Anting-Anting Stories - Sargent Kayme (brene brown rising strong TXT) 📗
- Author: Sargent Kayme
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The “wise man,” sitting on top of the tallest piece of furniture in the room, to which he had promptly mounted when my caller came in, said nothing, but his solemn eyes looked at me in a way which makes me half willing to swear that he had understood every word, and countenanced my untruthfulness.
The tax collector looked up at the monkey suspiciously, as if he sometime might have heard how the animal came into my possession, as, in fact, I had reason afterwards to think he had.
“Caramba,” he grunted. “I have reason to think there are big apes here. Juan,” his black-leg—in every sense of the word—servant, “has told me there is an old man here who has tamed them. He says he knows where the man lives, back in the mountains.
“If I can find a big ape while I am here, this time,” he went on, “I mean to have him or his hide. There was an agent for a museum of some kind in England, in Manila when I came away, and he told me he would give me fifty dollars for the skin of such a beast.”
He went on talking in this way for quite a while, but I did not more than half hear what he was saying, for I was trying to think of some way in which I could send word to the old man to guard his companions. I finally decided, however, that Juan, though quite vile enough to do such a thing, would never dare to guide his employer to the Conjure man’s house.
I did not properly measure the heart of a native doubly driven by hate of a former master from whom he is free, and fear of a master by whom he is employed at the present time.
The very next day Juan went to the Conjure man’s house, and in his master’s name demanded that one of the apes be brought, dead or alive, to the tax collector’s office.
The only answer he brought back, except a slashed face on which the blood was even then not dry, was:
“Does a father slay his children at a stranger’s bidding?”
The next day I was in the forest all day long. When I came home in the edge of the evening, and passed the tax collector’s house, I said words which I should not wish to write down here, although I almost believe that the tears which were running down my cheeks at the time washed the record of my language off the recording angel’s book, just as they would have blotted out the words upon this sheet of paper.
Europa, noble great animal, lay dead on the ground in front of the house, the slim, strong paw, like a right hand, which she had reached out to welcome me, drabbled with dirt where it had dragged behind the “carabaos” cart in which she had been brought, and which had been hardly large enough to hold her huge body.
I knew it was Europa. I would have known her anywhere, even if Filipe, white with fear and rage, had not told me the story when I reached home.
Juan had guided the tax collector to the mountain home in an evil moment when its owner and Atlas, by some chance were away. The Spaniard had shot Europa, standing in the door, as I had seen her standing, and the two men had brought the body down the mountain.
I think Filipe, and perhaps the other natives, expected nothing less than that the village, if not the whole island, would be destroyed by fire from the sky, that night, or swallowed up in the earth, but the night passed with perfect quiet. Not a sound was heard, nor a thing done to disturb our sleep, or if, as I imagine was the case with some of us who did not sleep, our peace.
Only, in the morning, when no one was seen stirring about the tax collector’s house, and then it grew noon and the lattices were not opened or the ladder let down, the Tagalog soldiers brought another ladder and put it against the house, and I climbed up and went in, to find the two men who stayed there, the Spaniard and Juan, dead on the floor. Their swollen faces, black and awful to look at, I have seen in bad dreams since. On the throat of each were the blue marks of long, strong fingers.
And the body of Europa was gone.
The red eye of the lighthouse on Corregidor Island blazed out through the darkness as a Pacific steamer felt her way cautiously into Manila harbour.
Although it was nearly midnight, a woman—one of the passengers on the steamer—was still on deck, and standing well up toward the bow of the boat was peering into the darkness before her as if she could not wait to see the strange new land to which she was coming. Surely it would be a strange land to her, who, until a few weeks before had scarcely in all her life been outside of the New England town in which she had been born.
People who had seen her on the steamer had wondered sometimes that a woman of her age—for she was not young—should have chosen to go to the Philippine Islands as a nurse, as she told them she was going. Sometimes, at first, they smiled at some of her questions, but any who happened to be ill on the voyage, or in trouble, forgot to do that, for in the touch of her hand and in her words there was shown a skill and a nobleness of nature which won respect.
