I found myself "up the railroad," as we used to say, in a well-remembered town. It had not changed since I saw it last. The railroad still ran through it, straight as a pencil-stroke ruled across the flat lands, and the rails, on their embankment, shimmered in the sun like two unending bars of white-hot metal. The cart road still wallowed into it, and out of it, for the town is set on an island in the marshy level of the paddies. The crazy huts of nipa, and crazier, decaying houses, still stood thick on either side of the one street.
And brown women in skirts of gaudy calico still sat under the shadow of wide shutters, dispensing such goods as Poverty can buy, while their babies and their pigs rolled comfortably together in the dust. The shaggy thatch still rustled in the sultry breeze, and a few dejected palm-trees clicked their branches as of old. And, very far away across the waveless green sea of the half-grown rice, the same dark and threatening mountains towered into the clouds. It was all unchanged. The merciless sun struck down just as hotly. The very smells were smells I had often smelled before.
Suddenly there was a stir of excitement in the town. The women crawled from the litter of their wares. The men, lighting fresh cigarettes from the remnants of their old ones, stood up to gaze. For down the street was coming, with the curious in-toeing shuffle of a barefoot mountaineer, a squat, huge-muscled, naked man.
He carried a long, broad-bladed spear in his right hand, and a head-axe was thrust through his belt, and at his back a bag, swollen as if it held something big and round, bobbed and dangled heavily, and something dripped from it slowly, thickly, in the dust. The man's broad, sweat-streaked face was all agrin with excitement and good-nature, but the natives of the town shrank back from him as he passed. "Donde 'Mericanos?" he kept asking eagerly.
A bystander pointed to a house, one a little taller than the others, where a flag of dingy white, barred with dingier red and blue, hung drooping, and a group of tall, lean, sun-bronzed men dressed in frayed shirts of blue flannel, and breeches of stained and faded khaki, and battered campaign hats, were lounging in the dusty shade. The bystander pointed to them, and the naked man, his face stretching in a wider grin, broke into a clumsy trot and ran to them.
"Me got," he said, and pulled the heavy, bobbing bag from his shoulders, and thrust it at them. They fell back hastily. "It's something, all right," said one of them judicially. "Something plenty dead. Sergeant," he called, "I reckon it's your deal. Here's an Igaroot with another dead-head lookin' for you." And the others laughed.
At that an oldish man with a long, drooping, gray moustache, and gray eyes that were bright below their sun-burned lids, stepped from the door. The naked man cried out again, "Me got," and held out his dripping bag. And the saturnine old sergeant fell back, as the men had done.
"You open it, Johnnie," he commanded. "It's too dead for me. Patay, sabe? Me no likum thataway. Icao abieria."
So the man undid the string that bound his bag, and opened it, and the sergeant took one peep inside. "It's a big American nigger, all right," he announced. "And he's sure dead. It might be him. Better call the Captain over here, some one; I don't reckon he wants that in his quarters. Where you catch him, hombre?"
The little man jerked his chin over his shoulder at those distant mountains. "You buy?" he asked anxiously.