Part 2

"So I left him to himself, and he lived on in his pestilential little hole, alone--lived a life more squalid every day. It wasn't at all a healthy life, you can understand, no healthier physically than morally. After a while I heard that he was looking bad, yellow as a lemon and the dengue cracking at his bones. I began to think of going to him after all, of jerking him out of his rut by force, if necessary, making him respect the traditions of his race. But just then came that Nichols affair, and flaring, his other bad side--his abject cowardice--reappeared to me. You remember the Nichols thing--boloed in the dark between my town and Himamaylan. His muchacho had jumped into the ditch. Afterward he got out and ran back the whole way, fifteen miles, to my place. I started down there. My idea was to pick up Miller as I passed, then Dent a little further down, find the body, and perhaps indications for White of the constabulary to whom I had sent a messenger and who could not reach the place till morning. Well, Miller refused to go. He had caught hold of some rumour of the happening; he was barricaded in his hut and was sitting on his bed, a big Colt's revolver across his knees. He would not go, he said it plainly. 'No, seh; Ah cain't take chances; Ah cain't affawd it.' He said this without much fire, almost tranquilly, exactly as he had, you remember, at the time of our shipwreck. It was not so amusing now, however. Here, on land, amid this swarming, mysterious hostility, at this crisis, it seemed a shocking betrayal of the solidarity that bound us all white men. A red rage took possession of me. I stood there above him and poured out vituperation for five good minutes. I found the most extraordinary epithets; I lowered my voice and pierced him with venomous thrusts. He took it all. He remained seated on his bed, his revolver across his knees, looking straight at some spot on the floor; whenever I'd become particularly effective he'd merely look harder at the spot, as if for him it contained something of higher significance--a command, a rule, a precept--I don't know what, and then he'd say, 'No, Ah cain't; Ah cain't affawd it.'

"I burst out of there, a-roar like a bombshell. I rode down to Dent; we rode down to the place and did--what there was to be done. Miller, I never wanted to see again.

"But I did. Some three weeks later a carrier came to me with a note--a pencilled scrawl upon a torn piece of paper. It read:

"'I think I am dying. Can you come see me?

"'MILLER.'

"I went down right away. He was dead. He had died there, alone, in his filthy little hut, in that God-forsaken pueblo, ten miles from the nearest white man, ten thousand miles from his home. He had died there all alone.

"I'll always remember our coming in. It was night. It had been raining for thirty-six hours, and as we stepped into the unlighted hut, my muchacho and I, right away the floor grew sticky and slimy with the mud on our feet, and as we groped about blindly, we seemed ankle-deep in something greasy and abominable like gore. After a while the boy got a torch outside, and as he flared it I caught sight of Miller on his cot, backed up into one corner. He was sitting upright, staring straight ahead and a little down, as if in careful consideration. As I stepped toward him the pliable bamboo floor undulated; the movement was carried to him and he began to nod, very gently and gravely. He seemed to be saying: 'No, Ah cain't affawd it.' It was atrocious. Finally I was by his side and he was again motionless, staring thoughtfully. Then I saw what he was considering. In his hands, which lay twined on his knees, were a lot of little metallic oblongs. I disengaged them. The muchacho drew nearer, and with the torch over my shoulder I examined them. They were photographs, cheap tintypes. The first was of a woman, a poor being, sagging with overwork, a lamentable baby in her arms. The other pictures were of children--six of them, boys and girls, of all ages from twelve to three, and under each, in painful chirography, a name was written--Lee Miller, Amy Miller, Geraldine Miller, and so on.

"You don't understand, do you? For a moment I didn't understand. I stared stupidly at those tintypes, shuffled and reshuffled them; the torch roared in my ear. Then, suddenly, understanding came to me; it came sharp as a pang. He had a wife and children--seven children.

