The Law of the Bolo

THE LAW OF THE BOLO

BY
STANLEY PORTAL HYATT

DANA ESTES & COMPANY
BOSTON

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

The Law of the Bolo, which runs throughout the Philippine Islands, has the crowning merit of simplicity. Unlike the codes of other countries, with their folios of verbiage, their precedents, decisions, and interpretations, their hair-splitting subtleties and refinements of phrase, their hidden dangers for the unwary and unfortunate, the Law of the Bolo, of the terrible two-foot-long knife, with which a Filipino can cleave his enemy from collar-bone to the waist, has but one clause—that the spoil shall go to the man with the longest reach. Possibly the process is crude, but, at least, it is speedy and final. Judge, jury, counsel, the Bolo takes the place of all these; and there is no appeal, at any rate in this life.

The Law of the Bolo has also the merit of antiquity. It was in force when the Spaniards annexed the Archipelago; it is in force there to-day, under the American successors of the Spaniards; and probably it will still be in force when, not only this generation, but half a dozen of its successors as well, have passed away—not because it is perfect, no law is, but because it is so admirably suited to local conditions.

Half the troubles in the Islands during the last century or so—a great many more than half, probably—have been due to the fact that white men would not recognise this elemental code. Mr Commissioner Furber, the head of the department of Constabulary and Trade in Manila, regarded it as scandalous, as did also Mr Dwight P. Sharler, the Chief Collector of Customs, and Mr Joseph Gobbitt, of the British firm of Gobbitt & Dunk, Eastern merchants; but both old Felizardo, the ladrone leader, and Captain Basil Hayle of the Philippines Constabulary, understood it, and acted on that knowledge, thereby avoiding many mistakes, as this story will show ….

THE LAW OF THE BOLO

CHAPTER I

HOW FELIZARDO TOOK TO THE HILLS

Felizardo was sixty years of age, a wizened little man, quiet of voice, emphatic of gesture, when the Americans displaced the Spaniards, and began to preach the doctrines of Law and Order, coupled with those of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, as defined by the Declaration of Independence. In appearance, Felizardo was not unlike a Japanese, being purely Asiatic by descent; but, so far as essential characteristics, were concerned, he was a son of the Tropics, with the qualities of his kind.

For all practical purposes, Felizardo’s history begins thirty-five years before the coming of the Americans. Up till that point in his career, he had been an ordinary tao, one of the peasantry of a village some ten miles from Manila, outwardly apathetic and inoffensive, respecting, or at least fearing, the Law as represented by the Presidente and the Guardia Civil, and earning such money as he needed—which was not much—by an occasional day’s work in his hemp-patch up on the mountain-side. For the rest, he fished when he had sufficient energy, or was sufficiently hungry so to do, or gathered cocoa-nuts in the grove which stretched for a couple of miles along the sea-shore. Then, suddenly, Dolores Lasara came into his life, and his character developed.

Dolores was the daughter of Juan Lasara, the Teniente of San Polycarpio, the next village to that in which Felizardo had been born and bred. Rumour in the village, which possibly spoke the truth, declared that Juan was connected with the local band of ladrones, and, as that body enjoyed a degree of immunity unusual even in the Philippines, there may have been grounds for the suspicion.

Juan Lasara was a mestizo, a half-caste, and Dolores herself showed strong traces of her white ancestry. Felizardo, on the other hand, was a native pure and simple, and, unlike most of his kind, prided himself on the fact.

Dolores and Felizardo first met after a fiesta, the feast of the patron saint of San Polycarpio. The girl, clad all in white, was walking in the procession round the plaza, following closely in the wake of the stout priest and the gaudily-painted image, when the man, lounging against the timbers of the crude belfry, smoking the eternal cigarette, suddenly awakened to the fact that there were other things in life besides tobacco and native spirits and game-cocks. He did not follow Dolores into the church—that would have involved abstention from several cigarettes, and would, to his mind, have served no useful purpose—but he waited outside patiently, and, when she emerged, followed her home, where he made the acquaintance of her father, whom he knew well by sight.

Juan Lasara, the Teniente of San Polycarpio, was a very able man, as his hidden store of greasy Bank of Spain notes would have told you, if you had been able to unearth them from the hiding-place up on the mountain-side; and, being able, he realised that there were latent possibilities in the rather shy young tao who was so obviously taken with Dolores; consequently, he was perfectly ready to let the girl accompany Felizardo down to the cockpit to see the fights, which, as every Filipino knows, are the most important part of a religious festival.

The Teniente saw the young people off from the veranda of his house, the only stone-built one in San Polycarpio; then he went back to his office, where presently there came to him Father Pablo, the parish priest, also a mestizo, and Cinicio Dagujob, a fierce little man, with two bolos strapped on his waist. The last-named had come in, unostentatiously, from the jungle behind the house, after the two Guardia Civil, who had been sent to attend the fiesta, had gone off to keep order at the cockpit; and even now he did not seem quite at ease, knowing that those dreaded Spanish gens d’armes were still in the village. “There might be trouble at the cockpit, and they might bring their prisoners here,” he muttered.

Juan Lasara laughed. “If there were trouble, they would only beat the causes of it with the flat of their sabres. That is their way—with the tao. It is only you and your kind that they take as prisoners, or kill.”

Cinicio’s beady eyes flashed. “And how about you and the reverend father?” he snarled.

Once more Lasara laughed. “He is the priest of San Polycarpio, and I am the Teniente. If they came—which they would not do without warning—you would be Dagujob, the ladrone chief, whom we had lured here, in order that he might be taken and hanged on the new gallows at Calocan. You understand, Cinicio?”

A sudden movement of his hand to his side showed that the robber did comprehend; then the half-drawn bolo was thrust back into its wooden sheath, contemptuously. “Bah!” its owner growled, “you dare not. I should talk, and there is room on that gallows for three of us, even when one is a fat priest. And now—what is the business we are to discuss?”

Father Pablo blew out a cloud of smoke and watched it curling upwards. “Don José Ramirez will be receiving three thousand pesos next month to pay for the new hemp land he is buying from the Friars,” he said.

Cinicio Dagujob leaned forward. “Don José, the Spanish merchant at Calocan?” he asked.

The priest nodded, whilst the Teniente added with a grin: “His place is opposite the new gallows, which they have put up for you and your kind, Cinicio.”

The ladrone ignored the last remark; this was now a purely professional matter.

“How are we to get in?” he demanded. “The house is of stone, well shuttered; and, if we tried force, the noise would bring down the Guardia Civil, who are only a quarter of a mile away.”

Father Pablo had gone to the window, and was staring out. He preferred not to listen to such discussions, which accorded ill with his calling; but the Teniente had no such scruples. “You must have some one inside, to open the door, then when Don José comes down——” He finished with a suggestive motion.

“That is easy to say,” growled the ladrone—“very easy to say; but whom can you get? Our own men are”—he shrugged his shoulders expressively—“suspected; and they might not like to be so near your gallows; whilst your people here are fools, every one—just common tao. Then a man from Manila would get in one of his own hands. It is rubbish. I know Don José Ramirez of old. He will keep his pesos safe until he hands them over to the Friars; and then, of course, one cannot rob the Church.”

Father Pablo, standing with his back to them, seemed to have missed everything else, but he heard those last words, and nodded his head, apparently in approval of the sentiment; though possibly, could the others have seen it, the smile on his face might have explained various things to them.

The Teniente of San Polycarpio did not answer at once, but lighted a fresh cigar very carefully, and got it drawing well; then, “I have the man,” he said quietly. “He came to me to-day, by chance, following my daughter, Dolores.” Father Pablo started slightly. “He is a tao, with brains. I know Don José wants a man to live in the house. If I send this young Felizardo to him, he will take him; and if I promise Felizardo that he shall marry Dolores, the door will be opened to you. I only met him to-day, but”—he laughed pleasantly—“I know men and women; and I saw how it was with those two, at once.”

There was no smile on Father Pablo’s face now, and one of his hands was gripping the window frame more tightly than a casual observer might have thought necessary; but the two other men were not watching him, being interested in the details of their plan.

It was sundown when Felizardo and Dolores came back, chattering gaily. On the road they passed the two Guardia Civil, in their gorgeous uniforms, with their clattering sabres and horse pistols in vast leather holsters. Felizardo received a friendly nod from them, being known as a decent young tao; but Father Pablo, whom they met a little further on, had no blessing to bestow, only a scowl.

“I do not like him,” the man said abruptly.

The girl shivered slightly. “Nor I. He is a priest, I know; but still——” She broke off significantly, and, for the first time in his life, Felizardo felt the instinct to kill awaken in him. Unconsciously, he became a convert to the Law of the Bolo; consciously, he decided that Father Pablo must be watched.

The Teniente of San Polycarpio was alone when the couple returned, and received Felizardo very graciously. He was interested in the young man, and asked him many questions, whilst Dolores was preparing some supper, a far more elaborate supper than usual.

“You ought to do better,” Lasara said kindly. “I see you are not like the majority; and there are careers for those who are ready to work. Look at myself”—he was a hemp-buyer—“I started to learn in a Spaniard’s store, and made all this myself. I should be a very happy man, if only I had a son. As it is, there is Dolores alone; and my ambition now is to see her married to an honourable man, a man of the people like myself, not a frothy agitator from Manila.”

Felizardo fumbled badly with the cigarette he was rolling; but before he could make any reply, his host had got up abruptly. “Come and see me again soon—the day after to-morrow, if you like. I believe I know of a post which might suit you.”

They make love quickly in the Tropics; consequently, it was not out of the natural order of things that, as he walked home through the cocoa-nut groves that night, Felizardo should feel sure both of his own feelings and of those of Dolores. Somehow, the world seemed to have grown a very different place. He had never noticed the moon quite so bright before, never realised how wonderfully beautiful was the effect of the light dancing on the waters. Then, suddenly, with a sense of shame, he remembered how he had wasted his life. He had eaten, smoked, and gambled on fighting-cocks—that was his whole record so far; but it should be different for the future. He turned into his little nipa-thatched house full of this good resolution, and awakened in the morning still of the same mind. There was a fiesta on in his own village that day, and he had saved five pesos in order to have an unusually large bet on his own favourite fighting-cock, hitherto the champion of the place; but, instead of doing so, he donned his working clothes, took his working bolo, and started off towards his hemp-patch, two miles away, up the hillside. One or two women he passed—the men rose late on fiesta-days—stared after him in astonishment; whilst a youth, who was taking a game-cock for its morning airing, hugging the over-fed bird closely in his arms, endeavoured to call him back; but Felizardo knew his own mind. That evening, just as the cock-fighting was over, he staggered down with the biggest load of hemp a man had ever brought into the village—one or two complained afterwards that he had cleaned up some of their hemp in addition to his own—took it into the Spanish hemp-buyers’ warehouse, and presently emerged with the best suit of white linen he could buy.

In after years they used to talk of the look which was on Felizardo’s face that last evening he spent in the village. They chaffed him, of course—who but a fool would clean up hemp on a fiesta-day?—but he walked past them all without appearing to notice them. He was not angry—there was no question of that; it was only that he seemed to have urgent, and very pleasant, business of his own on hand. He had become a man apart from them; and, though none could have foreseen it, he was to remain a man apart, in a very different sense.

By noon the following day, Felizardo was sitting on the broad, cool veranda of Juan Lasara’s house, talking to Dolores. There was no hurry about business, the Teniente said cheerfully. He himself was likely to be fully occupied until evening. Let the visitor stay the night, and on the morrow they would go over and interview Don José Ramirez, to whom he had already written—a proposal which suited both Dolores and Felizardo.

