"Well, I'm not going to waste any more thoughts on Tomba, or on his white-man companion, either. Whee! Look at that rain. It——"
But a fearfully vivid flash of tropical lightning caused Sergeant Hal Overton to step further back into the little shed and close his eyes for an instant. Right after the flash came a prolonged, heavy roll of thunder that made the earth shake.
"Cochero, para!" shouted Noll right after that, and a fareless quilez stopped near the door of the shed.
"Occupado (occupied)?" called Noll.
"No, señor."
Hal and Noll bolted through the rain, darted into the quilez through the door at the rear, and plumped themselves down on the seats.
"Sigue directio, Malate, cuartel nipa," ordered Hal, thus instructing the driver to go straight ahead to Malate and to take them to the nipa barracks.
The Filipino driver himself was drenched. In his thin cotton clothing the little brown man perched on the box outside, shivered until his teeth chattered. He did not propose, however, to let personal discomfort stop him from earning a fare.
Around the Walled City (Old Manila) the quilez carried the young soldiers. These massive walls, centuries old, enclose perhaps a square mile of city. Once past the Walled City the little vehicle glided on through pretty Ermita. Here, passing along Calle Real (Royal Street), the driver turned into the straight stretch for the next suburb, Malate.
For months before sailing for the Philippines both young sergeants had devoted a good deal of their spare time to the study of Spanish. They had, however, learned the best Spanish of old Castile. First Sergeant Gray, who had put in three terms of service in the Philippines, had taken pains to teach them much of the local Spanish dialect as it is spoken in this far-away colony of Uncle Sam's.