An instant later a cocoanut fibre rope, stretched taut across the river and just below the surface of the water, had turned his skittish boat bottom upward. The “tulisane,” you see, had seen the sergeant’s revolver, and thought wisest to attack him wet.
Drenched, blowing for breath, before he knew what had happened, the soldier found himself dragged to the bank, disarmed, robbed, his hands bound behind him, and his feet hobbled. He could speak Spanish and so could the “tulisanes.” Words told him that his captors, only two in number, meant him to march, hobbled as he was, along a path which they pointed out; but it took several sharp pricks from a “campilan” which one of them carried, to make him start. For the path led away from the river, away from Pasi, from Ilo Ilo and the Utica, which he would have given his life itself rather than fail to reach in time.
Only a little way back from the river the path began to leave the low land, mounting up to the hills among which the “tulisanes” had their camp. Sometimes one of the brigands led the way, with the prisoner between them, sometimes both drove him before them, secure in the knowledge that in his helpless condition he could not escape. The captain’s message, in its rubber case, still lay undisturbed and dry within the messenger’s jacket. For that he was glad, although his heart sank as every step carried him farther away from the destination of the dispatch, and from the chance of its being delivered in season.
The means which providence uses to accomplish the ends which it desires are marvellous, and those of us who do not believe in providence say, “a strange coincidence.”
The day before, back among the mountains of Panay, a little old Montese woman, who had never heard of God, or of America, and whose only dress had been thirty yards of fine bamboo plaiting coiled round and round her body, had died.
When the dead body had been set properly upright beneath the tiny hut which had been the woman’s home, and food and drink placed beside it for the long journey which the spirit was to take, the hut was abandoned, as is the custom of the tribe, and the men of the family, the woman’s sons and nephews, started out with freshly sharpened lances and “mechetes.”
For this is the only religion of the Monteses; that no one must be left to go alone upon the long journey. And so, when one of a family dies, the men relatives do not stay their hands until some one,—the first person met,—is slain by them to go on the journey as an escort. Only if they seek three days through the wood, and find no human being, then, after the third day, a beast may be slain, and the law of blood still be satisfied.
The sons and nephews of the Montese woman had marched for thirty-six hours, and the steel of their weapons had not been dimmed by any moisture other than the dew, when, suddenly rounding a turn in the mountain path, they met three men.
The first of the three at that moment was the “tulisane” leader, and him, in thirty seconds, they had driven six lances through. His partner, with a scream of terror, dashed into the trackless forest and disappeared. He need not. The demand for a sacrifice was appeased, and the men who had killed the “tulisane” cared as little for his companion as they did for the white man who had been his prisoner. All they wanted, now, was to get back to the Montese country, and to the new huts which their women would have been building in their absence. The white man’s words they could not understand, but his gestures were intelligible, and before they parted, he to hurry back towards the river and they towards the Montese country, they had cut the cords which bound the soldier’s hands and hobbled his feet, and thus had left him free to make such haste as he could.
Even then the afternoon was well nigh gone when the messenger reached the river at the place where he had been dragged from it; and practically all his journey was yet before him, wearied as he was.