Spurrier to every man in that command, standing under the monstrous presumption of having murdered a brother officer, called for a reaccommodation of the battalion’s whole habit of thought. It demanded a new and unwelcome word in their vocabulary of ideas, and against it argued, with the hot advocacy of tested acquaintance, every characteristic of the man himself, and every law of probability. For its acceptance spoke only one forceful plea—evidence which unpleasantly skirted the actuality of demonstration. Short of seeing Spurrier shoot his captain down and toss his pistol through the open window, Major James could hardly have witnessed a more damaging picture than the hurriedly opened door had framed 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 facts began building to the lieutenant’s undoing. They seemed to bring out like acid on sympathetic ink the miracle of a Mr. Hyde where his comrades had known only a Doctor Jekyll.

The one man out of the two skeleton companies of infantry stationed in the interior town who remained seemingly impervious to the strangulating force of the tightening net was Spurrier himself.

In another man that insulated and steady-eyed confidence might have served as a manifest of innocence and a proclamation of clean conscience. But Spurrier wore a nick-name, until now lightly considered, to which new conditions had added importance.

They had called him “The Plunger,” and now they could not forget the nickeled and chrome-hardened gambling nerve which had won for him the sobriquet. There had been the coup at Oakland, for example, when a stretch finish had stood to ruin him or suddenly enrich him—an incident that had gone down in racing history and made cafÉ talk.

Through a smother of concealing dust and a thunder of hoofs, the field had struggled into the stretch that afternoon, tight-bunched, with its snapping silks too closely tangled for easy distinguishing—but the cerise cap that proclaimed Spurrier’s choice was nowhere in sight. The bookmakers pedestalled on their high stools with field glasses glued to their eyes had been more excited than the young officer on the club-house lawn, who put away his binoculars while the horses were still in the back stretch and turned to chat with a girl.

Three lengths from the finish a pair of distended nostrils had thrust themselves ahead of the other muzzles to catch the judges’ eyes, and bending over steaming withers had nodded a cerise cap.

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 circumstances that “Plunger” Spurrier’s refusal to treat his accusation seriously was only an attitude? He was sitting 14 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 assurance 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 constitutions 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 Cumberland 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 15 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 16 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 Bloody 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 retarded hills until he came 17 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 Cumberlands 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 passed 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 18 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. 19 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 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.”

“Is it not a fact that since you and Grant ran amuck on the transport coming over, and Comyn put you both in irons, the two of you had sworn vengeance against him; that you had both taken the blood oath to get him?”

Severance looked blankly at his questioner and blankly shook his head.

“That’s all new tidings ter me,” he asserted with entire calmness.

“Don’t you know that you deliberately let Grant out immediately after the visit of Major James and slipped him the pistol with which he fired the shot? Didn’t you do that, knowing that when the report sounded you could make it your excuse for leaving your post, and then perjure yourself as to the time?”

“I know full well,” asserted the witness with an unshaken 20 composure, “that nothing like that didn’t happen.”

Fact built on fact until even the defendant’s counsel found himself arguing against a growing and ugly conviction. The pistol had been identified as Spurrier’s, and his explanation that he had left it hanging in his holster at his quarters, whence some unknown person might have abstracted it, lacked persuasiveness. The defense built a structure of hypothesis based upon the fact that the open door of Spurrier’s room was visible from the house where Grant had been tossing on his cot. The claim was urgently advanced that a skulking lunatic might easily have seen the glint of blued steel, and have been spurred in his madness by the temptation of such an implement ready to his hand. But that, too, was held to be a fantastic claim. So the verdict was guilty and the sentence life imprisonment. It must have been death, had the case, for all its warp of presumption and woof of logic, been other than circumstantial.

The defendant felt that this mitigation of the extreme penalty was a misplaced mercy. The disgrace could be no blacker and death would at least have brought to its period the hideousness of the nightmare which must now stretch endlessly into the future.

It was to a prisoner, sentenced and branded, that Major Withers came one afternoon when the court-martial of Lieutenant Spurrier had run its course as topic-in-chief for the Officers’ Club at Manila. Other matters were already crowding it out of the minds it had profoundly shocked.

“I want to talk to you, Jack,” began the major bluntly. “I want to talk to you with a candor that 21 grows out of the affection we all felt for you—before this damnable thing upset our little world. My God, boy, you had life in your sling. You had every quality that makes the soldier; you had every social requisite except wealth. This besetting passion for gambling has brought the whole train of disaster—as logically 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 warning to benefit me. I dare say in Leavenworth I shall have no trouble curbing my passion for gaming.” He paused and added with an irony of despairing bitterness: “But I suppose I should thank you and say, like the negro standing on the gallows, ’dis hyar is surely g’wine to be a great lesson ter me.’” Suddenly the voice broke and the young man wheeled to avert his face. “My God,” he cried out, “why didn’t you let them hang me or shoot me? Any man can stiffen his legs and his spine for five minutes of dying—even public dying—but back of those walls with a convict’s number instead of a name——” There he broke off and the battalion commander laid a hand on his heaving shoulder.

“I didn’t come to rub in preachments while you stood at the edge of the scaffold or the jail, Jack. My warning may not be too late, after all. We’ve passed the matter up to the war department with a strong recommendation for clemency. We mean to pull every wire that can honorably be pulled. We’re making the most of your good record heretofore and of the conviction being based on circumstantial evidence.”

He paused a moment and then went on with a trifle of embarrassment in his voice:

“You know that Senator Beverly is at the governor general’s palace—and that his daughter is with him.”

Spurrier wheeled at that and stood facing his visitor with eyes that had kindled, but in which the light at once faded as he commented shortly:

“Neither the senator nor Augusta has made any effort to see me since I was 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 know that Beverly has been keeping the cable hot in your behalf. Your name has become so familiar to the operators between here and Washington that 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 or on 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 distant playing of a band in the plaza. Somewhere in that ancient town was the girl who had not been to see him, nor written to him, even though, just before his battalion had gone into the bosques across the mountains, she had let him slip a ring on her finger, and had answered “yes” to his question—the most personal question in the world.