JOHN G., by Katherine Mayo

It was nine o’clock of a wild night in December. For forty-eight hours it had been raining, raining, raining, after a heavy fall of snow. Still the torrents descended, lashed by a screaming wind, and the song of rushing water mingled with the cry of the gale. Each steep street of the hill-town of Greensburg lay inches deep under a tearing flood. The cold was as great as cold may be while rain is falling. A night to give thanks for shelter overhead, and to hug the hearth with gratitude.

First Sergeant Price, at his desk in the Barracks office, was honorably grinding law. Most honorably, because, when he had gone to take the book from its shelf in the day-room, “Barrack-Room Ballads” had smiled down upon him with a heart-aching echo of the soft, familiar East; so that of a sudden he had fairly smelt the sweet, strange, heathen smell of the temples in Tien Tsin—had seen the flash of a parrot’s wing in the bolo-toothed Philippine jungle. And the sight and the smell, on a night like this, were enough to make any man lonely.

Therefore it was with honor indeed that, instead of dreaming off into the radiant past through the well thumbed book of magic, he was digging between dull sheepskin covers after the key to the bar of the State, on which his will was fixed.

Now, a man who, being a member of the Pennsylvania State Police, aspires to qualify for admission to the bar, has his work cut out for him. The calls of his regular duty, endless in number and kind, leave him no certain leisure, and few and broken are the hours that he gets for books.

“Confound the Latin!” grumbled the Sergeant, grabbing his head in his two hands. “Well—anyway, here’s my night for it. Even the crooks will lie snug in weather like this.” And he took a fresh hold on the poser.

Suddenly “buzz” went the bell beside him. Before its voice ceased he stood at salute in the door of the Captain’s office.

“Sergeant,” said Captain Adams, with a half-turn of his desk-chair, “how soon can you take the field?”

“Five minutes, sir.”

“There’s trouble over in the foundry town. The local authorities have jailed some I.W.W. plotters. They state that a jail delivery is threatened, that the Sheriff can’t control it, and that they believe the mob will run amuck generally and shoot up the town. Take a few men; go over and attend to it.”

“Very well, sir.”

In the time that goes to saddling a horse, the detail rode into the storm, First Sergeant Price on John G., leading.

John G. had belonged to the Force exactly as long as had the First Sergeant himself, which was from the dawn of the Force’s existence. And John G. is a gentleman and a soldier, every inch of him. Horse-show judges have affixed their seal to the self-evident fact by the sign of the blue ribbon, but the best proof lies in the personal knowledge of “A” Troop, soundly built on twelve years’ brotherhood. John G., on that diluvian night, was twenty-two years old, and still every whit as clean-limbed, alert, and plucky as his salad days had seen him.

Men and horses dived into the gale as swimmers dive into a breaker. It beat their eyes shut with wind and driven water, and, as they slid down the harp-pitched city streets, the flood banked up against each planted hoof till it split in folds above the fetlock.

Down in the country beyond, mud, slush, and water clogged with chunks of frost-stricken clay made worse and still worse going. And so they pushed on through blackest turmoil toward the river road that should be their highway to Logan’s Ferry.

They reached that road at last, only to find it as lost as Atlantis, under twenty feet of water! The Allegheny had overflowed her banks, and now there remained no way across, short of following the stream up to Pittsburgh and so around, a detour of many miles, long and evil.

“And that,” said First Sergeant Price, “means getting to the party about four hours late. Baby-talk and nonsense! By that time they might have burned the place and killed all the people in it. Let’s see, now: there’s a railroad bridge close along here, somewhere.”

They scouted till they found the bridge. But behold, its floor was of cross-ties only—of sleepers to carry the rails, laid with wide breaks between, gaping down into deep, dark space whose bed was the roaring river.

“Nevertheless,” said First Sergeant Price, whose spirits ever soar at the foolish onslaughts of trouble—“nevertheless, we’re not going to ride twenty miles farther for nothing. There’s a railroad yard on the other side. This bridge, here, runs straight into it. You two men go over, get a couple of good planks, and find out when the next train is due.”

The two Troopers whom the Sergeant indicated gave their horses to a comrade and started away across the trestle.

For a moment those who stayed behind could distinguish the rays of their pocket flash-lights as they picked out their slimy foothold. Then the whirling night engulfed them, lights and all.

The Sergeant led the remainder of the detail down into the lee of an abutment, to avoid the full drive of the storm. Awhile they stood waiting, huddled together. But the wait was not for long. Presently, like a code signal spelled out on the black overhead, came a series of steadily lengthening flashes—the pocket-light glancing between the sleepers, as the returning messengers drew near.

Scrambling up to rail level, the Sergeant saw with content that his emissaries bore on their shoulders between them two new pine “two-by-twelves.”

“No train’s due till five o’clock in the morning,” reported the first across.

“Good! Now lay the planks. In the middle of the track. End to end. So.”

The Sergeant, dismounting, stood at John G.’s wise old head, stroking his muzzle, whispering into his ear.

“Come along, John, it’s all right, old man!” he finished with a final caress.

Then he led John G. to the first plank.

“One of you men walk on each side of him. Now, John!”

Delicately, nervously, John G. set his feet, step by step, till he had reached the center of the second plank.

Then the Sergeant talked to him quietly again, while two Troopers picked up the board just quitted to lay it in advance.

