... Chino José died, and was given a military funeral. The bier was covered with the Stars and Stripes. A company of native scouts was detailed as an escort, and the local band led the procession to the church. Old “Ichabod,” with a long face, and in a dress suit, with a purple four-in-hand tie, followed among the candle-bearers with long strides. The tapers burning in the nave resembled a small bonfire, and exhaustive masses finally resulted, so I judge, in getting the old heathen’s spirit out of purgatory. Good old Chino José! He had left his widow fifty thousand “Mex,” of which the priest received his share; also the doctor, for the hypodermic injections of the past three months.

Then came the wedding of Bazon, whose bride, for her rebellious love, had recently been driven from her mother’s home. Bazon, touched by this act of loyalty, cut his engagement with another girl and made the preparations for the wedding feast. I met the little Maraquita at Bazon’s reception, and conversed with her through an interpreter. “The señorita says,” so the interpreter informed me, “she appreciates your conversation very much, and thinks you play the piano very well. She has a new piano in her house that came from Paris. In a little while the señorita will depart for Spain, where she intends to study in a convent for a year.” Ah, Maraquita! She had had an Insurrecto general for a suitor, and had turned him down. And she had jilted Joe, the French constabulary officer, and had rejected a neighboring merchant’s offer for her hand of fifty carabaos. I have to-day a small reminder of her dainty needlework—a family of Visayan dolls which she had dressed according to the native mode.

One day the undertaker’s boat dropped in with a detachment of the burial corps aboard. The bodies of the soldiers that had slept for so long in the convent garden were removed, and taken in brass caskets back across the sea....

We started out one morning on constabulary ponies, brilliantly caparisoned in scarlet blankets and new saddles. “Ichabod,” the Kansas maestro, had proposed to guide us to Misamis over the mountain trail. It was not long, however, before one spoke of trails in the past tense. The last place that was on the map—a town of questionable loyalty, that we had gladly left late in the afternoon—now seemed, as we remembered it, in contrast with the wilderness, a small metropolis. The Kansan still insisted that he was not lost. “Do you know where we are?” I asked. “Wa-al,” he replied, “those mountains ought to be ’way over on the other side of us, and the flat side of the moon ought to be turned the other way.” We wandered for ten hours through prairies of tall buffalo-grass, at last discovering a trail that led down to the sea. The ponies were as stiff as though they had been made of wood instead of flesh and blood.

We had Thanksgiving dinner at the doctor’s. Old Tom did the cooking, and Vivan, all smiles, waited upon the guests. Stuffed chicken and roast sucking pig, and a young kid that the muchachos had tortured to death that morning, sawing its throat with a dull knife, were the main courses. Padre Pastor, who had held a special mass that morning for Americans, “returned thanks,” rolling his eyes, and saying something about the flowers not being plentiful or fragrant, but the stars, exceptional in brilliance, compensating for the floral scantiness. The doctor sang “O, Ca’line,” and the captain did tricks with the napkins. Everybody voted this Thanksgiving a success.

The weary days that followed at Aloran were relieved late in December by a visit from the doctor, and a new constabulary officer named Johnson,[1] who had ridden out on muddy roads, through swimming rice-pads, across swollen rivers. When the store of commissaries was exhausted, we rode back, and Johnson came to grief by falling through an open bridge into a rice-swamp, so that all that we could see of him was a square inch of his poor horse’s nose. We pulled him out, and named the place “Johnson’s Despair.”

Our Christmas Eve was an eventful one. The transport Trenton went to pieces on our coral reef. We were expecting company, and when the boat pulled in, we went down to the beach to tell them where the landing was. “We thought that you were trying to tell us we were on a rock,” the little cavalry lieutenant, who had been at work all night upon the pumps, said, when we saw him in the morning. It was like a shipwreck in a comic opera, so easily the vessel grounded; and at noon the next day we were invited out on shipboard for a farewell luncheon. The boat was listed dangerously to port, and, as the waves rolled in, kept bumping heavily upon the coral floor. The hull under the engines was staved in, and, as the tide increased, the vessel twisted as though flexible. Broken amidships, finally, she twisted like some tortured creature of the deep. The masts and smokestacks branched off at divergent angles, giving the ship a rather drunken aspect. At high tide the masts and deck-house were swept off; the bow went, and the boat collapsed and bent. By evening nothing was left except the bowsprit rocking defiantly among the breakers, a broken skeleton, the keel and ribs, and the big boiler tumbling and squirting in the surf.

There were three shipwrecked mariners to care for,—the bluff captain, one of nature’s noblemen, who had spent his life before the mast and on the bridge, and who had been tossed upon many a strange and hostile coast. He had a deep scar on his head, received when he was shanghaied twenty years before. He told strange stories of barbaric women dressed in sea-shells; of the Pitcairn islanders, who formerly wore clothes of papyrus, but now dressed in the latest English fashion, trading the native fruits and melons for the merchandise of passing ships.

Then there was Mac, the chief, a stunted, sandy little man, covered with freckles, and tattooed with various marine designs. He loved his engine better than himself, and in his sorrow at its break-up, he was driven to the bottle, and when last seen—after asking “ever’ one” to take a drink—was wandering off, his arms around two Filipino sailors. Coming to life a few days later, “Mac ain’t sayin’ much,” he said, “but Mac, ’e knows.” Yielding to our persuasion, he wrote down a song “what ’e ’ad learned once at a sailors’ boardin’ ’ouse in Frisco.” It was called “The Lodger,” and he rendered it thus, in a deep-sea voice:

“The other night I chanced to meet a charmer of a girl,