Of these Moros, there is one the soldier dreads more than the firing line of death, more than the panther that springs at night, or the rattlesnake that strikes in the grass. It is the Juramentado.
When one of the Moros is adjudged guilty of thieving, impurity or half a hundred other crimes and sentenced to death he becomes a Juramentado. Strange, mystic ceremonies are performed over him by the priest in the black wood of the black night. Cruel tortures are inflicted; his head, face, eyebrows, and mustache are shaved clean, his face painted, his body left half naked.
There is but one atonement for him. He must kill as many Christians as he can before dying himself. Dying in the act he is transplanted to Paradise.
They are great sailors and are liable to run amuck and then float out to distant places, to any place where they can find a Christian. Stealthily they creep into a camp, or town, or church, or wherever there is a gathering. Their keen borang is sheathed between two bamboo reeds; its blade is a razor, its weight that of lead. With a blow they have cut heads clean from shoulders, or split a soldier from neck to hip.
At a word they will turn in a crowd and kill all those around them. The Spaniards tell how five of these fanatics slipped up to a company of their men peacefully, and then in sudden frenzy killed nineteen soldiers before they could shoot them down.
Our orders are strict concerning them: a soldier must never be out of lines without his side arms. And so nameless a danger is in their very name that it is the unwritten law of the camp to courtmartial any soldier who cries out for a joke, Juramentado!
I was visiting the camp of the Regulars and as I went through the gate a file passed out for guard mounting. A Juramentado had paddled over from Mindanao, slipped in, and suddenly attacked a soldier of the Eighteenth Regulars, as he was returning on a pony from some duty. The first blow of the borang took off the man's arm at the shoulder. Clapping spurs to his pony he rushed for the main entrance just as I passed out, with the file of soldiers behind me. In an instant the frenzied, howling, painted thing was on us.
I heard the officer in charge cry "fire," and a dozen Krags snarled their smokeless call, sending twelve steel-jacketed bullets into the charging demon whose painted face, and sharp black teeth were grinning like a wolf in my very face, and whose borang was at my throat.
The bugler got him with his Colt's 45. Twelve steel bullets had cut twelve clean pin-point holes through him, and not one had stopped him, not being in the brain.
The Krag is a failure. It shoots too clean and hard to kill quick. That old time Colt 45 saved my life. I saw the dead snarling thing all night. When I waked his black painted teeth grinned in my face. I was never un-nerved before.