Rainier of the Last Frontier (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1911 Excerpt: ... man had help from On High. With the counsels of McBurney in his mind, Rainier began habits of daily prayer an'd Bible study that were to mean worlds of character development to him. Little by little, as he felt his way in his new but fascinating work of checkmating the devil in the Ninth Separate Brigade, he found his confidence increased, and he began reaching out in those tours that were to give him an influence over the soldiers of the Island such as no officer in the service was able to wield. It was mainly in the battle for Rod Garrison's soul and the relief of Mabalacat that the new secretary won his spurs and caused old General Hughes to bang his veteran fist on his office table in approval when the stories came to his ears. As to Mabalacat, it came to pass in the Christmas time. Far up in the interior the world had been dissolving and steaming by turns. All precedents in Filipino weather manipulation had been disregarded, and Mabalacat was at its best a vile place for a white man to be stationed--a snarled knot of bamboo houses straggling out into a world of dun-colored pampas grass, worse than the desolate country about it in that it sent up from its gaseous puddles a sickening evidence of primitive sanitation. Small wonder, then, that the erstwhile dudish Lieutenant Lately, now commanding officer of Mabalacat, had yielded to the squalor of the place and lay upon his dirty cot in the musty " Tribunal," unkempt and sullen, and answering the clumsy kindnesses of his men curtly and moodily. Five weeks of alternating sun baths and water baths, of broiling and soaking, had filled his body with "dengue," and had drawn the hope and resolution from his soul fibre. His mental picture of Miss Royce far away in the comforts of Ho-Ilo, att...