“Magandang umaga,” (Good morning, in Tagalo), muttered the old man.
After a brief conversation during which Marie told him that she had been captured by the Americans, had been terribly misused and he had a miraculous escape, he invited her into his cabin where his aged wife gave her something to eat. This breakfast consisted of boiled rice, some fish which the old man had just brought from his set lines in the San Mateo river, and some bacon which he had found along the trail made by the American’s pack train the day before.
While the old couple were outside of their home—he breaking up some bamboo with which to re-kindle the fire, and she, cleaning the fish—Marie ransacked the house. She stole a large diamond ring which the old man had taken from the finger of a Spanish officer during the previous insurrection. She opened an old mahogany chest and took from it a rosary valued at several hundred dollars; also a gold lined cup which the old man, himself, had stolen from a Spanish priest, and some Spanish coins.
After a hearty lunch, she started on.
Crossing the river at the rapids, on the boulders which projected above the water, she quickened her steps and hurried along. Changing her course to the southward, she started for the northern end of Lake Laguna de Bay to see her mother.
She had not gone far through a small clump of timber when she came upon the corpse of a Filipino soldier who had been shot in the previous day’s engagement,—perhaps by a stray ball. Hastily stealing the cross which hung from a small cord about his neck, and a valueless ring from one of his fingers, she seized his Mauser rifle and his cartridge belt which was partly filled with ammunition, and then resumed her journey.
A short distance ahead was a large opening—an old rice field well cleared. She had scarcely begun to cross it when she heard a noise. She turned and saw the bow-legged old man whom she had robbed, with a machete in his hand, coming after her as fast as he could. He had discovered that the rosary was missing, and upon looking around, that several other things were gone; therefore he at once started in pursuit of the fiend who had just enjoyed his hospitality. Marie was not disturbed. Raising to her shoulder the rifle which she had just found, she took deliberate aim and at the first shot laid him low in death.
She reached the small native village of Angono, where her mother was stopping, about four o’clock in the afternoon of March 26th.
The old lady was wonderfully elated to receive the new jewels which Marie had stolen. She put on the rosary and danced about in the native hut like a young child on Christmas morning, when it sees the gorged stocking fastened to its bed.