It was over that execution that Commissioner Furber sought to have his revenge on Captain Basil Hayle for the trouble he had caused. “You brought them in. They are your prisoners. You shall have the hanging of them,” he snarled, looking to see the Virginian flush with rage. But therein he was disappointed, not knowing of the score against Juan Vagas.
“Where shall I have them hanged?” Basil asked calmly. “On the Luneta, in front of the band-stand? All Manila could see there.”
Again Mr Furber snarled. “Of course not. Take them out to Calocan; and do it very early one morning. I’ll leave it all to you, as you seem ready enough to do the job.”
Basil Hayle looked him squarely in the face, which was a thing the Commissioner himself never did to a man. “I would hang them, and a dozen more, some insurrectos, some white men who are traitors to their race, if I could,” he said very quietly. Then he went to Calocan, and arranged for the building of a new gallows on the site of the old one, opposite what had once been Don José Ramirez’s store, and was now the store of Lippmann and Klosky, American citizens.
No man except Basil Hayle and the prison officials knew where the prisoners were spending the night before the execution. As a matter of fact, however, they were on board a large launch, which was moored a mile from the shore, and the party of patriots, who were in ambush on the road, with the idea of rescuing their brethren, merely got wet and cramped as a reward for their devotion. Still, there was a crowd of two or three hundred on the plaza, of whom at least half were wearing bolos.
Basil’s total force consisted of his own ten men, with twenty more Manila Constabulary under a lieutenant, and even this reinforcement had been granted to him grudgingly.
“There are the local police,” the Commissioner had said, to which Basil had replied in practical fashion by taking all the rifles away from those police on the night previous to the execution. Still, despite this precaution, matters looked dangerous when they marched the prisoners ashore. They had roped in a space over night, and in that space Basil posted the Constabulary, in front of the new gallows, facing the crowd, and told them to load with ball, so that all men might be warned; but he noticed one, at least, of the Manila men slip in a blank cartridge, which made him feel more uneasy than ever.
“We’re in for it, properly,” he whispered to the lieutenant; then he went to the two ex-soldiers who had volunteered to act as hangman, the insurrectos having roasted some of their chums to death during the war. “Be as quick as you can,” he said. “And if we haven’t time to hang them, shoot them. I’ll take all responsibility.”
He had hardly spoken the words before he caught the flash of a bolo being drawn in the crowd. Vagas was then at the foot of the gallows, and Basil was by his side in a moment, pressing the muzzle of his revolver against his head. “Go up the ladder,” he said; then he saw another bolo being drawn, and another, and yet another. The crowd was swaying now. “Steady! steady!” he called to his men. “If they break the ropes or cut them, fire at once.”
Those in front, against the ropes, heard his words, and seeing the revolver at Juan Vagas’s head, tried to draw back, knowing that they would have been the sufferers from the one volley which the Constabulary could have hoped to get off. But those behind, the mass of the crowd, having no such fears, struggled and fought to get forward, or to force the others forward. There were a hundred drawn bolos now. A few seconds more, and the ropes would have been down, when a boudjon brayed out with startling suddenness from the line of bush which formed the top end of the little plaza, and, as men looked round in astonishment, they saw what seemed to be innumerable white-clad bolomen, jumping up out of the long grass into which they had crawled from the jungle, whilst, in the background, was a little old man on a grey horse.