“I would not have you think that I am complaining,” she said hastily, a moment later, as if she was afraid I would get that impression. “I am not. I do not regret one day of my life. My hands are stained with what people call crime, and my heart knows all the weight which grief can lay upon a heart; but the joy of my life while my husband lived paid for it all. To have been loved by him as I was loved, was well worth crime and grief.”
“Why do you not go away from here?” I asked. “Why not leave this country entirely, and go to some new land where you would be free from danger? I will help you to get away.”
“We know nothing of other lands,” she said. “We should be helpless there. We are better here.” “Besides,” a moment later, “his grave,” pointing out toward the trees, “is here.”
It had grown dark as we talked; the thick, dead darkness of a Philippine forest night. The deer on the ground outside the porch had lain down and curled their heads around beside them and gone to sleep. Enormous bats flew past the house. We could not see them, but we felt the air which their huge wings set in motion. The woman lighted a little torch of “viao” nuts. Elena came out of the house, walked across the porch and disappeared in the darkness, going toward the forest.
“Ought she to go?” I asked. “Will she not be lost, or hurt?”
“Did you not understand it all?” the girl’s mother said. “She is blind only in the day time. At night she sees as readily as you and I do by day.”
In a few minutes the girl came back with her hands filled with fresh picked fruit. She gave me this, and her mother brought out from the house such simple food as she could provide.
“You will sleep here, tonight,” she said, and left me.
The next day I went to the top of the mountain, and after that, by making two trips to my camp, brought up all the articles which had been left there, including some blankets a gun and ammunition, some food and some medicines. These I asked “the woman of the mountain,” as I called her to myself, to let me give to her. She took them, and thanked me. I stayed there that night, and the next day said good by to the two strange women, and went down the mountain.
When I reached my house in the village I found my neighbors getting ready to divide my property among themselves, since they were satisfied I would never return to claim it. They did not think it strange that I came back empty-handed. That I had come back at all was a wonder. For the sake of the security of the two women I let it be known that I had seen strange sights on the volcano’s top, and that it was a perilous journey to climb its sides.