"A simple fact, wasn't it, a commonplace one, almost vulgar, you might say. And yet what a change of view produced by it, what a dislocation of judgment! I was like a man riding through a strange country, in a storm, at night. It is dark, he cannot see, he has never seen the country, yet as he rides on he begins to picture to himself the surroundings, his imagination builds for him a landscape--a mountain there, a river here, wind-streaming trees over there--and right away it exists, it _is_, it has solidity, mass, life. Then suddenly comes a flash of lightning, a second of light, and he is astounded, absolutely astounded to see the real landscape different from that indestructible thing that his mind had built. Thus it was with me. I had judged, oh, I had judged him thoroughly, sized him up to a certainty, and bang, came the flare of this new fact, this extremely commonplace fact, and I was all off, all off. I must begin to judge again, only it would never do that man any good.

"A hundred memories came back to me, glared at me in the illumination of that new fact. I remembered the camisa, the bare feet. I saw him running down the lane with his bunch of stolen bananas. I recalled that absurd scene on the waters; I heard him say: 'No, seh; Ah cain't affawd to take chances; Ah cain't affawd it.'

"Of course he couldn't afford it. Think--a wife and seven children!

"That night I went through his papers, putting things in order, and from every leaf, every scrap, came corroboration of the new fact. It was easy enough to patch up his life. He was one of those pitiful pedagogues of the rural South, shiftless, half-educated, inefficient. He had never been able to earn much, and his family had always gently starved. Then had come the chance, the golden chance--the Philippines and a thousand a year. He had taken the bait, had come ten thousand miles to the spot of his maximum value. Only, things had not gone quite right. Thanks to the beautiful red-tape of the department, three months had gone before he had received his first month's pay. Then it had come in Mex., and when he had succeeded in changing it into gold it had dwindled to sixty dollars. Of course, he had sent it all back, for even then it would take it six more weeks to reach its destination, and sixty dollars is hardly too much to tide over five months for a family of eight. These five months had to be caught up in some way, so every month his salary, depreciated ten per cent. by the change, had gone across the waters. He wore camisas and no shoes, he stole bananas. And his value, shoeless, camisa-clothed, was sixty dollars a month. He was just so much capital. He had to be careful of that capital.

"'Ah cain't affawd to take chances; Ah cain't affawd it.' Of course he couldn't.

"And so he had fought on blindly, stubbornly, and, at last, with that pitiful faculty we have, all of us, of defeating our own plans, he had killed himself, he had killed the capital, the golden goose.

"Yes, I found confirmation, but, after all, I did not need it. I had learned it all; understanding had come to me, swift, sharp, vital as a pang, when in the roaring light of the torch I had looked upon the pale little tintypes, the tintypes of Lee and Amy and Jackson and Geraldine."

II

THE MAESTRO OF BALANGILANG

The Maestro of Balangilang opened the door of his nipa-hut and started down the crazy bamboo ladder on his way to the school. It was early. The sun was pumping back the water that had fallen through the night, and the grass-dishevelled common, the palm-groves about, the musty mountains to the east, the whole landscape, steamed like one great cauldron. Caribaos were wallowing in the mudholes, a dozen dogs were fighting at the church portals, a stream of brownies were pouring into the schoolhouse, and, in front of the cuartel, the company of native scouts were going through scientific evolutions.

The Maestro stopped at the bottom of the steps and took in the scene with a wistful attempt at admiration. A vague discouragement oozed into his soul, but he shook himself vigorously and started across. Through the viscid atmosphere he cut his way in sprightly fashion. His long legs snapped back and forth like springs. At regular intervals his chest swelled; it remained puffed out like that of a pouter-pigeon while he took twenty steps, then collapsed with the hollow report of an air gun. He was finishing up his morning calisthenics.

As he reached the centre of the plaza an unfamiliar object stopped him abruptly. It was only a cross, a rough cross made of two pieces of bamboo fastened at right angles with bejuca and stuck into the ground, but it seemed to have meaning to the Maestro. He walked up close to it and examined it carefully. He was disappointed for a moment; then his fingers, passing along the horizontal piece, touched a thorn stuck like a nail in the axis of the cross. Holding his breath, for it was not yet time to exhale, he nodded knowingly and his eyes searched the ground about him. They soon lit upon what he wanted. He pounced upon a bunch of wild palay, stooped, and was up again with something white in his hand.

It was a piece of paper, limp and bespattered with the night's rain, but on which characters in native Visayan were still visible. The Maestro pored over it closely, then his pent-up breath exploded.