They talked all that afternoon and all that evening—the Teniente was wonderfully discreet in keeping out of the way—and when, on the following day, Felizardo took a reluctant farewell, they were perfectly sure they understood one another. Other people of their ages have made up their minds, temporarily at least, just as quickly, even under colder skies than those of the Philippines.

As the two men were going down to the beach—Calocan lay round a headland, a long stretch of mangrove swamp, and you had to reach it by canoe—they met Father Pablo, apparently going to the Teniente’s. The Teniente stopped a minute and spoke to the priest in a low voice, then rejoined Felizardo, whilst the Father continued on his way.

Felizardo thought of Dolores, alone in the house, with only a couple of servants working in the courtyard, thought of the fat, sensual face, the self-assertive swagger, and once more that instinct to kill, which is one of the elemental corollaries of love, came back to him, stronger than ever. For a moment he hesitated, half inclined to go back; but he had not yet felt the full strength of that instinct; and so in the end he went on, reluctantly. Juan Lasara, thinking deeply over the priest’s words—“It will be five thousand pesos now. Don José has bought a second hemp-patch from the Friars”—did not notice his hesitation, and might not have understood it in any case, having got over his days of love, or at least of the love of woman. He worshipped the peso only.

Don José, white-haired and courtly, was gravely polite to the Teniente, as a white gentleman must be to a half-caste; but he was almost cordial to Felizardo.

“I have already asked the Guardia Civil, and they speak well of you,” he said; then, as if fearing his words might seem slighting to Juan Lasara, he hastened to add: “Of course, in any case, the recommendation of Senor Lasara would suffice. Still, in these days there are so many ladrones—you see my shutters and bars? You can read and write? Yes, the good Friars taught you? Well, then it is arranged. Good!”

So Felizardo became warehouseman, and, in a humble way, junior clerk, to Don José Ramirez, to live in the house, and, if need arose, to fire at ladrones with a musket through one of the loopholes of those same shutters, an arrangement satisfactory to himself, to the Spaniard, and perhaps most of all to his patron, the Teniente of San Polycarpio. There was no mistaking the cordiality of the latter’s farewell. “Come and see us the first holiday,” he said; “I shall be pleased, and”—he smiled meaningfully—“so will Dolores.”

If there had been no woman in the case, Felizardo would not have stayed two days in the warehouse. True, on the rare occasions when he did see Don José, the old man was kindness personified; but the merchant spent his time in his private office, whilst the other clerks, all mestizos, looked on what they called “a wild tao” as a fitting subject for jests and practical jokes. But Felizardo thought of Dolores, who could only be won by his success in that warehouse; moreover, he was wiry and strong as a leopard, as the practical jokers soon learned; consequently, at the end of the first week he had not only decided to stay, but had also made a definite position for himself.

“A good boy, a very good boy,” Don José remarked to the corporal of the Guardia Civil.

The latter nodded. “Yes, but watch him. They all want watching, these Filipinos. I say it with all respect—but what has the Holy Church done for them, save teach them our secrets and make them more dangerous than ever.” He sighed heavily, and twirled his huge, dyed moustache. “Thirty years I have been out here, Don José, thirty years, and only home to Spain once, and I still look on them as savages, who will get my head in the end. I shall never see Spain again.”

Don José took him by the arm; it was Sunday, and they were standing on the veranda. “Come inside,” he said; “I have some choice wine which came in the other day, wine of Spain; and some cigars such as you could not get elsewhere, even in Spain. Come inside, corporal, and drink to the day when we both return to Spain.”

Meanwhile, Felizardo had borrowed a dug-out canoe, and paddled round the long headland to San Polycarpio. Dolores was waiting for him. “I knew you would come,” she said simply, “because Don José always closes his warehouse on Sunday.”

The implied assurance in her words made him the happiest man in the Islands; and as he sat talking to the Teniente that afternoon, he was very full of the possibilities of a commercial career, and very severe on the subject of ladrones and the injury they did to trade, which was perhaps not very pleasant hearing to his host, for after the guest had gone—this time Dolores accompanied him down to the beach—Lasara remarked to the priest: “He will not open the door of the warehouse, even if I ask him. He is a fool, after all.”

The priest shook his head. “He will open it, because he is a special fool on one point.”

“What is that?” demanded the other.

Father Pablo smiled grimly. “You will see. Leave it to me.” And with that promise the Teniente of San Polycarpio had to be content, though, knowing the priest well, he was not really uneasy in his own mind. Certainly, they would eventually share those five thousand pesos of Don José’s, and if, as was probable, Don José himself were eliminated during the process of removal, so much the better. The disappearance of a rival is never felt very keenly by a good business man.

The pesos for the purchase of the Friars’ hemp lands came on the appointed day, and Felizardo helped to carry them into the warehouse, wondering greatly at the amount, and envying the man who possessed so much wealth. He was still thinking over the matter at closing time, when a strange youth hurried up, thrust a note into his hand, and disappeared as suddenly as he had come. Felizardo read the letter slowly, and forthwith forgot all about the pesos; for Dolores was in trouble; Dolores had fled from her father’s house, fearing a forced marriage with a wealthy cousin, who had unexpectedly re-appeared after years of absence; and, what was most important of all, Dolores was coming to him for shelter and protection. At eleven o’clock that very night, she would be outside the small door at the back of the warehouse, where he must join her, and take her somewhere for safety.

Felizardo sat down on a pile of cases in the corner of the warehouse, where he smoked innumerable cigarettes, and tried to think out the situation. For a moment, he was inclined to consult Don José, then dismissed the idea as impossible. It seemed like treason to Dolores. Above everything, no one must know that she had come to him secretly, in the dead of night—no one, that is, except the person who actually gave her shelter until he could marry her openly, in the light of day. Yet who would give her shelter? Who would not talk? He racked his brains for an answer, and then it came to him—the good Sisters at the little convent on the far-side of the plaza. It was only a few moments’ walk, and when he took Dolores there, and she knocked, and told her story, and showed the letter she had written him—the first line he had ever received from her—there would be no question of her welcome or her safety. All the Tenientes in the Islands would be powerless to wrest her from the Sisters.

Felizardo waited with almost savage impatience for eleven o’clock. If she missed her way, if by any chance she were overtaken, if some one should be watching outside to see if she were coming to him! Full of the latter thought, he slipped into the warehouse again and searched for a bolo, a particularly fine and keen weapon, which, only that afternoon, one of his fellow-clerks had bought from a hill-man. Felizardo found it, strapped it round his waist, saw that it was loose in its sheath, crept cautiously to the little back door, unlocked it, taking the key so as to be able to lock it again from the outside, took down the heavy bars, opened the door cautiously—and saw a dozen figures crouching on the ground, ready to spring at him.

Then he understood. Like a flash his bolo was out, and, with his back to the door, he was facing them, shouting, “The ladrones, the ladrones!” whilst unconsciously he crumpled up, and dropped, that forged letter.

It was his first fight. An old man, telling Captain Basil Hayle of it thirty-five years later, declared that it was his greatest fight; and Felizardo had then been in hundreds. Be that as it may, the fact remains that he had killed two ladrones, and mortally wounded two more, himself receiving only a gash across the forehead, before help came, in the form of the Guardia Civil from without, and Don José and his five men from within.

Of the twelve ladrones, only four escaped, crawling away wounded. Four they killed out of hand, and four more, including Cinicio Dagujob himself, they hanged on that new gallows opposite Don José’s warehouse, as a warning to all men.

Felizardo staggered back against the wall, half-blinded by the blood from his forehead, trembling, as a man does after his first fight; then, without the slightest premeditation, he made the mistake of his life. He slipped away in the darkness, down to the beach, launched a canoe, and began frenziedly to paddle towards San Polycarpio. He had remembered Dolores and her possible peril, and forgotten all else—Don José, the Guardia Civil, the questions he would be expected to answer.

The corporal asked one of those same questions of Don José half an hour later, after the prisoners had been safely locked in the cells.

“Who gave the alarm?” he demanded.

“Felizardo,” the merchant answered. “He was fighting in the doorway when we rushed down, fighting like a dozen devils.”

The corporal frowned. “Then he must have opened the door himself. Why? Where is he now?”

Don José poured himself out another glass of wine with a rather shaky hand. He was an old man, and his nerves were upset. “Felizardo is gone, they tell me. They have searched, thinking he might be lying wounded, but they cannot find a trace anywhere.”

Once more the corporal frowned, and drummed on the table with his fingers. He was not very brilliant, and he was trying to construct a theory. At last, “Let them search again,” he said severely.

A few minutes later, one of the clerks came back with a crumpled slip of paper in his hand. “We have found this, Senor,” he said.

The corporal handed it to Don José—despite that huge, dyed moustache and his straight back, his eyes were growing old, and one does not take spectacles when one is on service. “Will you read it, Don José, read it aloud slowly?” he asked with dignity, then turned a fierce gaze on the knot of clerks gathered in the doorway, who fled hurriedly.

When the merchant had finished, the corporal brought his hand down on the table with a thump which made all the wine-glasses dance. “A love affair, as I think I said, or rather a false assignation. He has got frightened at his mistake, and gone to the hills.”

Don José sighed. “I liked him. He is a good, sensible boy, and I hope he will come back.”

The corporal shook his head. “He will never come back. Thirty years I have been here, in this service, only going home to Spain once, and I should know that they are only savages, after all. I think I have said before that the Holy Church makes a mistake in trying to tame them. Let them be brought to hear Mass every Sunday—that would be only fitting, and would doubtless save their souls, if they have any—but books and learning are not for them. When I get back to Spain I shall make a journey to Rome to tell his Holiness these things. Doubtless, he will listen to an old soldier of Spain …. No, Don José, your Felizardo will never come back here. Yet”—he sighed regretfully—“he is a fine fighter. He was the only one on our side with a bolo, and two have been killed with the bolo, and two wounded so badly that we must hurry on the hanging of them. A fine fighter—but what will you——? They are all savages at heart, as I hope to tell his Holiness one day.” He stood up abruptly, saluted, and stalked out with his hand on the hilt of his great sabre.

There was only one light showing in San Polycarpio when Felizardo beached his canoe on the shingle by the palm grove; and only one mangy dog, which relapsed into silence after the first stone, noted his arrival. On the other hand, the light was in the Teniente’s house, which made things easier for the newcomer.

Felizardo had bandaged his forehead with a strip torn off his shirt, and as soon as he came to the stream of fresh water which ran down the one long street, he bathed the blood from his face carefully. He did not want to alarm Dolores—about himself. Then, bolo in hand, he made his way to the house, clambered cautiously on to the veranda, and peered in through a tiny hole in the matting blind. He could see very little—only Dolores standing, pale and trembling, against the further wall, and the heads of Lasara and Father Pablo, who were seated at the table. But he could hear, and that was almost better than seeing.

The voices were a little thick—it had been a weary task waiting for the return of the messenger Cinicio Dagujob was to send, and the native spirit had been very strong—but the priest, at least, knew what he wanted.

“You must let her come to me as housekeeper,” he was saying. “You would like that, wouldn’t you, girl”—he turned towards Dolores—“to keep house for your parish priest? I would get rid of the other. Answer me, Juan Lasara. Will you agree, or shall I denounce you as Cinicio’s partner?” There was a snarl in his voice. “After to-night’s work there will be a hue-and-cry; and you remember the new gallows at Calocan. Answer me, you ladrone Teniente of San Polycarpio.”

