Promptly at two o’clock, she walked down the hill to the Old Maid’s mansion, and found in that formidable vestal’s extensive grounds all the women of Guindulman, as well as those from the neighboring districts, as far even as Loboc. Every dusky sister of them was in a high state of consternation. As if that were not astounding enough, they had attached indissolubly to their persons very nearly all the children in the world—and these were shrieking in panic. As Julie quickly recognized, the barren and the unwedded had appropriated as their share the orphaned and deserted; and the orphaned and deserted were howling in apparent rebellion at belonging to anybody at all. Even the Old Maid had one wriggling little goddess of the dust—whom she ordinarily smacked soundly for poaching on her premises—touchingly tucked under her arm.
Delphine alone had been able to elude these theatrical adoptions, and skipped satirically free among the leaves. The moment, however, that he glimpsed his teacher, he ran up to her and stuck his head docilely under her arm like a young ox under the yoke.
The women were all chattering hysterically. Suddenly the Old Maid burst out oratorically to Julie. “Dios! What are we to do?”
“But what is happening?” Julie demanded.
“You have not heard? Christus!” She flung up her arms to heaven, while a piercing wail broke like a dirge through the mango trees, “Los Macabebes! Los Macabebes!”
Then Julie understood the meaning of the panic of weeping. From the North was coming a band of those unique and redoubtable little fighters, the Macabebe Scouts, of whose name every other tribe in the Archipelago stood in awe. The Macabebes, for centuries the friends of the white man and the enemies of all other tribes. There was no forest retreat they could not ferret out and no danger that they feared.
In these far islands, they were a terrible legend. The people feared them like the devil out of hell.
The women continued to sob, and to repeat, panic-stricken their dreadful monotone, “Los Macabebes! Los Macabebes!”
The Old Maid commanded silence, and whirled upon Julie. “You must think of a way to help us, you who have gone to school and have seen the earth. All our men will be butchered. There will be no sons, husbands or fathers left. The Macabebes are monsters out of hell. They eat babies, and suck the blood of the dying. They will make ashes of this island. There will not be one man left. Dios!”—she flung herself down on her knees, and the others dropped with her, beating their breasts—“if God made your brain better than ours, save us!”
“What can I do?” demanded Julie passionately. “I have no power over such things? Has not the Comandante held out to your men every opportunity to embrace order and peace, and have they not scorned them all? Have they not preferred rather to listen to the one malcontent who delights to sow discord between the two races to which he belongs?”