"Papa Isio," he exclaimed gaily. "The Mad Pope is coming to see us."

He stopped, with thought upon his brow.

"I lost my home and punching-bag at it once," he said, musingly. "Well, we'll give him a scrimmage this time."

After which somewhat incoherent remark he folded the sodden bit of paper carefully into his pocket, took a new deep breath, and walked on. As he approached the drilling company of scouts he saw with pleasure that Lieutenant Roberts was back from his tour of inspection and was at their head.

"Hello, Roberts," he shouted, with easy cordiality, as he came within hearing distance. "Hello, Roberts, old man; putting the boys through signal-practice, eh?"

The officer, who had just assumed a fine attitude--arms folded at the height of the chin, legs glued together in a gracefully curved column, chest projected forward till it threw a shadow upon the ground--did not respond with effusion.

"Present--Hums!" he said. "Carr-ie-ie--Hums! Shoulder--Hums!"

The Maestro took off his cap and, raising his freckled face to heaven, shook his head vigorously. A wealth of carrot-red hair parted at the crown and cascaded down the temples; and with the thus restored vision of two green eyes he observed the performance of the little brown soldiers critically.

"Pretty fine, Lieut," he said, encouragingly. "Very fair team-work; they'll do. You ought to see what _I_'ve taught them, though. I'll show you after drill. It's something scrumptious."

"Parade--Rest! Attentio-ion! Port--Hums! Shoulder--Hums!" said the officer.

"Yes, they'll do for signal-practice all right," resumed the youth, in soothing, patronising tones. "But," he went on, with a little of suggestive criticism in his voice, "what about the real thing, Lieut? What about their shooting, eh? I'm blest if I've ever seen them discharge anything except blanks, have you?"

"Fours right--March! Column left!"

"Hep, hep, hep," came the column straight for the schoolmaster. The Lieutenant was muttering something in his mustache that sounded like a benediction. For a long six months, since the organisation of the company, a prudent government had denied his pleadings for permission to give his men target practice. The Scouts were an experiment, and there was a vague feeling that they should not be taught too much.

"Why is that, Roberts?" persisted the Maestro, calmly dodging the advancing phalanx and dropping into the confidential manner. "Why don't you let them shoot? Are you afraid that they might begin on your broad back? Are you----"

A sudden start of pain closed his mouth. The Lieutenant had quietly planted his heel, in passing, upon the Educational toe, crushing down upon it with all the enthusiasm of two hundred pounds a-thrill with long-suppressed rage.

The Maestro's eyes followed the officer, marching at the side of his company. His mouth opened in a broad grin that displayed a startling vacuum where once had been two good teeth, now lying peacefully on the sod of the old Berkeley gridiron.

"Guess it's school-time," he said.

He sprinted fifty yards, leaped an eighteen-foot ditch, hurdled a little goat, bucked a carabao around till its tail was where its head had been, and bounded into the schoolroom.

Two hundred brown ninos sprang to their feet.

"Guda morrneen," they howled, in unison.

"Good-morning," answered the Maestro, briskly. "Come, let's get at this. No shirking, quick! Arm exercise! One, two; one, two."

He led them through a furious set of exercises in which he himself took part enthusiastically, the perspiration cascading down his nose.

"You poor, scrawny weaklings," he said, at last, beaming upon the breathless little assemblage. "Never you mind; I'll make men of you."

Then he started to go. "Give them reading," he shouted to his native assistant from the door, "and breathing exercises every half hour."

But he came back, on an after-thought, and placed under the nose of his faithful colleague the piece of sodden paper he had picked up on the plaza.

The man's skin went yellow beneath the brown. "Papa Isio," he whispered.

"Just, what I thought," said the Maestro, nodding to himself. "And he says he is coming here, doesn't he?"

"Yes, sir. He will come and burn the pueblo. That is the way he burned Cabayan last year."

"Gol darn it, don't I know it?" ejaculated the pedagogue, fiercely. "And didn't I lose my brand-new seven-dollar Spalding punching-bag? Well, we'll set him on his head this time."

