Anting-Anting Stories by Sargent Kayme (read full novel .TXT) 📕
The captain's eyes met those of Lieutenant Smith.
"La Plaza del Carabaos" means "The Square of the Water Buffalos."
As if with one thought the two men turned and looked out to sea. The sun had set. Against the glowing western sky a huge rock at the plateau's farthest limit was outlined. Rough-carved as the rock had been by the chisel of nature, the likeness to a water buffalo's head was striking. Beyond the rock three islands lay in a line upon the sunset-lighted water. Far out from the foot of the cliff the two men could hear the waves beating upon the sand.
"This is an excellent place for a camp," the captain said when he turned to his men again. "I think we shall find it best to stay here for some time."
Perhaps a month of respite from attack had made the sentries careless; perhap
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”‘Stop!’ I cried, rushing forward to where the Governor was standing. ‘Stop! I will pay this man’s tax. How much is it? Let him up! I’ll pay for him.’
“The Governor looked at me a moment, and, excited as I was, I noticed that his face was set in an angry scowl.
”‘You can’t pay for him, now,’ he said. ‘No one can pay for him now.’
”‘I’ll teach them,’ he added, a moment later, ‘See that!’ holding up his left arm, about the wrist of which I saw a handkerchief was bound, fresh stained with blood.
”‘Go on!’ he cried, to the man with the rod.
“At first I could not find out what had happened. Then a soldier told me.
“The man had been brought in like a snared animal, held by the jungle ropes, each thorn of which was agony. When he had cried out that he was unjustly tortured, the Governor himself had dragged the clinging hooks from out his flesh, and had called him a name which to the Visayan means deathly insult if it be not resented.
“At which Pedro’s brother, snatching a knife which was hidden inside his clothing, struck at the Governor and wounded him in the arm, before he could be caught by the soldiers, disarmed, and bound down on the bench.
“And all the time I had been learning this, the blows of the flog-man had been falling, laid on with an artistic cruelty across the other welts.
“I could not bear it. At the risk of destroying my chances to be allowed to finish my work in the island, perhaps even at the risk of putting my own life in danger, I tried once more.
”‘Unless you stop,’ I cried, ‘I will report you to your government.’
“The ‘Gobernadorcillo’ looked at me a moment, and almost smiled—a smile which showed his teeth at the sides of his mouth.
”‘Please yourself.’ he said. ‘But unless you like what I am doing I would suggest that you step out.’
“The man died that night, in the prison beneath the tribunal.
“I kept my word, and wrote a full account of the whole affair to the Governor-general at Manila. It was weeks before I received a curt note in reply, saying that the general government made it a rule not to interfere with the local jurisdiction of its subordinates.
“Pedro never spoke to me of his brother’s death but once. There was in his nature much of the same grim courage which had enabled his brother to bear the awful pain of that day upon the whipping bench without a cry.
”‘Señor,’ Pedro said one day, quite suddenly, ‘I would not have you think me a coward, that I do not avenge my brother’s death. I would have killed the Governor at once, or now, or any day, openly, glad to have him know how and why, and glad to die for the deed, only that now there is no one but me left to care for my old father, It is not that I am a coward, but that I wait.’
“I expect that I should have felt myself in duty bound to expostulate with him, upon harbouring such a state of mind as that, regardless of what my own private opinion in the matter may have been, had it not been that before I could decide just what I wanted to say, a man had come to my house to tell me that the mail steamer from Manila, which came to the island only once in two months was come in sight.
“The coming of that particular steamer was of special interest to me, as it was to bring me a stock of supplies; and Pedro and I went down to the dock at once.
“I remember that invoice in particular, because it brought me a supply of chloroform, a drug, which I had been out of, and for which I was anxiously waiting. Two months before, a native from far back in the forest had brought me a fine live ape. I could not keep him alive,—that is not after I left the island,—and I wanted his skin and skeleton for the museum, but I hated to mar the beauty of the specimen by a wound. That night with Pedro’s help I put him quietly out of the way, with the help of the chloroform.
“Afterwards the thought came back to me that as we took away the cone and cotton, when I was sure the animal was dead, Pedro said, ‘Señor, how like a man he looks.’
“Several weeks later the residents of Dumaguete were thrown into intense if subdued excitement by the news that the Gobernadorcillo was dead. Apparently well as usual the night before, he had been found dead in hie bed in the morning, in the room in the ‘gobierno’ in which he slept. If he had been killed on the street, or found stabbed, or shot, in his room, the commotion would not have been so great. Such things as that had happened in Negros more than once, to other officials. But this man was simply dead.
