Page 29 of Two Wars and a Wedding

That he was, Holt reminded himself. He’d been that person for four years. It wasn’t a lie. It just wasn’t the whole story.

“I hear they’ll eat a man’s face off,” said Ham, cheerfully eating stewed tomatoes.

“One of those crawled over me last night. Scared the living daylights out of me.” Paul shuddered. “Maybe ask Dr. Stringfellow to look at Teddy, Thede. I know the doc’s a Princeton man, but . . .”

“Needs must. Hey, Doc!”

With the exaggerated patience that came of being the Rough Riders’ junior surgeon, Dr. Stringfellow said, “Yes?”

Dr. Stringfellow wasn’t much older than the men he was doctoring, but his prematurely thinning hair and general air of faint irritation made him seem a generation removed. There’d been a certain amount of ribbing early on, but the Rough Riders had come to the conclusion that the doctor wasn’t a man to be crossed. When Colonel Wood had told him he had no mules to spare to carry medical supplies, Dr. Stringfellow had quietly found the mule holding Wood’s and Roosevelt’s bedding, dumped it, and appropriated the animal for the medical department.

Stringfellow was doggedly strapping bundles to the mule in question, and showed no inclination to interrupt his activities. “How may I help you gentlemen?”

“We’ve got a man down. Fever.”

Stringfellow looked at him sharply, his attention caught. “Black vomit?” That was the fear that stalked the army. Yellow fever.

“No,” said Thede quickly. “Nothing like that. Just a fever. He thinks he’s in a polo match.”

“Tell him to keep an easy pace and not to flatten his mallet.” The doctor held up his hands to silence their protests. “There’s not much that can be done for him right now. He’s better off staying where he is, in what shade you can find for him, than attempting the march back to Daiquirí to a hospital ship—if someone could be found to take him.”

“There’s no one to be spared.” Their commanding officer Colonel Wood stalked past, snapping his pocket watch closed. “We leave in five minutes. Anyone who isn’t ready will be left behind.”

“That’s what you get for taking his mule,” said Fish.

Stringfellow sighed. “I’ll take a look at your friend. Show me where he is?” He gave the men around the campfire a hard look. “Nobody touch my mule.”

They set off up a path so steep that some of the men were reduced to grabbing bits of rock or foliage to try to heave themselves along. Guacimos and banyans thick with vines pressed close on either side, the path so narrow they could go only single file as the rising heat turned the damp of last night’s storm to steam. Holt’s face was slick with sweat, his mustache drooping as though he’d jumped in a pool. The spiky leaves of Spanish bayonet sliced at their legs, leading to indignant yelps of pain as the stiff foliage pierced fabric and skin.

“I guess I know why our guides have no clothes,” panted Paul, struggling up the path just behind Holt. He slapped at his neck as a mosquito bit him just above his bandana. “Brooks Brothers won’t recognize my kit by the time we’re done.”

“Stay to the center of the path,” advised Holt. “And don’t scratch that. It’ll only make it itch more.”

Alongside the path, an abandoned plantation lay overgrown and silent, the fields clogged with shrubs, dwellings covered with vines. It looked like a picturesque ruin out of an artist’s etching. It was hard to believe that a mere two or three years ago, this had been someone’s home, someone’s livelihood.

All gone. Overtaken by the hungry jungle, civilization crushed and rotting beneath the weight of nature.

There had been a time when Holt would have been all in favor of that. Leave behind the ugly veneer of civilization, the polite lies of society, and live in nature. But he’d discovered that it didn’t matter whether a man slept on carved mahogany or on hay; back East or out West people were still people, and there were as many lies and crooked dealings on the range as there had ever been in his father’s opulent, oak-paneled office in their Springfield mansion.

Holt wasn’t sure what he’d have done with himself if Roosevelt hadn’t put out a call to arms. Joined an expedition to the Yukon, perhaps.

The Yukon was sounding pretty attractive just about now. It was barely seven in the morning, but the heat was brutal. Men were straggling behind, falling out of the column, just taking a moment to rest, or so dizzy with heat they scarcely knew what they were doing. Holt had spent a year in the Arizona territory; he’d thought he’d known heat. But this was something different. This was a sticky heat, a heat that soaked you through, clogged your lungs, and fogged your brain.

Some people dropped. Others just got silly.

Paul and Thede Miller, drunk on adrenaline, had begun warbling, “Bright college years with pleasure rife / The shortest gladdest years of life . . .”

“You all make more noise than a train going through a tunnel,” shouted Stephen Crane, the correspondent from the World, trudging along behind them.

“What?” Paul hollered back.

“STOP!” bellowed Colonel Wood. “Everyone, stay where you are—and BE QUIET.”

He rode off ahead as the men dropped where they stood, collapsing with relief, fanning themselves with their hats and taking thirsty slugs from their canteens. It looked like a picnic, with men reclining at every possible sort of angle, hunting through their packs for food, indulging in a quick chew of tobacco, or throwing spitballs at each other with holiday abandon.

Next to them, Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt, in cool contravention of Wood’s order for quiet, was chatting with one of the Cuban officers and Edward Marshall of the New York Journal about a lunch they’d all attended at the Astor House in New York.

Paul scrambled to his feet, utterly unconcerned about the sort of target his six-foot-plus frame made, peering at the Cuban officer.