But the reply did not come from Juan Lasara. With one cut of his bolo Felizardo cleared away the matting, and was in the room. Dolores gave a scream and fainted; Lasara fumbled drunkenly for his knife, and, failing to find it, seized a bottle; but the priest stood back unarmed—trembling, perhaps, but still apparently secure in the protection of his cloth.

“You dare not touch me,” he said. And for answer Felizardo slew him with a single slash of that terrible bolo. Then he dealt with Lasara, whom he maimed for life; and after that he gathered together the remains of the food and the wine—he was looking ahead even then—put out the lamp, took the insensible girl in his arms, and made his way to the jungle.

So in the one night Felizardo killed two ladrones and a priest who was worse than a ladrone, secured the hanging of two others, and then, possibly because, as the corporal said, he was a savage at heart, took Dolores Lasara with him to the hills, and became a ladrone himself.

CHAPTER II

HOW THE CORPORAL WENT BACK TO SPAIN

For six months the tao of the district talked of Felizardo, the man who had slain a priest; then, as nothing more had been heard of the outlaw, and a new band of ladrones had been formed in the neighbourhood of Calocan, the centre of interest shifted, and the crime at San Polycarpio, if not forgotten, at least ceased to be discussed.

The tao knew nothing about Father Pablo’s connection with the band of the late Cinicio Dagujob—the Church had seen to that fact being suppressed—but the corporal knew, in fact he had been the first to suspect it, and he took the information across to Don José Ramirez.

“This Pablo was a mestizo,” he said. “You knew him, I suppose. No? A big scoundrel, gross and burly. I wonder why the Church will allow natives to be priests. I am sure the Holy Father cannot know. Some day, perhaps, I may have the chance of telling him, if I get back to Spain. A villain, that Pablo; but still your Felizardo was wrong to kill him. Nothing can save him now. I told you that night, even after we found how splendidly he had boloed those ladrones, that he would not come back. I was right, of course. Have I not been thirty years in these accursed Islands, and if I do not know the Filipinos, who should know them, Senor? A fine fighter, that Felizardo. Had he been in our native troops, he would have risen high. And now, because he is a savage at heart, he has become a ladrone.”

Don José sighed—there had been a romance and a tragedy in his own life, many years before, in Spain. “No, corporal. He went because he loved one woman too well to leave her to some one else.”

The corporal twisted his moustache. “Therein he was a savage, as I said before. He got one idea in his mind, and he could not forget it, not having room for two. I have loved women, Senor, and women have loved me, many of them; but as for turning highwayman, or at least outlaw, for the sake of one—pouf!” He shook his head with a great assumption of scorn.

“I see.” Don José smiled. They had been friends for many years, these two, and he knew the story of the girl in Spain whom the other had gone back to marry—and found dead; therefore, he always listened patiently to those stories of subsequent love affairs, none of which ever had the slightest foundation in fact. “I see,” he repeated. “Then you think a man should have as many wives as he can get, like a Moor or a Chino?”

“No, no”—the corporal frowned—“the Church would not allow that, only—well,” he got up rather hastily. “I was forgetting the time. I must be off. After thirty years’ service in these accursed Islands, one must not begin to neglect one’s duty, Senor.” At the door he stopped and looked back. “Think no more of your Felizardo, Don José. He will never return; and, if he did, we should have to hang him. A fine fighter, certainly—but, to kill a priest!”

“But you say the priest was also a ladrone,” the merchant objected.

The corporal shook his head. “A priest is a priest, and the Church will not forgive, or admit excuses. How can she, when she has the souls of all these savages to save? Still, if I ever get the chance of seeing the Holy Father, and explaining——” and he went out, still frowning and shaking his head.

Don José helped himself slowly to another glass of wine, and sighed. “We shall never go back to Spain, he and I. It is getting too late now, and so”—he smiled sadly—“the Holy Father will lose much useful information.”

When Felizardo slew Pablo the priest, and took to the bush, carrying Dolores Lasara in his arms, he had no definite aim, save that of gaining a temporary hiding-place; but the moment he had found this, and even whilst he was bringing the girl round with some of the wine he had taken from her father’s table—the bottle itself was sticky with her father’s blood—his mind became busy with the problem of the future.

He was an outlaw for life. He had killed a priest—had offended far beyond the offence of the ordinary ladrone, who only kills ordinary men, and tortures women and children. True, the priest was a ladrone, even worse than a ladrone, but it was the cloth, and not the man beneath it, which mattered. Felizardo faced the issue squarely. Somehow, it seemed as though he had learned many things during that night. He had taken up the bolo, and thenceforth the Law of the Bolo must be his only code. A few hours before, no one had less desire to be an outlaw than he; now, he had become an outlaw, despite himself; but he did not rail against Fate, because he was an Asiatic, and also because, after all, he had got Dolores.

Still, there was one trouble, which would be greater for her than for him. He put it to her very gently after he had told her of the end of Father Pablo.

“We cannot be married now, dear one,” he said. “No priest would do it, even though I captured him, and threatened him with death.”

She looked at him with shining eyes. “What matter? I shall have you, all the same.”

He turned away. “It is not too late for you to go back, even now. The good Sisters at the convent would take you.”

For answer, she kissed him, the first kiss she had ever given him, and they said no more of that matter.

From Felizardo’s own village, from every village for miles round in fact, you can see a great range of mountains, rugged and forbidding, beginning practically at the shore of a huge bay and running inland for many miles. The lower slopes of the range are covered with dense jungle; but when you have climbed a thousand feet or so, you leave all this behind, and find bald rock, and lava-beds, and ashes, for there are half a dozen active volcanoes there, as well as many which are merely quiescent, and hot springs, and geysers, and other dangers to life and peace of mind.

Felizardo had often looked at those mountains, especially when he had been fishing in the bay, waiting lazily for a bite. Then, they had always seemed to suggest harshness and danger, the very antithesis to the dreamy life amongst the cocoa-nut groves and the hemp-patches; now, however, he thought of them in a very different light, as offering an ideal refuge; and even if, as was rumoured, they were the home of many bad men—well, was he, himself, not a bad man too?

He made up his mind quickly. It was no use thinking of remaining in the jungle by the coast. He was not greatly afraid of the authorities finding him, although the Church might insist on a hue-and-cry of an unusually vigorous nature; but he was afraid of coming across some of the local ladrones, who would assuredly take vengeance on him for what he had done to their friends. So, at the first streak of dawn he and Dolores set out for the mountains, where the rest of their lives were to be spent.

It was a long and slow journey, for Dolores was not used to the bush, and they had to avoid all footpaths and villages. Time after time, Felizardo had to carry her through those steep-banked, narrow little streams, which on the paths you cross by shaky pole-bridges; and twice he had to cut down hemp-palms, and make rafts on which to get to the other bank of larger streams. The second night out it rained, a veritable deluge; but he had foreseen it, and had made a little shelter of palm-leaves, which kept them perfectly dry, greatly to the surprise of Dolores.

“You seem to know everything, and to be prepared for everything,” she said; and he felt prouder than he had ever felt in his life.

Early next morning, whilst she still slept, he went out to a neighbouring village, where they were also asleep, and when she awakened he was plucking a newly-killed fowl, whilst there was a basket of sweet potatoes beside him. It was his first definite act of ladronism, and he shifted uneasily under her gaze, until she, understanding, laid a soft hand on his arm and said: “They drove you to it, dearest, and you have done it for me;” so Felizardo enjoyed his meal after all.

That night, Felizardo went much further. He found a water-buffalo belonging to the priest of the village they were skirting; and from that point onwards, until they were well up the lower slopes of the range, there was plenty of meat, whilst, of course, if you are a Filipino, you can always find sweet potatoes, and beans, and cocoa-nuts.

They built a little shelter in the jungle, and there they lived like children of nature for a week.

“I should be content to stay here for ever,” Dolores said; but the man shook his head.

“It will rain every day soon, and then you would die. There are caves on the slope overlooking the bay. We will take one. Then we can store a supply of food, and, if I can get a pig and some fowls from one of the villages in the valley, we shall have no need to trouble.”

The first two caves they explored were damp and dark, then they went into a third—and came on two men and a woman, sitting in the entrance, smoking some fish.

The men sprang to their feet, and one, the elder, came forward, bolo in hand; but the woman held the other back. “He may not be an enemy, and at least be fair,” she cried, for which Dolores loved her ever afterwards.

The other man was a little unsteady—there was a jar of spirits beside the fire—and his eyes were staring and bloodshot. He did not stop to ask any questions, and Felizardo said nothing, except, very quietly: “Go back, Dolores.”

It was not a fight: it did not last more than a few seconds; then, as he wiped his bolo on the white tunic of his attacker, Felizardo looked at the man beside the fire: “And you now?” he asked.

The other shook his head, and sheathed the bolo, which, despite the woman’s efforts, he had drawn.

“You are the better man,” he replied. “And he,” nodding towards the body—“he was a scoundrel;” whereat the woman gave a queer little sob, gratitude, relief, horror perhaps, which brought Dolores running to her side, and they cried together; whilst the men carried the body out, and threw it over the cliff, returning with dry earth with which to cover the stains.

They sat down beside the fire, Felizardo in his late foe’s place, and the stranger poured out some spirit, which they drank in silence.

After a while Felizardo spoke. “Why did you come up here, on the mountains?”

The stranger, whose name was Carlos, pointed to the woman: “I took her from a convent.”

Felizardo smiled grimly. “And I killed a priest, for her,” nodding towards Dolores.

Carlos leaned forward quickly. “Are you named Felizardo? I thought so. Even here, on the mountains, we hear things …. Let me, let us, stay here with you in this cave—as I said, you are the better man and can take it if you will—but I can help you; and the women will not be lonely.”

For answer, Felizardo held out his hand; and so was started his band, which afterwards became the most famous in the Islands.

The band grew rapidly, as is the way of such organisations, when the leader is infinitely stronger than any of his followers; then, after a while, Felizardo determined to weed it out. He would have no men who were outlaws merely because of their own vicious natures, to whom ladronism was a natural calling. There were many of these already in the mountains, and they formed a rival band against him, on hearing of which he sallied out one night and cut them to pieces. From that time onwards, for many years, no native challenged his sovereign rights over the mountain range.

He made peace with the tribe of head-hunters, who were his northern neighbours, respecting their customs, so long as they took none of his men’s heads, and with the tao to the south, from whom he bought live-stock, the money he gave being obtained from Presidentes and Tenientes and planters, and other folk who oppress the common people, though it was taken as tribute, Felizardo not being a midnight robber, like Cinicio Dagujob had been.

News might go up from the coastal towns to the mountains, in fact it did go freely—news of what the Government was doing, of how the Presidentes and Tenientes were robbing the tao, of where the Guardia Civil was; but very little came down from the mountains, at least to the white men, and, of that little, practically none reached Calocan. Consequently, five years after Felizardo had turned ladrone, neither Don José nor the corporal knew that he was the chief of the big band, consisting of outlaws rather than of ladrones, of which they had heard vague rumours.

“They are in the mountains—pouf! I should let them stay there,” the corporal said. “They do not seem to do much harm, and it would cost a fabulous sum to hunt them out from amongst the caves and craters;” an opinion with which Don José, being already heavily taxed, agreed heartily.

“I wonder if Felizardo is there,” he added.