“The ‘teniente primero,’ who, as next in authority, took charge of affairs upon the death of his superior, sent a man during the day to ask me if I would come to the tribunal. He was a very decent man, or would have been, I think, under a different executive. Naturally he was anxious, under the circumstances, as to his own standing with the authorities at Cebu, and he asked for my evidence, if necessary, as that of one of the few foreigners in the place.
“In company with him I visited the late governor’s room in the ‘gobierno.’ It was a large room, like all of those in the palace, as the executive mansion was sometimes called, built upon the ground floor, and having several lattice windows. A soldier was on duty in the room. As we were coming out, this man came to us, and saluting the ‘teniente,’ handed him a small tin can, saying, ‘A servant cleaning the room, found this.’
“The ‘teniente’ looked at the can curiously, and then, handing it to me, asked me if I knew what it was.
”‘It is a can in which a kind of strong liquor sometimes comes,’ I said. Then I unscrewed the top. The can was empty, but I showed him that there was still a strong and pungent odor which lingered in it. The explanation satisfied him. The late governor had been known to be a man who had more than a passing liking for strong liquors.
“I did not feel called upon to explain that the can was a chloroform can, and that no one in the place but myself had any like it.
“When I went home, though, and counted my stock, I found, as I had expected, that it was one can short; and that the cone and cotton which I had used for giving the drug had been replaced by one freshly made.
“I did not think it necessary, either, to impart the result of my investigations to the authorities, or to suggest to them any suspicions which might have been roused in my own mind.
“Even if there had not been very decided personal reasons why I would better not, unless I was obliged to, I had in mind that letter of a few months before, when these same authorities had informed me of their policy of non-interference in local affairs.
“Moreover, I could not but remember what I had seen that day, when the man now dead had said to me, ‘I’ll teach them.’ If his teachings had been effectual, had I any reason to criticise?”
“Speaking of ‘anting-anting,’” said a man at the club House on the bank of the Pasig river, in Manila, one evening, “I have had an experience in that line myself which was rather striking.”
An American officer at the club that evening had just been telling us about a native prisoner captured by his command sometime before in one of the smaller islands, who, when searched, had been found to be wearing next his skin a sort of undershirt on which was roughly painted a crude map of certain of the islands of the archipelago.
This shirt, it seemed, the officer went on to explain, the man regarded as a powerful “anting-anting,” which would be able to protect him from injury in any of the islands represented on it. That he had been taken alive, instead of having been killed in the fight in which he was captured, the man firmly believed to be due to the fact that he was wearing the shirt at the time. A native servant in the employ of one of the officers of the company had explained later that such an “anting-anting” as this was highly prized, and that it increased in value with its age. Only certain “wise men” had the right to add a new island to the number of those painted on the garment, and before this could be done the wearer of the shirt must have performed some great deed of valour in that particular island. The magic garment was worn only in time of war, or when danger was known to threaten, and was bequeathed from father to son, or, sometimes, changed ownership in a less peaceful way.
“What was the experience which you have referred to?” I finally asked the man who had spoken, when he did not seem inclined to go on of his own accord.
The man hesitated a moment before he replied to my question, and something in his manner then, or perhaps when he did speak, made me feel as if he was sorry that he had spoken at all.
“It is a story I do not like to tell,” he said, and then added hastily a little later, as if in explanation, “I mean I do not like to tell it because I cannot help feeling, when I do tell it, that people do not believe me to be telling the truth.
“Some years ago,” he continued, “I went down to the island of Mindoro to hunt ‘timarau,’ one of the few large wild animals of the islands—a queer beast, half way between a wild hog and a buffalo.
“I hired as a guide and tracker, a wiry old Mangyan native who seemed to have an instinct for finding a ‘timarau’ trail and following it where my less skillful eyes could see nothing but undisturbed forest, and who also seemed to have absolutely no fear, a thing which was even more remarkable than his skill, since the natives as a general thing are notably timid about getting in the way of an angry ‘timarau.’ As a matter of fact I did not blame them so very much for this, after I had had one experience myself in trying to dodge the wild charge of one of these animals infuriated by a bullet which I had sent into his body.
“Perico, though,—that was the old man’s name,—never seemed to have the least fear.
“I was surprised, then, one morning when the weather and forest were both in prime condition for a Hunt, to have my guide flatly refuse to leave our camp. Nothing which I could say or do had the least influence upon him. I reasoned, and threatened, and coaxed, and swore, but all to no effect.
“When I asked him why he would not go,—what was the matter,—was he ill? he did not seem to be inclined to answer at first, except to say that he was not ill; but finally, later in the day, he explained
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