Mrs Bush went out, returning a couple of minutes later. The doctor was already asleep, so she took a blanket from a pile behind the door, and covered him over very gently; then she went back to the house to look for her husband, whom, so far, she had only seen for a moment—just long enough to make sure that he was unwounded. But Captain Bush was not to be found.
“He went out with the Treasurer and the Supervisor, Senora,” a very sleepy muchacho informed her.
Like the doctor, Mrs Bush was deadly tired, and yet it was almost dawn before she went to sleep; this was the final, the most abominable insult of all. Next morning she took a definite step, writing a long letter to Captain Basil Hayle, giving him an account of the expedition as she had heard it from the doctor, in itself a perfectly harmless letter, and yet one the sending of which amounted to a repudiation of her husband’s right to control her. He had his friends; she would have hers.
The story of the fight had been the story of Basil’s defeat of two or three months previously over again; only, this time, no boudjons had given warning; and the attack had begun with a volley poured in at twenty yards range by riflemen hidden amongst the undergrowth. The Scouts, winded by the long climb up the muddy hillside, had been able to put up no effective resistance against the bolomen, who came in under cover of the smoke. Those who did escape, leaving some seventy of their comrades, including Lieutenant Vigne, dead in the jungle, owed their safety to the fact that they had been able to keep together in a bunch; but, even then, it had been a running fight all the way back to the level ground, a fight in which Bush had showed a savage, dogged courage, being himself the last man the whole time.
The Philippine Scouts though often, as in this case, loaned to the Civil Government, form part of the United States Army; consequently, it was impossible for the Commission to do as it had done in the case of Basil Hayle’s disaster, suppress news of the whole affair. The Army had the best of reasons for despising and detesting the politicians at the Palace, so it was not long before all Manila was in possession of the facts.
Mr Commissioner Furber waxed exceeding wroth, and proceeded to make matters much worse for his colleagues and himself by attempting to blame the Scouts.
“Felizardo has only some fifty followers in all,” he declared to a representative of the leading mestizo paper, which reproduced his remarks. “We have that on the best authority. It seems amazing that the Scouts should have retreated before such a small body, leaving so many dead behind them. The Governor-General is most perturbed about the affair, fearing that people at home may imagine that the culprits are some of our Little Brown Brothers, instead of being a gang of thieves and murderers.”
During the following months, expedition after expedition was dispatched against Felizardo, each larger and more costly than the last; yet each came back with a story of hardship and disaster. If Felizardo did allow it to get above the jungle on to the open mountain-side, it was sniped at, every foot of the way, by unseen riflemen, until its nerve was gone, and it decided to return to the cover of the bush, where the bolomen speedily got to work on it. No trace of a permanent camp was ever found, the enemy was never seen, save when he himself had chosen the time and place. It was inglorious, nerve-shattering, futile; and when the last expedition, which had consisted of some four hundred Scouts and Constabulary, returned with twenty men short and nearly fifty wounded, there was a very general feeling that Felizardo should be left alone for the future.
“After all,” as the General in command of Manila said to the Governor, “what harm does the old man do to us? I understand that, from the first, he has only asked to be left alone. I know he hanged some of your Brown Brothers—a good thing too. I wish he had hanged every insurrecto. They all deserved it.”
Whereupon, the Governor, who had never been in the war, and knew his Brown Brother only as a useful pawn in a certain political game in the United States, grew angry, and as soon as the plain-spoken General had gone, sent for Mr Commissioner Furber and one or two distinguished officials who had held great positions under the insurrecto Government, and with these he took counsel, and, after much discussion and deliberation, there was evolved a great scheme, which seemed certain to succeed.