The corporal shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows? Let me see—he went four, or was it five, years ago. Five, that is it. Probably he is dead by now; he was not of the true ladrone breed. Anyway, I was right when I said he would never come back, just as I was right when I said I should never go home to Spain.”

“Have you applied for your pension?” the merchant asked.

The old soldier drew himself up. “How can I, Senor, when I am still active, and—and not old, declare I am no longer fit for my work? No, if they offer it, I shall take it; but until they offer——” and he went out, shaking his head.

That night a runner came in with a message for the corporal. A large band of ladrones, or rather a combination of a number of small bands, had raided and burned the village of Igut, which was about ten miles from the foot of the mountains, on the edge of the bay. Most of the tao had been killed; the Spanish trader had been tortured to death, and all the women and girls carried off. Troops were being hurried from Manila—in the Spanish way of hurrying, which did not mean much—but, meanwhile, all the small detachments were to go in pursuit. The corporal was to take two of his troopers, and twenty of the native soldiers attached to his post.

It was a great grief to the corporal that he had to make the trip by canoe in order to save time. He disliked service on foot, being a little stiff and short of wind; whilst, more important than that, it was always more dignified to ride in full uniform, at the head of your men. Now, however, not only his horse, but his great thigh-boots as well, would have to remain behind. Even his sabre must be carried by a native orderly. Still, as he said to Don José, who came to the landing-stage to see him off, one’s duty came before one’s sense of dignity, and an old soldier of Spain could afford to do things which would make a lesser man look absurd.

They landed on the beach at Igut, which now consisted of some piles of still-smoking ashes, a hundred or two charred posts, the remains of the nipa-houses, and the blackened walls of the church and the Spanish merchant’s house. There were bodies everywhere, slashed hideously with bolo-cuts; and beside the post in the plaza, where they had done him to death, in the hope of making him confess how he had hidden the wealth he did not possess, was all that remained of the Spanish merchant himself; seeing which, the corporal swore great oaths, unconsciously drew his hand across his eyes—curious how dim they were growing!—then, like a good Catholic, knelt down and prayed for the soul of the man he had never seen in life; and after that he donned the parade uniform he had brought in case of emergency, buckled on his sabre, and carried out the funeral of his fellow-countryman.

There was no trace of the other detachments which were supposed to be coming; but that fact did not weigh with the corporal. He had been ordered to pursue the ladrones, so he marched inland on the trail of the robbers. It was not difficult to follow them, at least for the first few miles; they were a large body, and they were taking along much loot and many prisoners. A little way out, the pursuers came on the body of a woman, and then those of two children, all boloed, apparently because they could not travel.

The trail led towards the foot of the range of mountains, Felizardo’s territory; and the corporal groaned involuntarily. He had to keep at the head of his little force, yet he was very stiff, and the climbing tried him severely. Once or twice, he was sorely inclined to call a halt, just to get his breath again; but he could not let his native soldiers see any signs of weakness, and so he struggled on. It was rather curious. After thirty-five years’ service, a man should be fit for anything, inured to all hardships. Probably it was only fancy after all, he told himself, as he squared his shoulders, and looked back sternly for any possible stragglers. Then suddenly, his orderly, who was just behind him, cried out that he had seen a ladrone scout, moving amongst the trees; and a moment later, almost before the corporal had time to take his sabre from the orderly, the ladrones were on them, three to one, cutting and slashing with their bolos. The corporal’s men, winded and exhausted, fired a volley from their muskets, but only one of the enemy was hit, and there was no chance of reloading. It became a case of the butt-end against the bolo, and, naturally, the bolo won. A few seconds afterwards, the corporal, one of his white troopers, and a native sergeant were the only survivors in sight, standing with their backs to a huge tree.

The corporal had drawn his pistol with his left hand, but a slash from a bolo had taken off three of his fingers before he could fire, though he was hardly conscious of the fact. All he knew was that he must die like a soldier of Spain, with his sabre in his hand.

For a minute, they kept the bolomen at bay, then the native sergeant went down, and the enemy began to close in, twenty of them, at least.

“It is over. Good-bye!” the corporal cried to his one remaining comrade.

There had never been any chance, and now there were more bolomen coming, scores of them, rushing down the hillside, yelling. The corporal braced himself up. His strength was almost gone, but he meant to kill one more enemy of Spain before he himself was killed.

And then a miracle seemed to happen. Suddenly, there was not an enemy within reach of his sabre, for boloman was fighting boloman, or, rather, the newcomers were slaying his enemies for him. The corporal lowered the point of his sabre—he had lost a great deal of blood, and the weight of the weapon now seemed almost unbearable—then he turned to his comrade with a question in his eyes, and, before the other had time to answer, lurched forward in a dead faint.

When the corporal recovered his senses, he was lying on a pile of blankets under a palm-leaf shelter. His left hand, which was bandaged up, was very painful—that was his first impression; then he began to remember, vaguely at the outset, seeing everything as through a mist of blood, which cleared away suddenly when it struck him that he was a prisoner amongst the ladrones, and he knew how ladrones treated Spanish prisoners. Better to have died there, at the foot of the big tree. Still, they should get no sign of weakness from him.

He closed his eyes whilst he repeated a prayer, then opened them again, to see a native, whose face was somehow familiar, standing beside him, regarding him with grave interest.

The corporal returned the look, then raised himself on his unwounded arm. “You are Felizardo!” he cried.

Felizardo nodded. “Yes, Senor, it is Felizardo. You remember last time, outside Don José’s warehouse, you saved me? Now”—he bowed slightly—“I am able to save you, also from ladrones.”

The corporal lay back again. This was an unprecedented situation, for which there was no provision made in the Regulations; for this same Felizardo was a ladrone who had slain a priest. At first, he tried to think what would be the correct thing to do; but in the end he could only jerk out a question: “Why did you do it?”

Felizardo waved his hand. “Those ladrones who burned Igut captured some of my men’s wives—that was all. We came on you by chance, and I was glad to pay my debt.”

The corporal breathed heavily. He did not intend to show any anxiety, but he wanted to know his fate. “And now?” he asked.

Felizardo smiled slightly. “Now, if you like, you may go back to Calocan at once; or, if you would honour me, stay with me in my mountains until your wound is healed.”

From any other native, the mere invitation, even without the phrase “my mountains,” would have stirred the corporal’s deepest wrath; but somehow he realised, almost with a sense of humiliation, that this native was a stronger man than himself. For a moment, he was inclined to accept, then he remembered he must go back and report—his defeat.

“Senor Felizardo,” he said, “I must go back;” he looked away and went on, a little brokenly: “Thank you, Senor. I told Don José we should never see you again, either of us. Now I, at least, have seen you, and I am glad, and—and very grateful.”

Again Felizardo smiled. “So you told Don José that? Well, we shall see;” and he began to walk away slowly.

The corporal called him back. “I might get you a pardon, even now, though … you know … the Church——”

The other man’s face grew hard. “I take no pardons,” he said sternly; then he shrugged his shoulders and laughed. “And, anyway, Senor, they would grant none. Still, it was kind of you.”

They carried the corporal down to Igut, where to his surprise he found eight survivors out of his force, and they put him on board a canoe, after what seemed a day’s unnecessary delay. Then they started back to Calocan, his own men paddling the canoe. The corporal was very unhappy. He knew now that he must be invalided out of the service: not honourably, however, but in disgrace, for his haste, or rather his over-devotion to duty, had brought disaster on the arms of Spain.

True, it would be a difficult matter to explain, for the women and children and the loot as well were back in Igut, and the surviving men had crept in from the jungle and begun to rebuild the nipa-houses, whilst, as a price for his rescue, Felizardo had made him promise not to tell how the mountaineers had rescued him. He wished now he had not given that promise—it was, probably, like the rest of the business, contrary to the Regulations—but, having given it, he must abide by it. He puzzled over the matter all the way back to Calocan, wondering what his men would say, not knowing that they had received orders on that point—orders which they now dare not disobey—from Felizardo himself.

When the canoe reached Calocan, the whole population was waiting on the beach to greet him. They cheered, and they crowded round him, and the women showered blessings on him; whilst there was even an orderly from Manila, commanding him to go to the Governor-General himself, a Grandee of Spain, as soon as his wounds permitted. The corporal flushed and stammered and looked round helplessly; then Don José came forward and took his arm. “Come up to my house. It will be quiet there.”

He led the corporal into the well-remembered room, which, somehow, seemed different now to the visitor, possibly because he had always entered it before as a proud and important man, whilst this time he felt himself an impostor. He took his glass of wine with trembling hands, put it to his lips, then set it down untasted. He might have to deceive every one else, but he could not be false to this old friend. He drew his hand across his forehead slowly, then he blurted out: “It’s a lie. I was beaten. I thought all my men were killed.”

Don José leaned forward and laid a hand on his arm. “I know the truth, my friend—everything. Felizardo told me.”

The corporal sat up erect in his chair and gasped. “Felizardo? When? How?”

“In this room, last night. He came alone, by canoe, and walked straight in. He wanted me to see you said nothing foolish, and he wanted to prove you had been wrong when you said he would never come back.”

For a full minute they sat in silence, then the corporal broke out. “He is a strong man, Senor.”

Don José nodded.

“He is a gentleman, Senor, even if he did kill a priest;” there was almost a note of defiance in the corporal’s voice.

Again Don José nodded.

There was another spell of silence, which was broken by the merchant saying: “You will do as he wishes? You will hear all, and say nothing? Then you will go back to Spain with your pension. Why not? You tried your best; you held up the ladrones—you, single-handed—and gave Felizardo his chance. It was your victory, after all.”

They took the corporal’s reticence and his rather muddled statements as the results of the wound he had received, coupled with his modesty. How could one doubt when one had been to Igut and seen the released prisoners, and the restored loot, and the heads of the ladrones stuck on posts along the beach?

Don José came to Manila to see him start on his journey to Spain.

“Will you see the Holy Father—now?” the merchant asked.

The corporal’s eyes brightened. “Why, yes, if I can. Why should I have changed—I, who have had thirty-five years in which to learn the truth?”

Don José laughed. “But has not Felizardo changed you? Is he only a savage, then?”

For a moment, the corporal was at a loss, then, “If he had not been educated, he would never have been able to read that letter, and would not have had to take to the hills,” he answered stoutly.

CHAPTER III

HOW CAPTAIN BASIL HAYLE WENT TO THE MOUNTAINS

The corporal never went to Rome, after all, and, as a result, his message to the Holy Father remained undelivered. True, he talked about going often during the ten years which elapsed before he himself was gathered to his mundane fathers, but, somehow, life was very pleasant in his own little village, where there were no ladrones to worry you, and plenty of untravelled folk ready to listen to your stories of ladrones. Moreover, Rome was a long way off, a very long way, and the journey needed many preparations; so, in the end, the only journey he did make was when he went on a visit to Don José Ramirez, who had also come home, rich and very weary.

They talked of Calocan, of San Polycarpio, and of the new gallows, on which Cinicio Dagujob was hanged, of many familiar spots and old friends; but most of all they talked of Felizardo and his doings.

“We were both wrong,” the corporal said. “He came back to Calocan, and we have come back to Spain. Curious, I am seldom wrong; but I was over those matters. Still, even an old soldier of thirty-five years’ service may make mistakes sometimes …. You say Felizardo is still in those same mountains?”

Don José nodded.

