Anting-Anting Stories, Sargent Kayme [uplifting novels TXT] 📗
- Author: Sargent Kayme
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“Queer country, isn’t it?” said the visitor.
“Yes,” said the General. “A body never knows what may happen to him. Probably those women we see down there are slaves. Seeing them made me think of a funny thing I heard of today, which happened to one of my men a little while ago.
“A young officer hired a native man for a servant. One day the fellow came to the Lieutenant in a great state of mind, begging the officer to help him. It seemed he had a sweetheart who was a Visayan slave girl owned by a Moro. The man who owned the girl was going to leave the city and take all his property, including this slave girl, with him. Pedro—that was the officer’s boy—wanted ‘the great American Señor’ to say she should not go. Some of the natives seem to have the most wonderful confidence in the power of the Americans to do anything and everything.
“The officer told his boy he had no power to prevent the man’s moving and taking his property with him; but he happened to ask how much the girl was worth. How much do you think the fellow said? Fifteen dollars! And he went on to explain that this was an unusually high price, he knew, but that this girl was young and handsome and clever at work. Of course he thought so, for he was in love with her.
“Well, I suppose the Lieutenant was flush, or felt generous, or perhaps something had happened to put him in an unusually serene frame of mind. He handed over fifteen dollars, and told Pedro to go and buy the girl and marry her; which he did, and has been the happiest man alive ever since. He is really grateful, too, and there isn’t another officer in the service that is waited on as Lieutenant Day is. The funniest part of it all is, though, that he just found out a day or two ago, that in his gratitude Pedro had stolen one of his master’s photographs to give to the Visayan girl he had married, so that she could see what their benefactor looked like, and she has been going out with it every day to an altar, or shrine, or something of that sort in the wall of an old fort here, where the native women go to worship, to pray to the saint there to shower all kinds of blessings on the American Señor who brought all this happiness to her and her husband.
“The boys have guyed Day so much about it, since they found it out, that he swears he will discharge the man, and have him hauled up for stealing the picture into the bargain. If he does, the woman will be likely to think that there is something the matter with the saint, I reckon, or that her prayers havn’t found favour.”
For once the wicker walls of a bamboo house had a merit all their own. At least that was what a certain young woman thought, when she could not help hearing this conversation in the room in which she had shut herself for the afternoon.
That night at dinner Miss Grace Allenthorne, was so radiant that even her father noticed it.
“What have you been doing, Grace?” he said. “What’s the reason you feel so well, tonight? I havn’t seen you look so fine for a month.”
“Oh, nothing, father,” said the girl. “I don’t know of any special reason. I think that you just imagine it.”
Which was, of course, a very wrong thing for her to say; for she knew perfectly well what the reason was.
While they were still at table a messenger came post haste for General Allenthorne, with word that he was wanted at once at headquarters. He was absent nearly all night.
In the morning it was known that an outpost in the northern part of the island had been surprised and almost captured. The enemy was still in force about the place and threatening it. A loyal native had crept through the lines to bring word and ask for help. A relief force had been made up and sent at once. Lieutenant Day was among those who volunteered to go, and had gone.
Ten days of horrible anxiety followed. Then word came that the relief party had reached the post in time. The forces surrounding the place had been scattered, and the post was safe. There had been a sharp fight, though, and among those who had been badly wounded was Lieutenant Day.
Of course he got well. No man could help it, with four such nurses as Mrs. Allenthorne and Mrs. Allenthorne’s daughter Grace, and Pedro and Pedro’s Visayan wife Anita.
Just what Grace told her mother, which led that worthy person to become responsible for the young officer’s recovery, no one ever knew except the two women themselves, but in addition to being a motherly-hearted woman, Mrs. Allenthorne was a soldier’s daughter as well as a soldier’s wife, so perhaps it was not necessary to explain so many things to her as it would have been to some people.
Nobody ever knew—or at least never told—what explanation the young woman made to the Lieutenant, when he came back to consciousness and found her helping to care for him. Perhaps she did not explain. Possibly the explanations made themselves, or else none were needed.
At any rate, the young man got well, and since then he has been known to say—although this was in the strictest confidence to a very particular person—that he should always regard the Visayan woman’s prayers before “Our Lady of Pilar” with the profoundest gratitude, because the greatest blessing of his whole life had come to him through this woman’s praying for him outside the walls of the old fort.