The colonel of a regiment stationed near Manila was sitting in his headquarters. An orderly came to the door and saluted.
“A woman to see you, sir,” he said.
“A woman? What kind of a woman?”
“A white woman, sir. Looks about fifty years old. Talks American. Says she has only just come here. Says her name is Smith.”
“Show her in.”
The man went out. In a few minutes he came back again, and with him the woman that had stayed out on the deck of the Pacific steamer when the boat came past the light of Corregidor.
The Colonel gave his visitor a seat. “What can I do for you?” he said.
“Can I speak to you alone?”
“We are alone now.”
“Can’t that man out there hear?” motioning toward a soldier pacing back and forth before the door.
“No,” said the officer. “We are quite alone.”
The woman unfolded a sheet of paper which she had been holding, and looked at it a moment. Then she looked at the officer. “I want to see Heber Smith, of Company F, of your regiment,” she said. “Can you tell me where he is?”
In spite of himself—in spite of the self possession which he would have said his campaigning experience had given him, the Colonel started.
“Are you his—?” he began to say. But he changed the question to, “Was he a relative of yours?”
“I am his mother,” the woman said, as if she had completed the officer’s first question in her mind and answered it.
“I have a letter from him, here,” she went on. “The last one I have had. It is dated three months ago. It is not very long.” She held up a half sheet of paper, written over on one side with a lead pencil; but she did not offer to let the officer read what was written.
“He tells me in this letter,” the woman said, “that he has disgraced himself, been a coward, run away from some danger which he ought to have faced; and that he can’t stand the shame of it.” “He says,” the woman’s voice faltered for the first time, and instead of looking the Colonel in the face, as she had been doing, her eyes were fixed on the floor—“he says that he isn’t going to try to stay here any longer, and that he is going over to the enemy. Is this true? Did he do that?”
“Yes,” said the officer slowly. “It is true.”
“He says here,” the woman went on, holding up the letter again, “that I shall never hear from him again, or see him. I want you to help me to find him.”
“I would be glad to help you if I could,” the man said, “but I cannot. No one knows where the man went to, except that he disappeared from the camp and from the city. Besides I have not the right. He was a coward, and now he is a deserter. If he came back now he would have to stand trial, and he might be shot.”
“He is not a coward.” The woman’s cheeks flamed red. “Some men shut their eyes and cringe when there comes a flash of lightning. But that don’t make them cowards. He might have been frightened at the time, and not known what he was doing, but he is not a coward. I guess I know that as well as anybody can tell me. He is my boy—my only child. I’ve come out here to find him, and I’m going to do it. I don’t expect I’ll find him quick or easy, perhaps. I’ve let out our farm for a year, with the privilege of renewing the trade when the year is up; and I’m going to stay as long as need be. I’m not going to sit still and hold my hands while I’m waiting, either. I’m going to be a nurse. I know how to take care of the sick and maimed all right, and I guess from what I hear since I’ve been here you need all the help of that kind you can get. All I want of you is to get me a chance to work nursing just as close to the front as I can go, and then do all you can to help me find out where Heber is, and then let me have as many as you can of these heathen prisoners the men bring in here to take care of, so I can ask them if they have seen Heber. My boy isn’t a coward, and if he has got scared and run away, he’s got to come back and face the music. Thank goodness none of the folks at home know anything about it, and they won’t if I can help it.”
The woman folded the letter, and putting it back into its envelope sat waiting. It was evident that she did not conceive of the possibility even of her request not being granted.
The officer hesitated.
“You will have to see the General, Mrs. Smith,” he said at last, glad that it need not be his duty to tell her how hopeless her errand was. “I will arrange for you to see him. I will take you to him myself. I wish I could do more to help you.”
“How soon can I see him?”
“Tomorrow, I think. I will find out and let you know.”
“Thank you,” said the woman, as she rose to go. “I don’t want to
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