“I did not think it necessary, either, to impart the result of my investigations to the authorities, or to suggest to them any suspicions which might have been roused in my own mind.
“Even if there had not been very decided personal reasons why I would better not, unless I was obliged to, I had in mind that letter of a few months before, when these same authorities had informed me of their policy of non-interference in local affairs.
“Moreover, I could not but remember what I had seen that day, when the man now dead had said to me, ‘I’ll teach them.’ If his teachings had been effectual, had I any reason to criticise?”
Told at the Club
“Speaking of ‘anting-anting,’” said a man at the club House on the bank of the Pasig river, in Manila, one evening, “I have had an experience in that line myself which was rather striking.”
An American officer at the club that evening had just been telling us about a native prisoner captured by his command sometime before in one of the smaller islands, who, when searched, had been found to be wearing next his skin a sort of undershirt on which was roughly painted a crude map of certain of the islands of the archipelago.
This shirt, it seemed, the officer went on to explain, the man regarded as a powerful “anting-anting,” which would be able to protect him from injury in any of the islands represented on it. That he had been taken alive, instead of having been killed in the fight in which he was captured, the man firmly believed to be due to the fact that he was wearing the shirt at the time. A native servant in the employ of one of the officers of the company had explained later that such an “anting-anting” as this was highly prized, and that it increased in value with its age. Only certain “wise men” had the right to add a new island to the number of those painted on the garment, and before this could be done the wearer of the shirt must have performed some great deed of valour in that particular island. The magic garment was worn only in time of war, or when danger was known to threaten, and was bequeathed from father to son, or, sometimes, changed ownership in a less peaceful way.
“What was the experience which you have referred to?” I finally asked the man who had spoken, when he did not seem inclined to go on of his own accord.
The man hesitated a moment before he replied to my question, and something in his manner then, or perhaps when he did speak, made me feel as if he was sorry that he had spoken at all.