“He, at least, will never go back to his home to stay,” the corporal went on. “If there were nothing else, there is the Church, you know.” He shook his head gravely. “Felizardo killed a priest, and even though that Father Pablo was a ladrone, the cloth remains, always. And the Church does not forget. How can she afford to forget, with all those half-heathen souls to be saved?”

The corporal stayed a week in Don José’s big house, and then he went home to his own little house, in the village at the foot of the mountains, and with that both he and Don José Ramirez go out of this story, leaving only Felizardo and Dolores Lasara, who were still in the mountains in the distant Philippines, outlaws and, if you will, ladrones.

The corporal had been dead twenty years when Captain Basil Hayle, who was then only Serjeant Hayle of the Garrison Artillery, United States Army, landed in Manila. From the transport, he had seen a great range of mountains, running right down to the sea, and had admired them in his silent way, though he made no remark about them, even to the comrade who was leaning on the rail beside him, for, as a rule, the more he liked a thing, the less he said about it. It was only when his aversion was roused that he was moved to speech. If any one had told him then that those same mountains, and the people on them, were destined to play the most important part in his life, he might not have disbelieved the statement—in fact, he had a vein of superstition, or fatalism, which might have inclined him to believe it—but he would have gone on just the same until the crisis arrived.

Basil Hayle came of good stock on both sides. His father had been a Virginian, his mother a Swedish girl, a combination which usually turns out well, both the breeds being good ones. From his father he had inherited his sense of chivalry, his inability to know when he was beaten, and a certain deceptive strength which looked like laziness; from his mother had come his tall figure, his fair hair, and his unwillingness to cause unnecessary pain.

When, on the outbreak of the war, Basil Hayle had volunteered for the front, they had drafted him into the Garrison Artillery on account of his size and apparent slowness, qualities which are usually considered more suitable in garrison gunners than in any other branch of the service; but they quickly discovered that they had misjudged their man. The superfluous flesh he had recently acquired during a leisurely trip to Europe was soon got rid of, his education raised him above the level of the majority of his comrades, and before the transport left San Francisco he was a full Serjeant. Still, he was in the Garrison Artillery, and a garrison gunner he had to remain, kicking his heels in a sweltering fort on the shore of Cavite Bay—with his largest gun he could almost have thrown a shell on to the lower slopes of Felizardo’s mountains—whilst the other regiments were having a splendid time amongst the insurrectos.

As every one knows, the Americans went to the Philippines to save the Filipinos from the Spanish tyranny; and, as is also well known, the Filipinos responded in characteristic fashion. For a few brief weeks, the agitators in the towns believed, and proclaimed, that the millennium had come, the reign of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity—Liberty to do what was good in your own sight, and evil in the sight of every decent man; Equality, so far as the goods of a richer man than yourself were concerned; Fraternity in the Cain-and-Abel sense. The tao repeated the words, taking them to mean that the Presidentes and Tenientes would be hanged, and that there would be cock-fights every day of the week; the ladrones took them to mean the entire abolition of any form of police; but old Felizardo, who was now sixty years of age and the wisest man in the Islands, laughed scornfully.

“The Americanos will let them bolo one another for a while,” he said, “then they will send an army to put those who remain in order. Still, it is not my quarrel. I claim nothing beyond my mountains.”

None the less, he strengthened the outposts on the lower slopes of the range, and when the Provisional Government in Manila sent envoys to ask him to join them, the rather nervous mestizos who brought the message were sent back, very flustered, with their mission unfulfilled. Then came other envoys, truculent ones this time, with orders to Felizardo to make his submission to the Sovereign People, the latter being represented by a few score of coffee-coloured little men in khaki uniforms, with huge red sashes, huge red epaulettes, and even more huge sabres, which they loved to jangle over the cobble-stones of the towns, greatly to their own glory, and much to the detriment of their scabbards. Felizardo, hearing of them, laughed again—his official uniform was a suit of white duck and a broad-brimmed straw hat—then he said to Dolores, whose girlish prettiness had changed now to a sweet-faced dignity: “The corporal of the Guardia Civil at Calocan—you remember, the old one—would alone have put them to flight, beating them with the flat of his sword. They tell me those patriots have hewn down the gallows at Calocan. Well, it was old; and, in any case, the Americanos would doubtless have put up a new one—for these patriots.”

But when the second deputation, that to demand his instant submission to the will of the Sovereign People, arrived, and Felizardo heard that the envoys were generals, wearing that same gorgeous uniform, he waxed wroth, and ordered that those distinguished soldier-diplomats should be brought to him. “Bring them, sabres, revolvers, and all,” he said. “Let them climb the mountains, and climb rather fast, as I am in a hurry to see the great sight.”

Possibly, his orders were taken too literally. At any rate, two of the envoys fainted half way up the mountain-side, and had to be revived with pricks from the point of a bolo; whilst even the third, who was of a tougher breed, had none of his truculence left when he found himself face to face with that quiet, wizened little man. Moreover, the ends of the scabbards were worn and dented beyond all hope of repair, and when, in obedience to Felizardo’s order, the owners attempted to draw their sabres in salute, not one of them could get the blade out.

One or two of Felizardo’s men—there were over a hundred clustered round—laughed; but the chief himself looked grave. “Patriot generals should do better than that,” he said. “I fear you would be certain to die for your country if an enemy were to meet you in that state. I can remember the days when our people were content with a bolo in a wooden sheath.”

A laugh went round the semicircle of his followers, each of whom had one of the weapons in question strapped round his waist. But the envoys did not laugh. Somehow, Felizardo’s courtesy seemed to jar on their nerves.

“What do you want here, on my mountains? Where is the message you have to bring me?” The chiefs manner changed suddenly.

The envoys exchanged glances; then the eldest of them, rather reluctantly, produced an official-looking document, decorated with a large seal. Felizardo read the paper carefully, then handed it to a youngster who was standing behind his chair. “Burn that, Enrique,” he said; and after that he turned to the envoys again. “What are your names, O Generals of the Sovereign People?” he asked.

They gave him names, and then, after telling the eldest to stand to one side, he called to his men. “Do you know these two?” he asked.

One they identified as the late door-keeper at the Palace, and the other as a money-lender in a Manila suburb.

Felizardo nodded; then he beckoned to the third man. “You are the son of Cinicio Dagujob,” he said. “You were one of the band of ladrones which burned San Juan two years ago. Do not deny it. I know you.” Then he nodded to his men. “Hang him,” he said curtly; and they led the general away, sullen, defiant, unresisting, a ladrone to the end, and hanged him, with his great sabre still on him.

After that, Felizardo called up the other two. “You shall go back to Manila, with this message from Felizardo.—Your government talks of the will of the Sovereign People and the Law of Liberty. I, Felizardo, say that here, in my mountains, where I am the sovereign chief, there is only one law, the Law of the Bolo, to which every man becomes subject the moment he sets foot on my land. Tell them that in Manila. See that you tell it faithfully, lest I come down to Manila and tell it them myself. And now, O Generals of the Sovereign People, you shall be well flogged, so that you may remember Felizardo, and then you shall go back with the message of the Bolo.”

The Provisional Government passed a resolution, or rather a series of resolutions, on the subject of Felizardo, declaring him to be a rebel, an outlaw, a tyrant, and an Enemy of the People, whilst a bishop whom it had appointed—ratification from Rome was sure to come to Catholic patriots—solemnly excommunicated the whole band; but when they called for a volunteer to deliver copies of the resolutions to Felizardo, none was forthcoming, even though they promised a general’s commission to any man who undertook the task. But they sent no force against the chief of the mountains, and, almost before they had got half-way through their discussions on the subject of dealing with him, the American Army arrived and, as the soldiers put it, began to clear up the mess.

A few weeks later, the Provisional Government itself had taken to the hills; and many a time, when the Americans were hard on their heels, members of that same government looked longingly at Felizardo’s mountains, and thought of the shelter to be obtained there, or rather of the shelter which might have been obtained there, had Felizardo not been a tyrant and an Enemy of the People. Yet none even set foot in his territory, for that message of his concerning the Law of the Bolo had been repeated faithfully in Manila; and all men, at least all Filipinos, knew that Felizardo was a man of his word.

So the Americans chased the insurrectos—that is, the troops of the late Provisional Government—and the ladrones, and the head-hunters who were Felizardo’s northern neighbours, gathered in the stragglers on both sides, each doing in accordance with his customs; but the mountains were left alone. Then, as all the world knows, or ought to know, just as the army had the insurrectos nicely in hand, and was about to capture, and hang comfortably, the worst offenders, the exigencies of party politics in the United States led to the institution of Civil Government throughout the Islands. The army was withdrawn; the members of the late Provisional Government were absolved of their murders and their rapes, and their other abominations, and made governors of provinces, and commissioners, and even judges; and from these the Civil Government first learned of Felizardo and his wicked ways, how he had flogged, and even hanged, pure Filipino patriots; and Mr Commissioner Furber, the head of the new department of Constabulary and Trade—a rather infelicitous, or invidious, combination—decided that Felizardo, the Enemy of the People, must be rooted out and destroyed; for Mr Commissioner Furber, like Mr Collector Sharler of the Customs, who had a native wife, was a firm believer in that great and glorious and democratic doctrine, which declared that the Filipino was the white man’s Little Brown Brother, whilst, obviously, this same Felizardo, whom the ex-generals declared to be a common ladrone, had no fraternal feelings at all. So the doom of Felizardo was signed and sealed, and the only thing remaining to be done was the carrying out of the sentence—a small matter surely when the latter had been pronounced by a Commissioner of great power. It is at this point that Captain Basil Hayle of the Philippines Constabulary, late Sergeant Hayle of the Garrison Artillery, U.S.A., comes into the story; for he was the man deputed to carry out the dread fiat of Mr Commissioner Furber, which led to his going up into the mountains and learning the Law of the Bolo.

Basil Hayle took his discharge from the Army in Manila at the earliest possible opportunity. He was a little tired of garrison gunnery as practised in the Islands, and was anxious to join one of the new corps of native troops then being formed. The chance came quickly. The Civil Government, desirous of proving to the Army how beautifully it could manage without professional assistance, raised a force of its own, the Philippines Constabulary, the rank and file of which was composed of any stray natives who felt sufficiently energetic to enlist, whilst the officers consisted mainly of discharged private soldiers. The equipping of the Constabulary gave the politicians in the Government offices the chance of their lives. The rifles were Springfield carbines, manufactured in the early ‘seventies; most of the ammunition would not fire; whilst the clothing and boots were of the very worst quality imaginable, purchased at the very best prices.

It is one thing to raise officers for such a corps, quite another thing to keep them. Basil Hayle, however, was amongst those who remained, and, as a result, he quickly found himself promoted captain of a company of some sixty surly, ragged little men, natives of Manila and its immediate neighbourhood, who could neither drill nor shoot, whose objects in life were to smoke cigarettes, play monte, and, whenever the chance occurred, slip away to a cock-fight, from which they generally returned penniless and incoherent.

Basil did his best with them. He contrived to be sent to an out-station, in the hopes of getting them in hand; but the sole result was that five joined a local band of ladrones, taking their carbines and their friends’ money with them, whilst five more returned hurriedly, and without leave, to Manila, to lay their grievances before a fellow-countryman, an ex-colonel of the Army of Liberty, who was now chief secretary to Mr Commissioner Furber. Meanwhile, Captain Hayle’s subaltern, a youth from Boston, had married a native woman, a proceeding which aroused all Basil’s bitterest Southern prejudices. The incident moved him to speech, and he spoke with so much emphasis, and so much effect, that from that time onwards he was short of an officer. Then, to crown it all, a runner came in with peremptory orders from the Commissioner for him to bring his company back to Manila and explain his arbitrary proceedings.

