I cannot hope to describe to you my dismay at finding myself back in that ancient temple of Tzin Piaôu, nor the dislike with which I looked into the eyes of that old heathen priest, those slant eyes where cynical amusement, like a little, undying flame, danced and flickered.
"And so," said the bland old gentleman, raising himself languidly on his hollowed slab of stone, "and so you find the company of the ladies more agreeable than mine? I do not wonder. How did you leave them all in the temple of Lal?" It would be impossible to indicate the sly mockery which rustled in his tone.
"So that was your doing, too?" I asked.
He moved a deprecatory hand, smiling blandly through me into space. "I may have been used as an unworthy instrument," he murmured, "but for most of your experience, I fancy, you're indebted to the Little Gods themselves. Did you find amusement, or instruction, was it?—forgive me, I forget—in the Games they showed you?"
"I'm very tired of your Little Gods, if they exist," I said bluntly, for he made me angry. "As I told you once, and as I would tell them to their faces, I think them cowards. I ask you again, do they never give their victims a fair chance? Is there never a single plaything of theirs which, fighting bravely and in good faith, is permitted to win? Are the dice always cogged?"
"You like to see them win?" my old heathen priest asked in bland surprise. "What a very commonplace taste; for people are always winning what they strive for, thousands of them every day. It's only the exceptions, the surprises, which are interesting. I thought you asked to see Life through my eyes. But since your taste runs that way—" he yawned ever so slightly behind his hand—"You'll excuse me, won't you?" he apologized, "but this is an hour which I invariably devote to a nap." He made a little careless, dismissing gesture. "Wander where you choose," said he, "and watch men fight, since that's your taste, and win—what they may win."
It was my dismissal, and there I saw him last, as I had seen him first, lying motionless on his hollowed slab, smiling blandly, cynically, into Emptiness, with light yet bitter mockery in his smile.
Then, or so it seemed to me, I wandered far and long, and saw many men striving mightily for many things, and most of them were winners, and most of them, winning, found themselves no nearer their hearts' desires. But among them I marked three, and have remembered them, whose striving seemed to me not wholly without interest. The first of them was a very common-seeming man indeed, and the only thing about him which made him worthy of remark was, that he was an optimist.
Samar is a sorry strip of island which rises in gray-green, commonplace, and yet sinister ugliness from a green and treacherous sea. Its coasts are a desolation of over-thrifty vegetation. Its interior, so far as it has been explored, is a wilderness of forest and precipitous mountains. And the people who inhabit it are worthy of the place, outcasts and refugees from other islands, outlawed men for whom no other spot of earth holds a future.
Toward the end of 1901, soldiers and marines and sailors, the 41st Infantry, U.S.A., among them, were rushed to Samar to punish the murderers of Balangiga and cleanse the plague-spot of the Philippines of its spawn. The work proved to be difficult and slow. The blazing summer had darkened into such winter as the Eastern tropics know, a season of lowering skies and deluges of rain, and dank cold and boisterous winds, and still the quarry flitted elusively from stronghold to stronghold of the untracked mountains, emerging at rare intervals to strike with murderous suddenness at unexpected places and then disappear, as hard to bring to bay as any other beast of prey which makes cunning atone for its lack of strength and courage.