Anting-Anting Stories by Sargent Kayme (best books for 8th graders .TXT) 📖
- Author: Sargent Kayme
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“Ought she to go?” I asked. “Will she not be lost, or hurt?”
“Did you not understand it all?” the girl’s mother said. “She is blind only in the day time. At night she sees as readily as you and I do by day.”
In a few minutes the girl came back with her hands filled with fresh picked fruit. She gave me this, and her mother brought out from the house such simple food as she could provide.
“You will sleep here, tonight,” she said, and left me.
The next day I went to the top of the mountain, and after that, by making two trips to my camp, brought up all the articles which had been left there, including some blankets a gun and ammunition, some food and some medicines. These I asked “the woman of the mountain,” as I called her to myself, to let me give to her. She took them, and thanked me. I stayed there that night, and the next day said good by to the two strange women, and went down the mountain.
When I reached my house in the village I found my neighbors getting ready to divide my property among themselves, since they were satisfied I would never return to claim it. They did not think it strange that I came back empty-handed. That I had come back at all was a wonder. For the sake of the security of the two women I let it be known that I had seen strange sights on the volcano’s top, and that it was a perilous journey to climb its sides.
I planned to stay in the village some weeks longer. My house, like most of the native habitations, was built of bamboo, and was set upon posts several feet above the ground. I lived alone. One night about a month after my return, I woke from a sound sleep, choking.
Some one’s hand was pressed tightly over my mouth, and another hand on my breast held me down motionless upon my sleeping mat. “Don’t speak!” some one whispered into my ear. “Don’t make a sound! Lie perfectly quiet until you understand all that I am saying!
“The natives have banded themselves together to kill you tonight. They believe the village has been cursed ever since you came down from Mount Apo, and that you are the cause of it.”
I could see now that there had been a growing coldness toward me on the part of the people ever since I had come back. And there had been evil luck, too. The chief’s best horse had cast himself and had to be killed. Two men out hunting had fallen into the hands of a hostile tribe and been “boloed.” Game had been unusually scarce, and a “quago” bird had hooted three nights in succession.
“They are coming here tonight to burn your house,” the same voice whispered, “and kill you with their spears if you try to escape the flames. No matter how I knew, or how we came. There is no time to lose. You cannot stop to bring anything with you. Come outside the house at once, as noiselessly as possible, and Elena will lead us to where you can escape.”
The hands were taken from my mouth and body, and I felt that I was alone.
A few moments later, outside the house, when I stepped from the ladder to the ground, a hand—a woman’s hand—grasped mine firmly.
“Do not be afraid to follow,” the same voice whispered. “Elena will lead the way, and will tell us of anything in the path.”
The hand gave a tug at mine, and I followed. We were in absolute darkness. Sometimes the frond of a giant fern brushed against my cheek, or the sharp-pointed leaf of a palm stung my face, but that was all. The girl led us steadily onward through the forest.
“Stop!” she said, once, “and look back.”
I turned my face in the direction from which we had come. A ray of light shone in the darkness, and quickly became a blaze. It was my house on fire. With the light of the fire came the sound of savage cries, the shouts of the men watching with poised spears about the burning house. In the dim light which the fire cast where we stood, I could make out the forms of my two companions. A black cloth bound around the girl’s head hid her white hair. In the dark, her eyes, so blank in the day light, glowed like two stars. She held her mother by the hand, and the older woman’s other hand grasped mine. I looked at the girl, and thought of Nydia, leading the fugitives from out Pompeii to safety.
Before the light of the fire had died, we were on our way again. It seemed to me as if we walked in the darkness of the forest for hours; but after a little we were following a beaten track. At times the girl told us to step over a tree fallen across the path, or warned us that we were to cross a stream. At last we came out on the hard sand of the ocean beach, and reached the water’s edge. Freed from the forest’s shade the darkness was less dense. I could make out the surface of the water, and out on it a little way some dark object. The girl spoke to her mother in their native tongue.
“There is a ‘banca,’” the woman said, pointing out over the water to the boat. “No matter whose it is. Swim out to it, pull up the anchor, and before day comes you can be safe.”
I tried to thank her.
“I am glad we could do it,” she said, simply. “I am glad if we could do good.”
Then they left me; and went back up the beach into the darkness.