“The native pilot who is to take the gunboat Utica around from Ilo Ilo to Capiz is a traitor. I have just discovered indisputable proofs of that fact. He has agreed to run the gunboat aground on a ledge near one of the Gigantes Islands, on which a force of insurgents is to be hidden, large enough to overpower the men on the gunboat in her disabled condition. Do not let her leave Ilo Ilo until you have a new pilot, and one you are sure of.
“Demauny.”
Captain James Demauny, of the American army in the Philippine Islands, folded the dispatch which he had just written, and sealed it. Then, calling an orderly to him he said, “Send Sergeant Johnson to me.”
Captain Demauny’s company was then at Pasi, a small inland town in the island of Panay. He had been dispatched by the American general commanding at Ilo Ilo, the chief seaport of Panay, to march to Capiz, a seaport town on the opposite side of the island, to assist from the land side a small force of Americans besieged there by the natives, while the gunboat Utica was to steam around the northeastern promontory of the island and cooperate from the water side of the town, in its relief.
The distance across the island was about fifty miles, while that by water, by the route which the Utica must traverse, was about two hundred miles. Captain Demauny, starting first, had covered half the march laid out for him, without incident, until, halting at Pasi, half way across the island and well up in the mountains, he had been so fortunate as to obtain the information which he was about to send back to the commander at Ilo Ilo. Panay had been, up to this time, one of the most quiet islands in the group. He had met with no opposition in his march, so far, and it was believed that the only natives on the island who were under arms were those living in the northeastern part of the territory. It was a force of these that had invested Capiz.
“Sergeant Johnson, sir,” the orderly reported.
“Very well. Send him in.”
A young man, wearing a faded brown duck uniform, tightly buttoned leggings, and a wide-rimmed gray hat, entered the tent.
“I have sent for you, sergeant,” said Captain Demauny, “for two reasons. One is that I want a man who is brave, and one whom I can trust.”
The sergeant bent his head slightly, in acknowledgement of the implied compliment, his cheeks looking a trifle darker shade of brown, where the blood had flushed the skin beneath its double deep coat of tan.
“The other reason,” the officer went on, “is that I want a man of whose muscle and endurance as a runner, and whose skill as a boatman, I have had some proof.”
In spite of the difference in rank, and the seriousness of the situation, which the officer knew and the man guessed, the two men looked at each other and smiled. For one was a Harvard man, and the other had come from Yale.
“The gunboat Utica is to leave Ilo Ilo at midnight, tonight. It is of the very greatest importance that this dispatch,” handing him the letter, “be delivered to the American general at Ilo Ilo before the vessel gets under way. I entrust it to you, to see that it is delivered.
“You ought to have no trouble in getting there in ample season,” the captain continued, spreading out a map so that the other man could see it. “I cannot spare any men for an escort for you, because my force is already far too small for what we have to do. Instead of following back the road we took in coming here—which would be impassable for any one but a man on foot, even if I had a horse for you, which I have not—I think you can make better time by another route.
“Six miles from here,” pointing to the map, “you will reach the same river which we crossed at a point farther up the stream. Get a boat there and go down the river some fifteen or twenty miles, until you come to a native village built at the head of steep falls in the stream. I am told that until you reach there the river is navigable, and that the current is so swift much of the way that you can make rapid progress. At that village you will have to leave your boat, but from that place you will find a clearly marked path to Ilo Ilo.
“The quicker you start, the better; and, as I have told you, I trust it to you to see that the general has the dispatch before the Utica leaves port.”
It was ten o’clock in the forenoon when the sergeant had been sent for to come to headquarters. Half an hour later he had started, the letter tightly wrapped in a bit of rubber blanket before he had placed it inside his jacket, for he had already had enough experience with the native boats to know how unstable they would be in the current of a rapid river.
The five miles from Pasi to the river were easily made, in spite of the fact that it was midday, for there was a good path, which, for nearly all the distance, was shaded by lofty trees. When he reached the river the sergeant bought from a man whom he found there a native “banca,” for three dollars, a sum of money which would make a native rich. In this boat he started on his voyage down the river.
A native “banca” is a “dug-out,” a canoe hollowed out from the trunk of a tree. It is propelled and guided by a short, broad-bladed paddle, and is as unstable as
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