This time, there was no one to whom he could speak emphatically, save the messenger, who knew no English, whilst, so far, his own knowledge of Spanish expletives was limited; consequently, he had to keep it all for the Commissioner, who, having regarded him hitherto as a silent, docile man, even if he were a Southerner—Furber himself came from Boston—was distinctly surprised and pained, as Basil had intended he should be. Still, in the end, they parted, if not good friends, at least with a temporary understanding. So many useful officers had resigned recently that the Commissioner dare not let another go; moreover, he had just been made fully acquainted with the evil deeds of Felizardo, that enemy of Progress and the Sovereign People; and Basil Hayle seemed a very suitable man to go and rout out the nest of brigands in the mountains.

Hayle accepted the commission joyfully, knowing nothing of Felizardo, of whom he now heard for the first time. He was in the service purely for the sake of excitement and experience, and this task of clearing those mountains, which he had so often admired, of a gang of brigands and murderers seemed to promise him both. That same night, after dinner, he went to the Orpheum, the music-hall of Manila, and, meeting Clancy of the Manila Star in the entrance, was taken into the Press box, whence you can obtain the finest view of those young ladies who are imported at vast expense, and apparently with only part of their wardrobes, from Australia and the China Coast to elevate and amuse the public of Manila.

Clancy had known the Philippines in the Spanish days, and Basil turned to him for information.

“Ever heard of a ladrone called Felizardo?” he asked,

“No”—Clancy had a passion for correct expressions—“but I have heard of an old man called Felizardo, who for the last five-and-twenty years has been recognised by the Spaniards as the chief of that range of mountains over there. He was an outlaw, certainly, but a regular ladrone, never. The Spaniards were too wise to worry him, and he left them alone. Why, what’s the matter with him now? Has he been hanging any more patriots?”

“No, only I’ve got to go out and catch him, and break up his band.” There was a note of defiance in Hayle’s voice. He was young, after all, a bare eight-and-twenty, and he did not like even the possibility of ridicule.

But Clancy was very grave now. “You are going up there?” he said. “You, who are new at the game yourself, going up against Felizardo, with that ragged crowd of yours? Why, man, it’s absurd. Twenty companies like yours wouldn’t suffice for the job. Your people must be stark raving mad”—Clancy was an Irishman. “Take my advice and go sick. You’ll be cut to pieces the moment you set foot on Felizardo’s mountains,”

Basil got up stiffly. “Thanks,” he said, “but I shall not take your advice. I have been ordered to go, and I shall go—to-morrow, if possible,” and he went out.

Clancy looked after him, and shrugged his shoulders. “A fool and his folly,” he muttered; “or, rather, fools and their folly. Still, it is a pity.”

However, Captain Hayle did not start for the mountains the following day, nor for many days after. Incautiously, or perhaps fortunately, he mentioned their destination to his serjeant, who repeated the news to the men, with the result that there were only three members of the company, the serjeant and two corporals, old soldiers of the Spanish times, who answered to the roll-call that evening. The rest had found urgent business elsewhere, and half of them had forgotten to leave their carbines behind.

It was a very angry and shamed-faced Captain of Constabulary who reported the occurrence to the Commissioner on the following morning; but, greatly to his surprise, that official was almost sympathetic.

“I cannot say I was altogether unprepared for it,” he said. “In fact, since I saw you, I have heard so many absurd stories concerning this Felizardo, who seems to be a kind of supernatural person in the eyes of the common people here, that I can understand your poor, ignorant soldiers going.”

“They took twenty-eight carbines,” Hayle interjected grimly.

The Commissioner smiled. “My secretary assures me those will be returned. There is no vice in those Little Brown Brothers of ours. It is only men like this Felizardo who cause all the trouble …. Well, Captain Hayle, there is a company in Manila now, one which was raised in the Island of Samar by Captain Marten, who has just died. You had better take command of that. You will find those Samar men are not afraid of Felizardo.”

So Basil Hayle took over the sixty-five little brown men from Samar, and spent the better part of a fortnight trying to instil some idea of discipline into their heads; then, with infinite trouble, he managed to get some tolerably reliable ammunition from the stores, and bought boots for his men out of his own pocket, though he knew that the money would be stolen. And after that he went back to the Commissioner, and reported that he was ready, adding: “It would be as well if one of these Manila men, who gave you the information about Felizardo, came along as guide.” But all those same Manila men had, it appeared, very pressing private business which they could not leave, and, anyway, as the Commissioner said: “If you search long enough, you are bound to come on these outlaws;” whereat, Captain Hayle went out, shrugging his shoulders. He had been making a few enquiries, from Spaniards and other folk likely to know, and he had come to the conclusion that it was far more probable that Felizardo would find him. Still, Clancy of the Star had put him on his mettle, and he was determined to go through with it.

At Igut, where the corporal of the Guardia Civil had landed thirty years before, there was a garrison consisting of a company of the Philippine Scouts, a force which held itself to be vastly superior to the Constabulary, for, though the rank and file of both were drawn from the same classes, the Scouts were under the Army, and so had food and clothing and high pay, and other advantages, which, if given to an Asiatic, tend to make him proud and mutinous and careful of his own skin. They had rebuilt Igut since the corporal’s day, and there was now a regular plaza with half a dozen stone-built houses on it, and a gaol and barracks and many nipa-shacks and a church; in fact, there was accommodation for all classes of the community, save the pigs, and fowls, and pariah-dogs, which wandered at large, spreading disease. Still, even with these drawbacks, it was an important place. The Presidente was an ex-member of the Provisional Government, whom the army was just going to hang for torturing a bugler to death, when the Civil Government saved him; the principal merchant was a nephew of old Don José Ramirez of Calocan; whilst Captain Bush, the officer in command of the Scouts, lived with his wife in the large white-washed house at the top corner of the plaza. Igut had changed greatly since the day when Felizardo had the heads of the ladrones stuck on posts along the beach, and insisted on the corporal having the credit for the victory.

A wheezy little steamer took Captain Hayle and his men across the bay. At first, the skipper suggested that he should land the party at Igut; but, greatly to his disgust, Hayle declined. There was another tiny harbour practically at the foot of the mountains, and there was no sense in tramping ten miles or so through the jungle when you could go much more comfortably by water. It was nothing to Basil if the mestizo skipper happened to be in a hurry to get back in time for a big cock-fight. So, in the end, they disembarked at the village of Katubig, which consisted of a score of nipa-shacks along the edge of the beach, the sort of place which could be burned with the greatest ease any night, if you were not on good terms with the ladrones—or, more important still, not under the protection of Felizardo—facts which struck Captain Hayle at once, and made him very careful and a little anxious.

Felizardo had received ample warning of the coming of the Constabulary; in fact, ten of the deserters from Hayle’s old company had arrived, with their carbines, and begged to be admitted to the band; but, though the chief had retained the weapons, which would be useful, he had declined the services of the men, arguing that if they had been unfaithful to the Americanos, they would possibly be unfaithful to him.

He was perfectly able to hold his own in the mountains, of that he had no doubt; but still Hayle’s expedition worried him, because it showed that the Americanos did not mean to continue the sensible Spanish policy of leaving him alone. For years past he had given up active ladronism, having no further need to practise anything of the kind, and he was both annoyed and astonished that the new authorities in Manila should think of interfering with him. It never occurred to him that, in addition to having incurred the enmity of the Manila mestizos, he was also an anachronism—that he represented a condition of affairs which Mr Commissioner Furber and his colleagues could not allow to continue, that his personal independence was contrary to all the accepted theories of law and order, as well as to the Declaration of Independence, because, as the Commissioners had heard on the very best authority, he was a tyrant and an Enemy of the People.

If Felizardo had understood these things, he might have acted differently, and have made his peace with Manila. True, he was growing old, and a little weary, and old men are less ready for strife than are the younger ones; but, at the same time, they are less ready to change their points of view, and the one fixed idea in Felizardo’s mind was that the mountains belonged to him. Still, he did not want to bring on a crisis; and so he sent word to his outposts on the lower slopes, to the villages in the valley, and to the head-hunters on the northern side, that the Americanos were to be turned back with as little bloodshed as possible—which was fortunate for Captain Basil Hayle and his men.

The Constabulary remained one night at Katubig, the Teniente of which proved to be a most courteous old native, very full of information concerning Felizardo and his evil ways; in fact, so anxious was he to see the band broken up, that he even offered to let his own servant guide Hayle and his men to the brigands’ camp, which, he said, was some twenty miles away, towards the end of the range. For a moment, Basil hesitated. It seemed a little too easy. Then he recollected that his only alternative was to blunder forward without a guide of any sort, and so he accepted the offer.

Twenty miles may not seem a great distance in a civilised country, where there are roads, or, at least, paths; but twenty miles along the lower slopes of Felizardo’s mountains, forcing one’s way through the dense jungle, with the necessity of being prepared for attack at any moment, is a very different matter. It took two days to do the journey, and when the column arrived, weary and hungry, at the spur of the big volcano, just beyond which Felizardo’s camp was supposed to be, and camped down for the night, Basil discovered that the guide had slipped away into the bush.

The situation was not a pleasant one. The whole way they had seen no trace either of ladrones or of tao. There was no chance of getting another guide, no chance of obtaining information; whilst for lack of cargadores, or carriers, they had only been able to take five days’ food supply with them. In the circumstances, most men would have made their way straight back to Katubig, and then have started afresh; but the idea was utterly repugnant to Captain Hayle. He felt that, so far, he had shown himself a helpless amateur, and that to return meekly would be to make a public confession of failure. He spent half the night sitting beside the fire, smoking, and trying to think out a plan. He realised now the extreme difficulty of his task, the absurdity of it even—they had set a white man who had not the slightest idea of the geography of the range to track down a native outlaw who had spent thirty-five years there, and knew every inch of the ground.

Nine Constabulary officers out of ten would have reported the job to be hopeless. Basil Hayle happened to be the tenth man, and, before he lay down to sleep, he had decided to do the thing scientifically—to explore the range from end to end, even if he took months over doing it, and then to ask for an adequate force with which to round up the outlaws. It was the only way.

In accordance with this plan, he did the one thing which neither Felizardo, nor any one else, would have expected him to do—at the first streak of dawn he started to climb straight up the mountain-side, beyond the jungle, beyond the scrub which succeeded the jungle, on to the rocky ground itself, and there he had his first fight.

Afterwards, Felizardo hanged two of the survivors for not keeping a proper lookout; but, though that prevented similar mishaps for the future, it did not alter the essential fact that the outlaws were badly beaten. They had a camp—it was one of their largest outpost stations—on a great ledge of rock, from which, on a clear day, you could see Manila itself. Two large caves furnished the main shelter, but in addition to these there were half a dozen little huts, amongst which the men were sitting, smoking and playing cards, when Basil Hayle and his men suddenly appeared. For once, the rifle had its chance against the bolo, or rather the bolo had no chance at all. Moreover, the Constabulary were superior numerically. The first volley really settled the question; and when a dozen bolomen did rally and attempt a rush, half-heartedly, knowing that the bolo should be used in the jungle or in the darkness, they were beaten back easily.