“The story of the tax collector of Siargao reminds me of an official of that rank whom I once knew,” said a fellow naturalist whom I once met at a club in Manila, and with whom I had been exchanging experiences. “It was when I was gathering specimens in Negros. They were a bad lot, those collectors, a set of money-grabbers of the worst kind, but, bad as they were, they had a hard time, too.
“If they did not make their pile, out of the poor natives, and go back to Manila or to Spain, rich, in three or four years, it was pretty likely to be because they had fallen victims to the hate of the natives or to the distrust of the officials at headquarters.
“When I first went to Negros, and had occasion to go to the tribunal, as the government house was called, I noticed some objects in one of the rooms so odd and so different from anything I had seen anywhere else that I asked their use. I was told that they were used for catching men who had not paid their taxes.
“Among the various thorn-bearing plants which the swamps of the Philippine Islands produce is one called the ‘bejuco,’ or ‘jungle rope.’ This is a vine of no great size, but of tremendous strength, which, near the end, divides into several slender but very tough branches. Each of these branches is surrounded by many rings of long, wicked, recurved thorns, as sharp and strong as steel fish-hooks, and nearly as difficult to dislodge. The hunter who encounters a thicket of ‘bejuco’ goes around it, or turns back, for it is hopeless to try to go through. While he frees himself from the grasp of one thorn, a dozen more have caught him somewhere else.
“The objects which I had seen in the tribunal guard room were made of long bamboo poles, across one end of which two short pieces had been fastened. To these cross pieces were bound a great number of the ‘bejuco’ vines, so arranged that the innumerable hooks which they bore could be easily swung about in the air.
“The ‘Gobernadorcillo’ who was in office at the time was a man who had no mercy on his people. Negros, with the other islands of the group commonly known as Visayan, forms a province which is under the supervision of a governor who has his headquarters in the island of Cebu, where also the bishop who is the head of the see resides.
“Negros is near enough to Cebu so that the authority of the government could be maintained better there than it could in the more distant islands. When I was there the village of Dumaguete, the chief town and seaport of Negros, contained a stone fort, the most imposing probably of any outside the capital; while the garrison formed of half-breed soldiers who were on duty there, sent down from Cebu with the ‘Gobernadorcillo,’ kept the people in a degree of subjection which in many places would have been impossible.
“The men whom the Governor employed to round up his delinquent subjects were called ‘cuadrilleros.’ Sunday was the day he devoted to the sport, for such I think he really regarded it. The ‘cuadrilleros’ would start out in the morning with a list of the men who were wanted. A house would be surrounded, and unless the man had been given some warning of their coming, and had fled, he would be driven out. Then, if he tried to escape, or refused to come with them, one of the ‘bejuco’ ‘man-catchers’ was swung with a practiced hand in his direction, and, caught in a hundred places by its cruel, thorny hooks, he was led to town, the journey in itself being a torture such as few men would think they could endure. The whipping came later.
“It was not until Pedro fell into trouble that I came to know really the worst of all this. Of course I knew in a way, I had seen the ‘bejuco’ poles, and the rattans, and the whipping bench, and sometimes, of a Sunday, when I was in the village and could not go away, I had heard cries from the tribunal such as white men do not often hear—such as I hope no one will ever hear again, even from those places.
“Pedro was my Visayan servant, a good worker and a likable fellow in every way. He came to me one Sunday morning in great distress. His twin brother had been dragged into the tribunal that morning by the ‘cuadrilleros,’ and was at that very moment being flogged. Could I not help him? Would I not go to the Governor and tell him that Pedro would pay his brother’s tribute as soon as he could earn the money?
“If course I would. I would gladly do more than that I would pay the money myself and let Pedro earn it afterwards. The man’s last wages, I knew, had gone to pay his old father’s taxes and his own. His family lived some little distance inland.
“We lost no time in getting to the tribunal. Pedro told me on the way, and I think he told me the truth, that his brother’s tax was not rightly due then, else he would have been ready with the money.
“I have always been glad I had Pedro wait outside the door of the government house.
“His brother was bound upon the whipping bench, his body bare to the waist. A row of stripes which ran diagonally across his bare back from hip to shoulder showed where each blow of the rattan had cut through skin and
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