"Ah—it's your papa wants me, is it? Very well——" her lips tightened into a line ominously straight—"he shall have me; oh, yes, indeed!"
Thus it was that an hour later the widow, erect and tense in a carro drawn by a pacific carabao, surrounded by an escort of tulisanes with the grave and preoccupied air of people bearing a case of dynamite, followed by the holiday-decked populace and the delirious blare and roar of the band, passed along the main street, by the Casa Popular, beneath the triumphal arch, to the outskirts of the pueblo, and on into the open country.
The band, marking time with the populace on the edge of the town, which they were not to leave, was playing "Hail the Deliverer, Hail!"
III
Long and in detail will Major General Gomez remember (he has now ample leisure for such exercises of memory between the four walls of a place called Bilibid) that march back to camp. And his bringing it to a successful termination will always stand as his most serious claim to military glory.
It was not that the train was cumbersome. It consisted, in fact, only of three carros, the first one containing the widow, the second the camphor-wood chest, inside of which was the town treasury, and the third, Mr. Rued, second-class inspector Philippine constabulary—a roaring mad inspector, it might be added, and tied up like a sausage. He had been surprised in bed; the ignominy of his taking was deep in his soul, and found vent in a stream of expressions Biblical and strenuous and not at all complimentary to his captors.
No, the widow was the matter.
It was that curious performance of Mr. Rued which caused the first outbreak. After listening meditatively for some ten minutes, the widow suddenly realised that here was something highly improper.
"Colonel," she cried, rising in her cart like a jack-in-the-box, "you will please place more distance between me and that blasphemous person yonder."
There was a pause in the procession. New intervals were tried. But the widow's carabao was slow, and the inspector's, possibly impressed by the fervent soliloquy going on behind him, persisted in coming up within earshot.