For the old maid this was the time the ages had been waiting for. What anxious nights she spent upon her pillow or before the looking-glass; what former triumphs she reviewed; and what plans for the conquest she had made, shall still remain unwritten history. When she was ready to appear, we used to hear her nervous call, “Doctor! Can I come over?” Poor old maid! She couldn’t even wait till she was asked. How patiently she stirred the hot tomato soy the captain made; O yes! She could be useful and domestic. How tenderly she leaned upon the arm of the captain’s chair, caressing the scar upon his head “where he was shanghaied!” Then, like Othello, he would entertain her with his story about the ladies in the sea-shell clothes, or of the time when he had “weathered the Horn” in a “sou’wester.” She was flurried and excited all the week. The climax came after the captain left for Iligan. The old maid learned somehow that he was going to Manila on a transport which would pass by Oroquieta but a few miles out. Sending a telegram to the chief quartermaster whom she called a “dear,” she said that if the ship would stop to let her on, she could go out to meet it in a banca. Though the schoolmaster and his wife had also requested transportation on the same boat, the old maid, evidently thinking that “three made a crowd,” wired to her friend the quartermaster not to take them on.
We met the old maid almost in hysterics on the road to Lobuc. “O, for the love of God!” she cried, “get me a boat, and get my trunk down to the shore. I have about ten minutes left to catch that ship.” It was old Ichabod who rowed her out in the canoe—the old maid, with the sun now broken out behind the clouds, her striped parasol, and a small steamer trunk. It was a mad race for old Ichabod, and they were pretty well drenched when the old maid climbed aboard the transport, breathless but triumphant. I have since learned that Dido won her wandering Æneas in Manila, and that the captain finally has found his “bucko mate.”
It was old Ichabod’s delight to teach a class of sorry-looking señoritas, with their dusty toes stuck into carpet slippers, and their hair combed back severely on their heads. The afternoons he spent in visiting his flock; we could descry him from afar, chin in the air, arms swinging, hiking along with five-foot strides. If he could “doctor up” the natives he was satisfied. He knew them all by name down to the smallest girl, and he applied his healing lotions with the greatest sense of duty, much to the amusement of the regular M.D. But Ichabod was qualified, for he had once confided to me that at one time he had learned the names of all the bones in the left hand!
The colony showed signs of breaking up. The native scouts had gone, leaving their weeping “hindais” on the shore. “Major O’Dowd,” his wife, and Flora had also departed to a station sin Americanos up in the interior. At this, the doctor, for the first time in his life, broke into song, after the style and meter of immortal Omar:
“Hiram, indeed is gone; his little Rose
Vamosed to Lintogoup with all her clothes;
But still the Pearls are with us down the line,
And many a hindai to the tubig goes.”
“Tubig,” he said, “did not mean ’water.’ It was more poetical, expressing the idea of fountain, watering-place, or spa.”
It was my last day at Aloran. In the morning I ascended a near elevation, and looked down upon the sleepy valley spread below. There was the river winding in and out; there was the convent, like a doll-house in a field of green. Vivan had gone on with the trunks and boxes packed upon a carabao. The ponies were waiting in the compound. Valedictories were quickly said; but there was little Peter with his silken cheeks, the brightest little fellow I have ever known. It seemed a shame to leave him there in darkest Mindanao. Turning the horses into the Aloran River at the ford we struck the high road near the barrio of Feliz. Galloping on, past “Columbine” bridge, “Skeleton” bridge, “Johnson’s Despair,” and Fenis, we arrived at Oroquieta in good time.