Lucinda Merton was in San Francisco on the day that the _Indiana_ sailed. She and perhaps Henry Falkins knew why she had crossed the continent. As the regiment from bluegrass and mountains filed in their long lines over the side, she stood on the transport deck with the colonel and one of his majors and looked on. What things the lovers said that day, in the moments they stole alone, were their own secrets, but the girl's eyes and lips were smiling, and the eyes of the young major were full of light when he slipped into his blouse-pocket a small leather case--and a photograph. It was to smile at him over many campfires in the islands.
Yet, with a teasing laugh and a certain pride of section, the girl compared the central Kentuckians with the leaner, harder men of the hills, and announced:
"Those mountaineers of yours still cry out for the curry-comb, Henry."
It was the colonel who answered her. He, too, was gazing down with a smile wrinkling the corners of his eyes. The colonel, for all his Chesterfieldian polish, could judge a horse or man in the raw.
"They're a shaggy herd," he mused quietly, "exceedingly shaggy and unkempt. My barbarians, I call them, Lucinda. They are men with the bark on--but men." He paused, and the smile became a contented grin. "If there's a chance to baptize them, you'll hear of them again."
"For it's Tommy this an' Tommy that, an' 'Tommy 'ow's yer soul?' But it's 'Thin red line of 'eroes' when the drums begin to roll."
Then came days of blue wastes and sparkling wake; days of lazy lounging on swinging decks and under awnings, and at night the phosphor-play of the Pacific and stars that hung low and softly lustrous. Often Private Newt Spooner surprised himself, as he leaned with his bare fore-arms resting on the rail, to find that his thoughts, instead of busying themselves with war or vengeance, were going strangely back to the added room of the smoky cabin on Troublesome and the girl who sat before the fire in the long evenings when the wind wailed through the dead timber. The logs were blazing there on the hearth he had built for her.
One morning the men crowded and jostled at the rail to gaze ahead where the hunched shoulders of Corregidor Island raised themselves like a crouching sentinel, at the gate of Manila Bay.