And so, length by length, they made the passage, the horse moving with extremest caution, shivering with full appreciation of the unaccustomed danger, yet steadied by his master’s presence and by the friend on either hand. As they moved, the gale wreaked all its fury on them. It was growing colder now, and the rain, changed to sleet, stung their skins with its tiny, sharp-driven blades. The skeleton bridge held them high suspended in the very heart of the storm. Once and again a sudden more violent gust bid fair to sweep them off their feet. Yet, slowly progressing, they made their port unharmed.

Then came the next horse’s turn. More than a single mount they dared not lead over at once, lest the contagious fears of one, reacting on another, produce panic. The horse that should rear or shy, on that wide-meshed footing, would be fairly sure to break a leg, at best. So, one by one, they followed over, each reaching the farther side before his successor began the transit.

And so, at last, all stood on the opposite bank, ready to follow John G. once more, as he led the way to duty.

“Come along, John, old man. You know how you’d hate to find a lot of dead women and babies because we got there too late to save them! Make a pace, Johnny boy!”

The First Sergeant was talking gently, leaning over his pommel. But John G. was listening more from politeness than because he needed a lift. His stride was as steady as a clock.

It was three hours after midnight on that bitter black morning as they entered the streets of the town. And the streets were as quiet, as peaceful, as empty of men, as the heart of the high woods.

“Where’s their mob?” growled the Sergeant.

“Guess its mother’s put it to sleep,” a cold, wet Trooper growled back.

“Well, we thought there was going to be trouble,” protested the local power, roused from his feather bed. “It really did look like serious trouble, I assure you. And we could not have handled serious trouble with the means at our command. Moreover, there may easily be something yet. So, gentlemen, I am greatly relieved you have come. I can sleep in peace now that you are here. Good-night! Good-night!”

All through the remaining hours of darkness the detail patrolled the town. All through the lean, pale hours of dawn it carefully watched its wakening, guarded each danger-point. But never a sign of disturbance did the passing time bring forth.

At last, with the coming of the business day, the Sergeant sought out the principal men of the place, and from them ascertained the truth.

Threats of a jail delivery there had been, and a noisy parade as well, but nothing had occurred or promised beyond the power of an active local officer to handle. Such was the statement of one and all.

“I’ll just make sure,” said the Sergeant to himself.

Till two o’clock in the afternoon the detail continued its patrols. The town and its outskirts remained of an exemplary peace. At two o’clock the Sergeant reported by telephone to his Captain:—

“Place perfectly quiet, sir. Nothing seems to have happened beyond the usual demonstration of a sympathizing crowd over an arrest. Unless something more breaks, the Sheriff should be entirely capable of handling the situation.”

“Then report back to Barracks at once,” said the voice of the Captain of “A” Troop. “There’s real work waiting here.”

The First Sergeant, hanging up the receiver, went out and gathered his men.

Still the storm was raging. Icy snow, blinding sheets of sharp-fanged smother, rode on the racing wind. Worse overhead, worse underfoot, would be hard to meet in years of winters.

But once again men and horses, without an interval of rest, struck into the open country. Once again on the skeleton bridge they made the precarious crossing. And so, at a quarter to nine o’clock at night, the detail topped Greensburg’s last ice-coated hill and entered the yard of its high-perched Barracks.

As the First Sergeant slung the saddle off John G.’s smoking back, Corporal Richardson, farrier of the Troop, appeared before him wearing a mien of solemn and grieved displeasure.

“It’s all very well,” said he—“all very well, no doubt. But eighty-six miles in twenty-four hours, in weather like this, is a good deal for any horse. And John G. is twenty-two years old, as perhaps you may remember. I’ve brought the medicine.”

Three solid hours from that very moment the two men worked over John G., and when, at twelve o’clock, they put him up for the night, not a wet hair was left on him. As they washed and rubbed and bandaged, they talked together, mingling the Sergeant’s trenchantly humorous common sense with the Corporal’s mellow philosophy. But mostly it was the Corporal that spoke, for twenty-four hours is a fair working day for a Sergeant as well as a Troop horse.

“I believe in my soul,” said the Sergeant, “that if a man rode into this stable with his two arms shot off at the shoulder, you’d make him groom his horse with his teeth and his toes for a couple of hours before you’d let him hunt a doctor.”

“Well,” rejoined Corporal Richardson, in his soft Southern tongue, “and what if I did? Even if that man died of it, he’d thank me heartily afterward. You know, when you and I and the rest of the world, each in our turn, come to Heaven’s gate, there’ll be St. Peter before it, with the keys safe in his pocket. And over the shining wall behind—from the inside, mind you—will be poking a great lot of heads—innocent heads with innocent eyes—heads of horses and of all the other animals that on this earth are the friends of man, put at his mercy and helpless.

“And it’s clear to me—over, John! So, boy!—that before St. Peter unlocks the gate for a single one of us, he’ll turn around to that long row of heads, and he’ll say:—

“‘Blessed animals in the fields of Paradise, is this a man that should enter in?’

“And if the animals—they that were placed in his hands on earth to prove the heart that was in him—if the immortal animals have aught to say against that man—never will the good Saint let him in, with his dirty, mean stain upon him. Never. You’ll see, Sergeant, when your time comes. Will you give those tendons another ten minutes?”

Next morning John G. walked out of his stall as fresh and as fit as if he had come from pasture. And to this very day, in the stable of “A” Troop, John G., handsome, happy, and able, does his friends honor.