Five minutes later, everything was over; and then Basil Hayle made a discovery which was to alter the whole of his after-life. There were half a dozen women and children in one of the caves, weeping and clinging to one another. Basil drew back hurriedly. He did not like to see things like that, especially as most of them were young, and one, a mestiza, was extremely nice-looking. The position was rather awkward, he told himself. He had not the slightest intention of taking them along with him, and yet, if he left them up there, on that ledge of rock, with three or four badly wounded outlaws as their sole guard, no one could tell what might happen. Possibly, Felizardo’s main camp was twenty miles away, and, from what he had heard of the old man’s character, it was quite likely that none of the few members of the outpost who had escaped unhurt would be in a hurry to return to their leader.

Basil pushed his hat back and scratched his head. What right had women to be mixed up in an affair like this? Then, suddenly, his eyes fell on the only unwounded prisoner, a sullen-looking youth, who had been knocked down with the butt-end of a carbine. “Come here,” he said. “Do you know Felizardo’s camp?”

The boy looked at him suspiciously; then Basil went on: “Go and tell him to come and fetch these women and the wounded men. See? Get along now.”

He needed no second bidding. He had been expecting to be taken down to the coast and hanged as a ladrone, and he did not feel quite sure that such was not to be his fate until he was actually out of sight round the next spur of the mountain; then he doubled back, and re-passed the Constabulary out of sight, for, like a true outlaw, he had taken the precaution of starting off in the wrong direction.

Had Basil Hayle been a more experienced, or a less chivalrous man, he would have waited, on the chance of Felizardo himself coming along presently, in which case this story would have ended abruptly, so far as the Constabulary officer was concerned; for the force which presently arrived, expecting some such trap, had both rifles and bolos, and crept in cautiously from all sides; but, by that time, the Constabulary were miles away, scrambling over the rocks in great good-humour, for had they not won their first fight, and acquired, not only glory, but loot as well in the form of bolos, and playing cards, and clothes, and, most important of all, cigarettes?

The Captain, too, was satisfied, feeling he had made a good start. Moreover, he had secured an additional two days’ provisions, and so would be able to explore the whole of one side of the range before returning to Katubig.

The Teniente of Katubig was very apologetic about the guide. It was all a mistake, he said. The man had taken them to the foot of the wrong volcano, and then, fearing to be punished, had fled. Still, every one was glad to hear that the Senor Capitaine had inflicted a severe blow on that villain, Felizardo, who would doubtless now see the wisdom of submission to those great-hearted Americanos, who had saved the Islands from the oppressions of both the Spaniards and the insurrectos. As for the ladrones——

Basil cut his eloquence short. “How did you hear about our fight?” he demanded.

For an instant the Teniente looked troubled, then he laughed. “I forgot. There is one here, a young tao by his appearance, who has been waiting for three days past with a letter for you. He it was who had heard of the fight.”

Hayle frowned. “Send him in to me,” he said. The moment the messenger entered, the American knew him again; but the Teniente, who was watching closely, detected no sign of recognition; nor did Basil’s face give him any clue to the contents of the letter, which ran:—

“Felizardo thanks the American captain for returning to him his daughter, and the other women, and also the wounded men. That is how brave men make war; and if at any time Felizardo has the opportunity of doing a similar service, assuredly it will be performed. On the other hand, in the mountains, which belong to Felizardo, there is only one law, the Law of the Bolo, and those who come as enemies will be met with the bolo. This was the word Felizardo sent to the insurrectos, and he sends the same message to the Americanos. Though, perhaps, some day he may be able to show the captain of the Samar men that he can be an enemy and a friend at the same time.”

Captain Basil Hayle folded the letter carefully, and thrust it into an inner pocket. “H’m!” he muttered, “Felizardo’s own daughter—the well-dressed, pretty mestiza, I suppose. I don’t think I shall mention this to Furber—or to any one else, for that matter, as they wouldn’t understand.”

CHAPTER IV

HOW MRS BUSH HEARD OF THE LAW OF THE BOLO

After he received the letter from Felizardo, thanking him for returning his daughter, promising to repay the service when an opportunity occurred, and threatening him with the Law of the Bolo if he dared to come, as an American officer, on to his mountains, Captain Basil Hayle spent three days in Katubig, resting his men, and preparing to do the very thing which Felizardo had forbidden. His duty was to destroy the community of outlaws in the mountains; yet, though at the first encounter he had scored an easy victory, he was by no means sure that he could repeat the process. It is one thing for troops armed with carbines to surprise bolomen in the open, quite another thing when the bolomen jump out on the troops in the dense jungle, where you hardly have time to bring your carbine to your shoulder once, much less have time to reload, before they are right on you, slashing and jabbing with their hateful knives, under cover of the smoke.

So far, Basil Hayle had had practically no experience of jungle fighting, but he had a very shrewd notion of what it would be like; and, whilst his little Constabulary soldiers were full of confidence and ardour, as a result of their first victory, he looked forward with a certain amount of misgiving, not because he was afraid—he was physically incapable of fear—but because, having started the hunting of Felizardo, he was anxious to see the job through to the end.

He heard a good deal of Felizardo during those three days; for on the night of his return a curious little tramp steamer wheezed into the bay, and put ashore an equally curious old Spaniard, a hemp-buyer; and from him Basil Hayle learned many things; for the newcomer had known Don José Ramirez and the corporal of the Guardia Civil, and could remember the building of what was then the new gallows at Calocan, on which they had hanged Cinicio Dagujob the ladrone thirty-five years before. Consequently, he was able to tell Basil, who was only too ready to hear, all about how Felizardo had slain Pablo the priest, and had run off with Dolores Lasara, and had taken to the mountains, of which he was now the ruler.

Basil Hayle asked many questions, and with each answer he grew to have more respect for the power of the wizened little man whom he was to hunt down—if he could. Of Dolores Lasara the Spaniard could tell him little. “I saw her once, and—I was very young then, younger than you are now—I thought her the most beautiful mestiza in the Islands. Perhaps she was; at any rate, many men have died because Felizardo loved her so well. She is still alive, they say; and I hear there is a daughter.” Basil coloured involuntarily. “How do I hear all these things? Oh, now that they no longer have reason to fear us, we Spaniards can go anywhere, just as the English have always done. The Law of the Bolo is for other Filipinos, and for you Americanos”—he laughed gently—“you will learn that law by and by. So far, you have hardly begun to know it. If we had taken those insurrectos, those generals and colonels and majors, we should have hanged them, and finished all the foolishness. You create them judges and governors, and make it worse. This same Felizardo knows better than that, even though he may have been born a tao and have killed a priest.”

Just as the Constabulary were starting out on the fourth morning, the old Spaniard gave their officer one last word of advice. “I say you are mad to go on Felizardo’s mountains at all—what harm does the old man do to your American politicians in Manila?—but you will be more than mad if you go round on the northern slopes.”

“Why?” Hayle demanded.

The Spaniard smiled. “Head-hunters—hundreds of them they say, more dangerous than any bolomen. I have never been there to see. No, Senor; but I have heard often. What are they, Senor? How much you Americanos have to learn about these Islands! Why, just savages—quite different from the Filipinos—nearly naked. Their pleasure in life is to collect heads, just as your great men collect millions of dollars.”

“What a pleasant notion!” Hayle’s voice was quite cheerful. “No, Senor, I am not going the head-hunters’ direction this time; but I may do so soon. Still, if I do, I shall come back to tell you all about it.”

The old man shook his head rather sadly as he walked away. “Perhaps,” he muttered, “perhaps—but first old Felizardo, then the head-hunters, and only sixty half-trained Samar tao as his troops. They are rash, very rash, these young Americans. A nice lad, too.” He sighed heavily, and went back to the weighing of his hemp.

Captain Hayle had decided to explore the seaward end of the range, where the mountains ran almost down to the shore of the great bay; consequently, from Katubig he followed the coast until he came to what looked like a suitable place for beginning his climb. Up to that point, he had not seen a sign of any human being, not heard a sound, save that of the waves breaking on the shore, and the wind murmuring through the cocoa-nut palms; but no sooner had he started to force his way into the jungle on the lower slopes, than a deep note boomed out, apparently from the tree-tops a few hundred yards away; a moment later, it was repeated, higher up the hill, and then again and yet again, in a dozen places, until every native for miles round must have heard it.

Basil stopped abruptly. “What is that?” he demanded of his serjeant.

The man made an expressive gesture. “The Boudjon, Senor, the alarm-horn. Now, every one of these ladrones knows we are coming. Either we shall see none at all, or we shall see too many.”

Basil muttered an oath, then, “Come on,” he said. “The quicker we move, the better our chances;” but already his own hopes of another successful fight had vanished. Obviously, Felizardo’s men were not to be caught asleep a second time.

It had been raining all night, and as a result the slope, bad enough at any time by reason of its horrible steepness, was now trebly bad on account of the slippery red clay underfoot. There was no trail of any sort; it was just a matter of forcing one’s way through the dense, soaking undergrowth, of fighting one’s way upwards, half-blinded with perspiration all the time, of dragging one’s boots, which now seemed to weigh a hundred pounds each, out of that horrible mire at every step, and then sliding back half the distance one had advanced. It was impossible to keep in any sort of order so as to be ready to meet an attack. There were always stragglers, those who got tangled up in the vines, or had their boots wrenched off by the mud. Basil Hayle went ahead, and trusted that his men, who were born to the jungle, were keeping up with him, for at no time could he actually see them all, on account of the dense bush.

They had gone, perhaps, half a mile up the hillside when he was suddenly convinced that men were watching him, that in the jungle ahead, and on both sides too, there were bolomen closing in. He paused and looked round, and saw nothing; looked round again and caught a glimpse of something white behind a bush. At the same moment, the serjeant, who was just behind him, saw it too, and gave a shout. The Constabulary tried to close up, but the last man was a full hundred yards behind, down the slope, and it was too late. The bolomen broke cover—a couple of hundred of them at least—whilst the Constabulary were still a helpless rabble, and the ragged volley which the plucky little Samar men let off only made matters worse. Possibly, it injured some of the trees and bushes; certainly, one bullet did get a boloman square in the throat; but under cover of the smoke, which hung like a pall in that breathless atmosphere, the outlaws rushed in.

The Constabulary died game. They were from Samar, Visayans by race, and the outlaws were natives of Luzon, Tagalogs; and between Visayan and Tagalog there is a never-dying blood-feud. Those who had bolos dropped their carbines, and set to work in their national fashion; those who had no bolos clubbed their carbines, and did their best that way. All died standing up, and almost every Visayan killed or wounded a Tagalog before he himself went down. They upheld the honour of Samar that day on the slopes of Felizardo’s mountains, when the Tagalog outlaws were three to one, and had the additional advantage of surprising a winded column.

Basil found himself with a little group of some fifteen men. The bolomen were in between him and the rest of his party, and so thick was the smoke—for, despite his orders, those round him continued to blaze away wildly—that he could see nothing of what was occurring below. Only, knowing that the outlaws were in overwhelming force, and hearing no more shots from the rest of his column, he could guess with a fair degree of certainty.

There were no bolomen above him now, so far as he could make out, and when at last the smoke cleared away, he could see none on the slope below. Nor could he see any of his other men, at least until he went down to look for them. Then he found them, and every one he saw was dead, usually with a dead outlaw somewhere near him.

He did not stay to count the bodies; he did not even go through what would have been the perfectly useless formality of ascertaining if any were still alive. For some inexplicable reason the outlaws had disappeared—they had not even made an attempt against him and his own little group—but they might be back at any moment, and his first duty was to get his pitiful handful of survivors into a place of safety.

