The corporal stayed a week in Don José’s big house, and then he went home to his own little house, in the village at the foot of the mountains, and with that both he and Don José Ramirez go out of this story, leaving only Felizardo and Dolores Lasara, who were still in the mountains in the distant Philippines, outlaws and, if you will, ladrones.
The corporal had been dead twenty years when Captain Basil Hayle, who was then only Serjeant Hayle of the Garrison Artillery, United States Army, landed in Manila. From the transport, he had seen a great range of mountains, running right down to the sea, and had admired them in his silent way, though he made no remark about them, even to the comrade who was leaning on the rail beside him, for, as a rule, the more he liked a thing, the less he said about it. It was only when his aversion was roused that he was moved to speech. If any one had told him then that those same mountains, and the people on them, were destined to play the most important part in his life, he might not have disbelieved the statement—in fact, he had a vein of superstition, or fatalism, which might have inclined him to believe it—but he would have gone on just the same until the crisis arrived.
Basil Hayle came of good stock on both sides. His father had been a Virginian, his mother a Swedish girl, a combination which usually turns out well, both the breeds being good ones. From his father he had inherited his sense of chivalry, his inability to know when he was beaten, and a certain deceptive strength which looked like laziness; from his mother had come his tall figure, his fair hair, and his unwillingness to cause unnecessary pain.
When, on the outbreak of the war, Basil Hayle had volunteered for the front, they had drafted him into the Garrison Artillery on account of his size and apparent slowness, qualities which are usually considered more suitable in garrison gunners than in any other branch of the service; but they quickly discovered that they had misjudged their man. The superfluous flesh he had recently acquired during a leisurely trip to Europe was soon got rid of, his education raised him above the level of the majority of his comrades, and before the transport left San Francisco he was a full Serjeant. Still, he was in the Garrison Artillery, and a garrison gunner he had to remain, kicking his heels in a sweltering fort on the shore of Cavite Bay—with his largest gun he could almost have thrown a shell on to the lower slopes of Felizardo’s mountains—whilst the other regiments were having a splendid time amongst the insurrectos.
As every one knows, the Americans went to the Philippines to save the Filipinos from the Spanish tyranny; and, as is also well known, the Filipinos responded in characteristic fashion. For a few brief weeks, the agitators in the towns believed, and proclaimed, that the millennium had come, the reign of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity—Liberty to do what was good in your own sight, and evil in the sight of every decent man; Equality, so far as the goods of a richer man than yourself were concerned; Fraternity in the Cain-and-Abel sense. The tao repeated the words, taking them to mean that the Presidentes and Tenientes would be hanged, and that there would be cock-fights every day of the week; the ladrones took them to mean the entire abolition of any form of police; but old Felizardo, who was now sixty years of age and the wisest man in the Islands, laughed scornfully.
“The Americanos will let them bolo one another for a while,” he said, “then they will send an army to put those who remain in order. Still, it is not my quarrel. I claim nothing beyond my mountains.”
None the less, he strengthened the outposts on the lower slopes of the range, and when the Provisional Government in Manila sent envoys to ask him to join them, the rather nervous mestizos who brought the message were sent back, very flustered, with their mission unfulfilled. Then came other envoys, truculent ones this time, with orders to Felizardo to make his submission to the Sovereign People, the latter being represented by a few score of coffee-coloured little men in khaki uniforms, with huge red sashes, huge red epaulettes, and even more huge sabres, which they loved to jangle over the cobble-stones of the towns, greatly to their own glory, and much to the detriment of their scabbards. Felizardo, hearing of them, laughed again—his official uniform was a suit of white duck and a broad-brimmed straw hat—then he said to Dolores, whose girlish prettiness had changed now to a sweet-faced dignity: “The corporal of the Guardia Civil at Calocan—you remember, the old one—would alone have put them to flight, beating them with the flat of his sword. They tell me those patriots have hewn down the gallows at Calocan. Well, it was old; and, in any case, the Americanos would doubtless have put up a new one—for these patriots.”
But when the second deputation, that to demand his instant submission to the will of the Sovereign People, arrived, and Felizardo heard that the envoys were generals, wearing that same gorgeous uniform, he waxed wroth, and ordered that those distinguished soldier-diplomats should be brought to him. “Bring them, sabres, revolvers, and all,” he said. “Let them climb the mountains, and climb rather fast, as I am in a hurry to see the great sight.”
Possibly, his orders were taken too literally. At any rate, two of the envoys fainted half way up the mountain-side, and had to be revived with pricks from the point of a bolo; whilst even the third, who was of a tougher breed, had none of his truculence left when he found himself face to face with that quiet, wizened little man. Moreover, the ends of the scabbards were worn and dented beyond all hope of repair, and when, in obedience to Felizardo’s order, the owners attempted to draw their sabres in salute, not one of them could get the blade out.