But Clancy was very grave now. “You are going up there?” he said. “You, who are new at the game yourself, going up against Felizardo, with that ragged crowd of yours? Why, man, it’s absurd. Twenty companies like yours wouldn’t suffice for the job. Your people must be stark raving mad”—Clancy was an Irishman. “Take my advice and go sick. You’ll be cut to pieces the moment you set foot on Felizardo’s mountains,”
Basil got up stiffly. “Thanks,” he said, “but I shall not take your advice. I have been ordered to go, and I shall go—to-morrow, if possible,” and he went out.
Clancy looked after him, and shrugged his shoulders. “A fool and his folly,” he muttered; “or, rather, fools and their folly. Still, it is a pity.”
However, Captain Hayle did not start for the mountains the following day, nor for many days after. Incautiously, or perhaps fortunately, he mentioned their destination to his serjeant, who repeated the news to the men, with the result that there were only three members of the company, the serjeant and two corporals, old soldiers of the Spanish times, who answered to the roll-call that evening. The rest had found urgent business elsewhere, and half of them had forgotten to leave their carbines behind.
It was a very angry and shamed-faced Captain of Constabulary who reported the occurrence to the Commissioner on the following morning; but, greatly to his surprise, that official was almost sympathetic.
“I cannot say I was altogether unprepared for it,” he said. “In fact, since I saw you, I have heard so many absurd stories concerning this Felizardo, who seems to be a kind of supernatural person in the eyes of the common people here, that I can understand your poor, ignorant soldiers going.”
“They took twenty-eight carbines,” Hayle interjected grimly.
The Commissioner smiled. “My secretary assures me those will be returned. There is no vice in those Little Brown Brothers of ours. It is only men like this Felizardo who cause all the trouble …. Well, Captain Hayle, there is a company in Manila now, one which was raised in the Island of Samar by Captain Marten, who has just died. You had better take command of that. You will find those Samar men are not afraid of Felizardo.”
So Basil Hayle took over the sixty-five little brown men from Samar, and spent the better part of a fortnight trying to instil some idea of discipline into their heads; then, with infinite trouble, he managed to get some tolerably reliable ammunition from the stores, and bought boots for his men out of his own pocket, though he knew that the money would be stolen. And after that he went back to the Commissioner, and reported that he was ready, adding: “It would be as well if one of these Manila men, who gave you the information about Felizardo, came along as guide.” But all those same Manila men had, it appeared, very pressing private business which they could not leave, and, anyway, as the Commissioner said: “If you search long enough, you are bound to come on these outlaws;” whereat, Captain Hayle went out, shrugging his shoulders. He had been making a few enquiries, from Spaniards and other folk likely to know, and he had come to the conclusion that it was far more probable that Felizardo would find him. Still, Clancy of the Star had put him on his mettle, and he was determined to go through with it.
At Igut, where the corporal of the Guardia Civil had landed thirty years before, there was a garrison consisting of a company of the Philippine Scouts, a force which held itself to be vastly superior to the Constabulary, for, though the rank and file of both were drawn from the same classes, the Scouts were under the Army, and so had food and clothing and high pay, and other advantages, which, if given to an Asiatic, tend to make him proud and mutinous and careful of his own skin. They had rebuilt Igut since the corporal’s day, and there was now a regular plaza with half a dozen stone-built houses on it, and a gaol and barracks and many nipa-shacks and a church; in fact, there was accommodation for all classes of the community, save the pigs, and fowls, and pariah-dogs, which wandered at large, spreading disease. Still, even with these drawbacks, it was an important place. The Presidente was an ex-member of the Provisional Government, whom the army was just going to hang for torturing a bugler to death, when the Civil Government saved him; the principal merchant was a nephew of old Don José Ramirez of Calocan; whilst Captain Bush, the officer in command of the Scouts, lived with his wife in the large white-washed house at the top corner of the plaza. Igut had changed greatly since the day when Felizardo had the heads of the ladrones stuck on posts along the beach, and insisted on the corporal having the credit for the victory.