"Yes, sir," meekly answered the assistant, who had not caught the full import of the explosive questions.

But the maestro did not hear him. He was out already and making his way to the cuartel. Roberts was dismissing the company when he arrived.

"Hello, you take them now," said the officer, as he saw the Maestro--Professor of Military Gymnastics also, by common consent--near him. "And, by the way," he added, with suppressed glee, "how's the toe?"

The Maestro did not answer. He was working at the inside of his khaki jacket. With some trouble he drew out a flat, oblong box. From this he took a piece of yellow leather and a shining object that looked like a bicycle pump. He inserted the mouth of the pump into a hole in the leather and worked the handle up and down in rapid movement. The thing began to swell and take shape. Finally it looked like a great leather egg. He threw it on the ground, toward one of the loafing soldiers, and the latter, as an automaton worked by some powerful spring, hurled himself headfirst at it, grasped it inside of both arms, and lay on it, while the rest of the company poured upon him in an avalanche.

"How's that, eh?" asked the schoolmaster, turning upon the Lieutenant an eye that winked.

He did not wait for an answer. At a signal the company had formed into a long, crouching line. He placed himself behind it, took a quick step, and booted the pigskin a resounding whack. At the sound the whole line galloped off in ferocious pursuit, and when, after describing a beautiful parabola, the ball bumped along the ground, it was smothered at the second bounce beneath the gross weight of the company.

"And how's that?" asked the Maestro, in tone still more compelling.

He turned to his men. "The 'Varsity," he called, a trifle pompously.

Eleven men stood out from the rest and lined up in a team.

"Six, eight, fifteen!" he shouted.

The team went through the pantomime of a fierce mass on centre.

"Four, fifteen, twenty-two."

The team swirled around in an end-run.

Then he hurled signals at them, and, in quick succession, with a tangle here and there, it is true, they went through an entire repertory--cross tackle bucks, straight openings, tandems, kangaroos, revolving masses, double and delayed passes, fake kicks. They massed and bucked the air about as if it offered no resistance. It was beautiful to see.

"And now, behold!" said the engineer of this fine performance, pausing solemnly.

He drew a line in the earth with his heel and placed the ball upon it. The quarterback took his position near the ball and the rest of the team gathered some twenty yards away.

"Five, twenty-four, six X!" barked the Maestro.

There was a rapid movement among the men, and then they shot out in a long V. On the walk at first, then on the trot, then at full gallop the V swept down toward the line. The quarterback stooped, picked up the ball, and dexterously passed it as the formation thundered down upon him. The ball disappeared, swallowed up within the V, which, passing the line with tremendous impetus, rumbled on like a battering-ram to a glorious touch-down.

"The flying wedge," announced the Maestro, in the tone of the knickerbockered flunkey ushering his Grace, the Lord Hunter of the Billion Mark, into the Reception Hall. "Barred out in the States, but, lordy, we're so far way, and it's such a good one, that I thought I'd give it to them anyhow. Well, what do you think of _my_ team-work, eh?"

The Lieutenant pondered a moment in silent malevolence.

"Yes," he said, "pretty fair for signal-practice. But what about the _real_ thing, eh? Why don't they _get_ at each other? I don't see them _scrimmage_, do you?"

A cloud obscured the radiance of the Maestro's visage.

"Well," he said, ruefully, "we're in the Philippines. My team can run signals, but you can't expect them to play. And," he added, in sudden consolation, "your Scouts can drill, but they won't fight."

The situation had become tense beyond words, and the Maestro gracefully evoluted.

"Papa Isio is coming," he said. "I picked up his announcement this morning in the middle of the plaza."

"Papa Isio is a common carabao thief," said the Lieutenant. "Besides, our troops have killed him already five distinct times and he doesn't exist. And it's not up to me, anyhow. Go see Hafner."

So the Maestro went off to see Hafner. Leopold Joseph Hafner, First Lieutenant of Scouts, U. S. A., Commandant of the Post of Balangilang, was reclining in an easy-chair on his veranda, a bottle of gin under his nose. He greeted his visitor with a blank stare. The Commandant disapproved of pedagogues, and, in fact, of civilians in general.

