y bring him home again, for, as things had been going in Samar
and Mindanao, colonels were in that sort of campaigning about as useful
as most of them in church. Keen young captains and lieutenants were in
demand. Field officers, so-called, were of less account in the field
than in fortified places. Occasionally a sizable column--a major's
command perhaps--would push forth into the jungle, where it speedily had
to split up into small detachments, probing in single file, and in
pursuit of scattering bands of ladrones or banditti, the bamboo or the
mountain trail. Moreover, much of the vim and spirit had been taken out
of the soldiery, officers and men, old and young, by the fate of the
more daring and energetic of their number, who had fallen victims, not
to lance or bullet of lurking foe at the front, but rather "the slings
and arrows of outrageous fortune" at the rear. A powerful party at home
had shown far more concern over the alleged ill-treatment of the few
insurgent bands than their actual treachery to our men-at-arms. Officers
and men listened in silence to the public rebukes and sentences
administered to the leaders who had shed their gloves and fought the
insurrecto with weapons far more effective, yet infinitely less deadly,
than fire and steel. Officers and men in silence set forth upon their
next ordered expedition, and in silence returned and announced the
result--practically nothing. Elusive and flitting little bands of native
warriors, vanishing like shadows among the thickets, were not to be
trapped by the methods prescribed for dealing with an army arrayed in
front of Washington. "Don't come unless you have to," wrote Major Blake
from the hospital at Manila to Billy Ray at Minneconjou. "The
courts-martial of Hill and Dale and Langham have taken the heart out of
our fellows. The young officers say they dare not go out for fear they
might do some damage somewhere."

So Ray, who had fought Indians all over the West for many a
year--sometimes, it is true, coming in for a Puritanical scorching from
press and pulpit in far New England, where, two hundred years ago, with
prayerful zest our forefathers burned witches at the stake and put
Pequots to the sword--now found himself shrinking from the task of
tackling savages with gloves who treated men without mercy. Marion, as
has been said, was not to accompany him to the Islands and be near to
counsel and to comfort. She was not too well now, and had had many an