As they hurried down the hillside, Basil blamed himself savagely for his folly. He had gone on blindly, in face of the warning of the alarm-horn, in face of Felizardo’s warning, taking his brave little fellows to certain death; and then, in the end, he had escaped without even one single boloman having attempted his life. Moreover, he had remained where he was, whilst his men were being cut to pieces below him. At first, this latter thought was the most bitter of all; then suddenly he understood, with a great sense of relief—Felizardo had ordered his life to be spared, and if he had led those last fifteen through the smoke they, too, would have been sacrificed uselessly. Still, it was galling to feel you owed your life to the clemency of an old outlaw, whom you had been sent out to catch.

He wondered what they would say in Manila. They would get his first message, telling how he had surprised the outpost on the slope of the volcano; and now he would have to send a second message—a message of a very different character—reporting that he had lost fifty men and fifty carbines, that the outlaws had scored a victory, the news of which would carry hope and encouragement to the hearts of all the criminal and all the disloyal elements in the Islands.

He wondered too what his men would think of him. They were keeping very close at his heels, expecting another attack any moment. He glanced back over his shoulder, half-fearing to meet with scornful or reproachful looks; but they were loyal little fellows, being simple tao, and, in their half-savage way, they were very sorry for him. The serjeant, a grizzled veteran who had received his first training at Calocan, under the successor of the old corporal of the Guardia Civil, tried to comfort him. “It is Fate, Senor. Why worry? Last time we had the luck; to-day the luck is with those accursed ladrones. Doubtless, next time we shall have our chance again. We could not help it. If we had charged, instead of keeping where we were, they would have had us too, and there would have been none to avenge our comrades. They were three to one all the time; and they were fresh, whilst we were exhausted with the climbing and the mud. It was their day to-day, Senor; to-morrow, it will be ours!”

The little men following behind grunted approval, which eased Basil’s mind considerably, knowing, as he did, that they were reliable judges.

They saw no trace of the outlaws as they made their way down to the beach, though three of the men whom they had reckoned dead, scrambled through the jungle to rejoin them. Basil breathed more freely when he found himself back in the cocoa-nut grove, off Felizardo’s ground, where, at least, one had a chance to shoot.

“We will get to Katubig as quickly as possible,” he said to the serjeant. “I don’t think they will follow us there; but, even if they do, we can put up a fight in one of the houses.”

Five minutes later, however, he began to think his confidence had not been justified; for one of the men, happening to look back, caught sight of a figure moving along the edge of the jungle, where the bush ended and the cocoa-nut grove began, and then they caught fleeting glimpses of many, though all the time there was nothing at which to shoot.

Basil did the right thing. He led his men on to the beach itself, where the boloman has to come within range of the carbines long before he reaches you, and there is always sufficient breeze to clear away the smoke.

They marched quickly, or rather they hurried along—as Basil Hayle told himself bitterly, they were the remnant of a defeated force in full retreat—and all the time they were aware that the bolomen were following just at the edge of the jungle; then, suddenly, they rounded the point by Katubig, when you come in sight of the village, and for a moment they forgot even the bolomen, for Katubig was in flames. Half the nipa and bamboo houses, including that in which the Constabulary supplies were stored, had already collapsed, whilst another five minutes would see the rest practically gutted.

Captain Hayle groaned. “Well, of all the infernal luck——” he began; then he noticed that there was not a single native in sight, not a single canoe left on the beach, and straightway he understood. Katubig was practically one of Felizardo’s villages—he was a fool not to have thought of that before—and the old chief no longer intended it to be used as a base for operations against himself.

There was practically only one course open to Basil, and he decided instantly to take it. He had no axes, no tools of any sort; consequently, there was no possibility of making anything in the way of a stockade, whilst to remain in the open with only eighteen men was to invite a further and final disaster. No, he must cover the ten or twelve miles to Igut, where there was a company of the Philippine Scouts quartered. There he would be safe, and from there he could send a report of his defeat to Manila. It was not a pleasant prospect. The Constabulary and the Scouts did not love one another overmuch, and it was humiliating to have to seek refuge with the rival force. Still, he could see no alternative. Even as he decided, he could catch glimpses of Felizardo’s bolomen in the background, dodging from bush to bush, never giving a chance for a shot, but still driving him back from Felizardo’s mountains. He glanced at the sun. It was about one o’clock—Heavens, how much seemed to have happened since sunrise!—if he went straight on, and there was no sense in going into the burning village itself, he would be at Igut by sunset, provided the path were not unusually bad.

The men heaved sighs of relief when they learned their destination. They had had enough of the mountains to last them for a day or two; it was going to pour with rain again that night; and the prospect of sleeping, or rather of trying to sleep, in the open with Felizardo’s bolomen prowling round, just outside the circle of firelight, was not an exhilarating one. Consequently, they started off for Igut very cheerfully. True, they had lost most of their comrades, and had been badly beaten by the accursed Tagalog outlaws; but, after all, what matter? They themselves were all right. They had plenty of cigarettes for the march: they could buy plenty more in Igut, in addition to spirits; whilst, doubtless, the Scouts would have money to lose at monte; moreover, next time they met Felizardo’s men, the fight would go the other way—of that they felt sure ….

Somehow, Igut seemed well-named. The word might mean anything, but the sound expressed the town itself, at least to Western ears. The place might appear picturesque, almost fascinating, to a chance visitor, who knew that he was going to leave it in a few hours; but when you had to live there, you quickly came to see it in a very different light, as Mrs Bush, the wife of Captain Bush of the Philippine Scouts, who had not been out of it for a whole year, could have told you.

From the balcony of her house at the corner of the plaza, Mrs Bush could survey the whole scene; and, as time hung very heavily on her hands, she used to spend many an hour lying back in her long bamboo chair, watching the view with languid disfavour, striving hard not to resent the fate which had led her to bury her bright young life in such a spot.

There was so little worth looking at, when you got to know it. The same tao were always asleep under the shade of the huge timber belfry in the middle of the plaza, the same hungry dogs were always nosing round for stray pieces of offal, the same shrill-voiced women wrangling with the Chinaman who kept the general store at the far corner. The priest would come out at a certain hour, meet the Presidente, and they would then make their way together to the spirit shop next to the Chinaman’s. A little later, the Supervisor and the school teacher—white officials these—would come round the corner and follow the others to the same place, where presently her own husband would join them. Then, just at sundown, a squad of Scouts would loaf across the plaza to perform what they called mounting guard at the gaol. With that, the day’s activities would end, and the long, sweltering, breathless night, when the mosquitoes and the heat, and perhaps, as in her case, your own mental torment, would not allow you an hour’s real sleep. On Sundays the only difference was that every small boy in the place was allowed to jangle those terrible bells in the plaza to his heart’s content, and the white officials went to the spirit shop earlier in the day.

So much for the town. If you looked seawards—and from that balcony you had an almost uninterrupted view—it was equally monotonous. The palm-fringed bay, with its multicoloured coral bottom, and the vast expanses of mangrove swamp, which, almost closing its entrance, rendered it a safe anchorage, even when the monsoon was booming in its fiercest, always seemed the same. True, every now and then, at irregular intervals, a Government launch would come in with mails or stores. More rarely still, a trading steamer, with rust-streaked funnel and sides, a veritable maritime curiosity which would have been condemned to the scrap-heap anywhere else, would wheeze and cough her way up to the rickety wooden jetty in quest of a cargo of hemp; but save on these occasions, the waters were disturbed only by the dug-outs of native fishermen, who seemed to put to sea merely for the sake of avoiding the flies on shore; at any rate, they always dozed off to sleep the moment they had dropped the stones which served as anchors.

Mrs Bush knew it all so well, and hated it as well as she knew it. Over a year ago—twelve months and three weeks, to be correct—she had left Manila; and, though the capital was only a few hours’ steam away, she had never been back, never spoken to a woman of her own race—for her husband had been told pointedly by the general in command that his only chance of retaining his commission was to remain at his station, and get his men in hand again. Captain Bush had left the capital, raging, and stayed at Igut, sulking; whilst his wife had been too proud to suggest a trip for herself, and he had been too indifferent to all that concerned her to offer it.

There was not even male society, for the Treasurer, the Supervisor, and the two school teachers, mere political nominees of small mental attainments, had long since sunk to the point of mixing socially with the natives, a thing from which her Southern blood recoiled in horror. Once, and once only, had she turned on her husband, and that was on the occasion when he brought the Supervisor and the Presidente—the latter a mestizo—in to dinner. The experiment was never repeated; possibly because Bush was really frightened at the storm he had aroused, possibly because she frightened the guests themselves; though in the end the latter had their revenge, or what passed with them as revenge, by vilifying her on every possible occasion, and rendering the breach between her and her husband absolutely uncrossable.

On the day of Basil Hayle’s defeat on the mountain-side, Igut had been panting and perspiring as only towns amongst the mangrove swamps can perspire and pant. On the plaza nothing had stirred. The women in the Chinaman’s store had quickly grown weary of wrangling, and had settled down to sleep in the doorway; even the dogs and the wolfish-looking pigs had ceased to quarrel amongst themselves on the quayside.

Evening brought little or no relief. Every few minutes, Mrs Bush glanced towards the setting sun, longing for it to disappear behind the line of mangroves, when there might be some chance of a slight breeze.

She was, as usual, on the veranda, behind the light matting blind, when an unwonted commotion made her start up quickly. The dogs had awakened to fresh life, and were barking noisily. A native, who had spread his net across the roadway that morning, with the intention of repairing it, and had then gone to sleep over his task, came to his senses suddenly, and began to gather in his property, as a small party of native soldiers, headed by a white officer, swung down the street. Mrs Bush lay back in her chair, and watched through the blind with languid interest. There was something in the manner of the officer which she liked. He seemed to know his own mind, and when half a dozen natives gathered in his path, apparently with the object of making the white man give way to them, and so raising a snigger at his expense, he brushed them aside like so many flies.

“He is from the South,” she said to herself, and, almost unconsciously, came to the rail of the balcony in order to see more easily.

As soon as he reached the dusty patch of grass in the centre of the plaza, Captain Hayle dismissed his men, who, after piling their arms against the timbers of the belfry, threw themselves down on the ground and produced the inevitable cigarettes. From the barracks at the upper end of the plaza, a score of Scouts emerged, and regarded the newcomers with marked disfavour, commenting on their torn, mud-stained uniforms, and their generally-ragged appearance.

“Only dam’ Constabularios,” sneered a serjeant, who prided himself on his knowledge of English; but, despite the insults, Hayle’s men smoked on unconcernedly. Had they not great things to relate when the women came round; whilst these Scouts, mere Tagalogs after all, had never even set foot on Felizardo’s mountains.

Mrs Bush remained at the rail of the balcony. The evening breeze had just begun to blow, and, moreover, she felt vaguely that she would like to get a nearer view of the newly-arrived white man. A minute later, her wish was gratified, for, after asking a question of one of the Scouts, who came forward rather sullenly, Basil Hayle started to cross the plaza towards her house. He was a little weary, his walk showed that; but when he chanced to look up and their eyes met, he seemed to pull himself together; then, probably because he had not expected to see a white woman in Igut, he raised his well-worn felt hat.

At the door, Basil found a sleepy muchacho, who, in reply to his questions, answered that Captain Bush was out, adding gratuitously, “As usual.” Nor did he know where the Scout officer was, or when he would be in. He was not at the barracks, nor at the spirit store across the plaza. Still, the Senora might know; he would call her.