He worked hard, but it was not all work. Many an early evening found him out on the broad Gulf in an outrigger canoe he had learned to handle with native skill, sometimes with Matak, oftener with Mercado, the first sergeant of his Macabebe company. Sometimes, when the surface was calm, he spent wonderful hours in studying the cool depths of the waters, the lee-shore coral ledges which bore fairy gardens of oceanic flora, brilliant-hued, weird-shaped, swaying gently in the tidal current: strange forms of sea-life moved among the marine growths,—some beautiful in form and color, others hideous. Once, while he watched a school of smaller fish playing around a huge sea-turtle, they disappeared as if by signal and the tortoise drew in his scaled head and sank to rest on the bottom as a swordfish swam majestically over the spot, then darted into deeper waters. There were clams as large as washtubs.
Often, while Mercado—or Matak—paddled, he trolled a flashing bait to lure the gamefish which swarmed in the depths. Rarely did such an evening pass without a long fight with a leaping pampano or a sea bass: with thirty or forty pounds of desperate muscle at the other end of a hundred-yard line, the song of reel was sweet. One night he brought in an eighty-pound barracuda but usually the larger fish cost him line, leader or spoon.
At times the surface of the Gulf was alive with schools of leaping fish: one evening he saw a great fish, a tanguingi, rise into the air with nose pointed upward, till, at a height of twenty-five feet, it reversed for a downward rush to plunge in the exact center of the ripples its great leap had created. Once, far out on the Gulf with Matak, he came upon a forty-foot whale asleep on the surface, rolling dreamily from side to side: the Moro, unafraid of man or devil, turned Malay-green with terror as Terry prodded the huge black surface with his paddle. Awakened, it upended in a sluggish dive, the heavy flirt of its great glistening tail smashing the left outrigger and drenching them to the skin.
Terry had attended strictly to the affairs which properly came under his control and in doing this and doing it well, had won the respect of natives and whites, a respect which had warmed into admiration among those who knew him better, into affection with those who knew him best. The loyal Macabebes would have followed him against any foe, and, better than that, they drilled hard and worked faithfully that they might be a credit to their leader.
The natives knew him as "El Solitario," "The Solitary," partly because he played his game alone in a quiet competent way, to all appearances equally friendly to all, regardless of color or condition, partly because he seemed unconscious of the lures of all those brown maidens known to be as shady of character as of color.
He had often stopped to spend an hour or two with Ledesma on his prospering plantation. He liked Ledesma's sincere, old-school courtesy, and he liked him because Ledesma was known as an Americanista, looked upon the Americans as God-sent to guide his people out of their sloth and abysmal ignorance. But he gave up these visits following a day when he found the dark-eyed, ripe-bosomed daughter alone in the house and learned, in her flaming passion for him, that she had misunderstood the reason for his calls.
The frequency of his trips to the outlying plantations had increased as the weeks went by, especially to the pitiful holdings of some of the poor natives. Malabanan's coming had been broadcasted across the land, and an uneasiness had settled over the Gulf, a vague fear Terry sought to allay. But Malabanan's record, a dark and dismal history of hideous crime for which he had been but half punished, was known throughout the country, and was the nightly subject of fearful conversation in every hut on every isolated plantation.
Terry had ridden, alone, to the neglected settlement up the coast where the gang of roughs had rendezvous, but Malabanan was away. A dozen hard-looking natives had sullenly responded to his curt questions. None were working, though he had arrived during the cool of the afternoon and the fields cried for attention.
In Davao, the town, he found consuming interest. Sleepy six days in the week it woke each Wednesday during the couple of hours the weekly steamer anchored offshore to discharge cargo into a lighter, drop a passenger or two, and send ashore the exiles' greatest balm—home mail. He came to know everybody: first the other government people—Lieutenant-Governor; Scout officers; Dr. Merchant, the district health officer; school teachers, native postmaster. Seldom a week passed that he failed to saunter into each of the Chinese tiendas, making the purchase of matches or other small articles the excuse for a half-hour's visit. Oftenest he went into Lan Yek's smelly little shop, for there the Bogobos brought their mountain hemp to trade for small agongs: tired from their heavy packing, they would squat down on the floor along the wall, one of them occasionally stepping to an agong to test it with deft contact of finger, all joining him in rapt study of its tone, measuring the duration of the lingering waves of sound. Terry learned, in time, that they found greatest merit in those agongs which rang longest to lightest stroke.
Even those timid Bogobos who never left the wooded foothills knew him. He went among them, studying their language, learning their customs and hopes and fears, listening to their picturesque traditions. Always, when he met a file of the beaded, braceleted folk upon the trail, he dismounted to exchange a few words with them. Unbelievably shy at first, in time they came to know him as word passed through the foothills of the young white man who understood: so they brought their problems to him, some pathetic, some ridiculous—recently he had ridden twenty miles to settle a dispute regarding the ownership of some yet unborn puppies.