Together, the two had gathered the blossoms from the rhododendron, and down in shaded recesses where the waters whispered over mossy rocks and the elder-fringed forests closed in until only slender threads of sunshine filtered through, they had gathered ferns and been children together.
At last came the day when they knelt down and rose together from cushions before an improvised altar in the wide hall, and the colonel led them all to the wainscoted dining-room. There, in a vintage that had lain for a generation in the cobwebbed sleep of the cellar, both the old man from the mountains and the old man from the bluegrass toasted them--"Even if," as the colonel chortled, "the youngster is a Yankee soldier."
When the journey across the continent ended, they had lazy days at sea. As Henry Falkins gazed at his wife, panama-hatted, white-clad, with the Pacific winds stirring the one curl that, in persistent truancy, escaped its confinement to trail across one eye, he wondered if she were really not too delectable a vision to be real. And his brother officers seemed to think so, too, so that she reigned on the quarter-deck.
But, if the testimony of so astute an observer as General Sherman is to be accepted, war is not unbroken honeymoon, and in the Islands in 1900 the general's monosyllabic descriptive was more applicable. At least, that was true in certain provinces, where the orders of _El Presidente_ were being carried into effect with ardor and pertinacity. Those orders were to disperse, live outwardly as _Americanistas_, and under the semblance of peace to harry, sting and annoy the army of occupation. The seventy thousand troops now in the Islands were no longer marching and bivouacking as armies, but, "split in a thousand detachments," were scattered into garrisons from the China Sea to the Pacific.
Over beyond the mountains and across the level plantation lands of Nueva Ecija lay a town from whose center radiated many meager _barrios_ and villages. It was a town with a small stone church, from whose teetering cross one arm had been shot away.
That church had a line of graves--inside its walls, with stones identically alike--and a history. Here, for almost a solid year, a garrison numbering at the outset fifty Spanish soldiers had held out with heroism against a swarming horde of Insurgents equipped with artillery. The town bore many _recuerdos_ of that long and dogged fight. The walls of the church showed them in disfiguring scars, like those on the face of a man who has been mercilessly pitted by small-pox. The ruins of nipa houses showed them in fallen roof-trees and gaping breeches. The even ranks of gravestones, within the walls, bore eloquent testimony in successive dates of death.