"Hello, Lieut," shouted the Maestro, with an irreverence that would have sent a shudder along the spine of a neutral witness. "Here's a piece of paper for you."

The Commandant examined the paper.

"Well?" he said, at length, with an indifference calculated to crush.

"Oh, nothing. Only that Papa Isio is coming. That's the way he announced his visit when I was at Cabayan last spring, and he burned the town down and my punching bag, and made hash of the----"

He stopped with a little gurgle of dismay. Hafner had risen from the ranks by a Teutonic adhesion to regulations, and rumour, supported by his mannerisms, had it that his debut in the army had been culinary. The remark about the fate of the inhabitants of Cabayan was harmless; the little gurgle was not.

"And what business is that of yours?" asked the Commandant, with a snort.

"Not much. Thought you'd like to know, so as to get ready----"

"Sir," interrupted the Commandant, pompously, "the American Army is always ready."

"I was speaking of your Scouts, sir," the Maestro corrected, suavely.

He had been maneuvering toward the door during the latter part of the dialogue, and with the last word he waved an airy good-by and hop-skipped-jumped down the stairs.

* * * * *

The next day Papa Isio was in town.

The Commandant and his Second Lieutenant were aware of the fact at the same time. For, startled out of their morning slumbers by a screeching tumult, they sprang to their windows to see the whole population of Balangilang driving past as if the demon were after them--men, women, children, half-dressed, dishevelled, their eyes bursting out of their sockets, carrying bundles of hastily snatched goods or squalling babies. And from this multitude, flying by like nightmare creatures, there came one long, wailing cry: "Papa Isio! Papa Isio!"

Against the black-blue background of the mountains, over which one golden ray of sun was just sliding like a long rapier lunging toward the heart of the city, volutes of smoke were rising heavily in the water-logged air. Beneath, spiteful red tongues leaped up and out again with explosive cracklings. The whole eastern part of the pueblo was burning.

The officers ran to the cuartel. The men were in an uproar. With the force of habit, acquired through the countless parade drills which had been their sole military experience, they had made a concerted rush and were ferociously fighting among themselves for the combs and brushes and shoe-blacking.

"Here, here," thundered Roberts, while Hafner fumbled at the iron door of the storeroom where was the carefully guarded ammunition; "here, here, you don't need to comb your hair. Get your guns and cartridge-belts."

His additional persuasion was physical and evidently potent, for when the men filed past Hafner to get their ammunition they all had their rifles in hand and their belts around their waists, though some had not had time to don other garments generally regarded, in more social crises at least, as indispensable. They poured out, were rapidly formed in front of the cuartel, and, as they deployed across the plaza, from the smoke ahead Papa Isio's mad mountaineers emerged in convulsive charge. A drainage ditch cut the town transversely and the Scouts dropped neatly into it; then their rifles slid out between the grass tufts like venomous things.

"Fire at will!" bellowed the Commandant.

Here the Regulations, which hitherto had unwaveringly rewarded Hafner for his respect of them, suddenly went faithless.

"During the final rush of the attacking party," they say, categorically, "firing should be at will, for then the rapidity of fire and the flatness of trajectory are more to be relied upon than accuracy."

But--alas!--the peculiar moral characteristics of the Balangilang Scouts had not been considered when the Regulations were elaborated.

The flatness of trajectory worked poorly. At first pop the majority of the Scouts emptied their magazines like bunches of firecrackers. Most of the bullets sped towards the rising sun, to whisper the story of their masters' unsteady nerves to the trees in the hills. To be just, however, it must be recorded that some ploughed up the ground directly beneath the marksmen's noses. Even then the mere noise--which was positively tremendous--might have checked the advance of the attackers had they not been Papa Isio's own Dios-Dios crew of mad, weird fellows, hurled on by that religious spirit which kills so finely. Their Mad Pope was sending them to everlasting glory, and Death would only expedite the voyage. On they came, howling, mouth-distorted, muscles convulsively tense, a foaming, maniacal band. At their head a big black man with rolling eyeballs bounded, waving a long lance ending in a blood-dipped standard. The war drums hummed in rhythm.