Last Days at Oroquieta.
I had been visiting the teachers at El Salvador, who occupied a Spanish convent, with a broad veranda looking out upon the blue sea and a grove of palms. It was a country of bare hills, which reminded one somewhat of Colorado. Nipa jungles bristled at the mouths of rivers, and the valleys were verdant with dense mango copses. We made our first stop on the way from Cagayan on Sunday morning at a village situated in a prairie, where a drove of native ponies had been tethered near the nipa church. The roads were alive with people who had been attending services or who were on the way to the next cock-fight. Falling in with a loquacious native, who supplied us with a store of mangoes, we rode on, and reached Tag-nipa or El Salvador late in the afternoon.
One of the teachers, “Teddy,” might have actually stepped from out the pages of Kate Greenaway. He had a large, broad forehead, and a long, straight nose. He conducted a school of miserable little girls, and in the evening, like a village preacher, he would make his pastoral calls with a “Hello, girlie!” for each child he met. When he was pleased at anything, he used to clap his hands, exclaiming, “Goodie!” “Teddy” envied me “my baccalaureate enthusiasm,” and, encouraged evidently by this quality, he would read Chaucer in a sing-song voice, or, when this recreation failed, would make up limericks to a guitar accompaniment. His partner was the one who wore the transposed leggings, and who walked as though continually following a plow.
Leaving for Oroquieta, in a Moro sailboat stocked with Chinese pigs and commissaries that belonged to one called “Jac-cook” by the natives, or “The Great White Father”—a New Zealander who could have posed as an Apollo or a Hercules—the sailors whistled for wind, and finally succeeded in obtaining it. The moon rose early over the dark waters, and the boat, behaving admirably, rode the huge waves like a cockle. We had nearly gone to pieces on a coral reef that night if “Jac-cook,” suddenly aroused by the unusual sound of breakers, had not lowered sail in time to save the ship from running on the sharp rock half a mile from land. The sailors, perfectly incompetent, and panic-stricken at the course the boat was taking, blundered frightfully as the New Zealander assumed command.
No doubt the best mess in the town at that time was the one conducted by the members of the hospital detachment. “Shorty,” who did the cooking, was a local druggist in his way; that is, he sold the natives talcum powder, which they bought at quinine rates. The acting steward, whom all the Filipinos called “Francisco,” though his name was Louis, was a butcher, and a doctor too. Catching the Spaniard’s goat out late at night, he knocked it in the head. The carcass was then taken into the dissecting-room, where it was skinned and dressed for the fresh-meat supply. He had acquired a local reputation as a medico, to the disgust of the real army doctor, who, for a long time, could not imagine why his medicines had disappeared so fast. Then there was “Red,” who had the art of laziness down fine, and who could usually be found playing monte with the natives. With the money he had won at monte games and chicken-fights, he intended to set up a drugstore in America.
In a downpour of rain I left one morning for Aloran, down the coast and up the winding river. Prisoners furnished by the presidente manned the banca. They were guarded by a barefooted municipal policeman, who, on falling presently to sleep, would probably have lost his Mauser overboard had not one of the convicts rescued it and courteously returned it to him. It was a wet and lonesome pull up the Aloran River, walled in on both sides by nipa jungles, and forever winding in and out. After an hour or so, while I was wondering what we were coming to, we met a raft poled down the stream with “Red” and a young Austrian constabulary officer aboard.
Finding a little teacup of a house, I moved in, and, before an interested throng of natives, started to unpack my trunks and boxes with a sense of genuine relief; for I had had four months of traveling and living out of steamer-trunks. But I returned to Oroquieta all in good time for the doctor’s birthday and the annual Oroquieta ball. I found the doctor wandering about Aloran late one afternoon; for he had been attending a sick Chinaman. We started back together through the night, and, in the darkness, voices greeted us, or snarled a “Buenas noches” at us as we passed. Bridges that carabaos had fallen through were crossed successfully, and we arrived at Oroquieta during the band concert.
The foreign colony at Oroquieta was more interesting than the personæ dramatis of the “Canterbury Tales.” Where to begin I do not know. But, anyway, there was my old friend the constabulary captain, “Foxy Grandpa,” as we called him then, because when he was not engaged in telling how he had arrested somebody in Arizona, he was playing practical jokes or doing tricks with cards and handkerchiefs. And then there was the “Arizona Babe,” a blonde of the Southwestern type, affianced to the commissary sergeant. The wife o£ the commanding officer, a veritable O’Dowd, and little Flora, daughter of O’Dowd, who rode around town in a pony cart, were leaders of society for the subpost.
Then you could take a stool in front of Paradies’s general store, and almost at any time engage the local teacher in an argument. You would expect, of course, that he would wander from his topic till you found yourself discussing something entirely foreign to the subject, but so long as he was talking, everything was satisfactory. There were the two Greek traders who had “poisoned the wells” out Lobuc way,—so people said. And I must not forget “Jac-cook,” whose grandfather, according to his own report, had been a cannibal, a king of cannibals, and eaten a roast baby every morning for his breakfast. Jack was a soldier of fortune if there ever was one. He could give you a recipe for making poi from ripe bananas and the milk of cocoanuts, or for distilling whisky from fermented oranges,—both of which formulas I have unfortunately lost. He recommended an exclusive diet of raw fish, and in his youth he had had many a hard battle with the shark and octopus. His one regret was that there were no sharks in the Oroquieta Bay, that, diving under, he could rip with a sharp knife. “To catch the devil-fish,” he used to say, “you whirl them rapidly around your arm until they get all tangled up and supine-like.” And once, like Ursus, in “Quo Vadis,” he had taken a young bull by the horns and broken its neck.
All members of good standing in the colony received their invitations to the birthday party. Old Vivan, the ex-horse-doctor of the Insurrectos, went out early in the morning to cut palms. The floor was waxed and the walls banked with green. The first to arrive was “Fresno Bill,” the Cottobato trader, in a borrowed white suit and a pair of soiled shoes. Then came the bronzed Norwegian captain of the Delapaon, hearty and hale from twenty years of deep-sea sailing from the Java coast to Heligoland. Came Paradies, the little German trader, in his finest blacks, and chose a seat off in one corner of the room. Then “Foxy Grandpa” and the “Arizona Babe” arrived, and the old maid from Zamboanga, who, when expression failed her, would usurp the conversation with a “blab, blab, blab!” And as the serpent made for old Laocoön, so she now made for “Fresno Bill.”