III
A mysterious enemy began to vex the little detachment of San Juan with the puerile attacks.
Every night a Mauser bullet came wailing down the Lipa road and pa.s.sed over the outpost with a resounding hiss. The first time this occurred, the lone sentinel, returning the fire, doubled back prudently upon the guard rushing out to his support. Tense in vigilance the little troops waited for the attack. But it did not come. At regular intervals a lone bullet screeched above their heads, and that was all. Finally they charged along the highway. A few more detached shots met them; then there was silence.
The following night the same thing took place--the wail of the lone bullet, the alarm, the pursuit--and nothing.
A new plan was tried. Four men were placed at the outpost with saddled horses within reach. At the humming approach of the first shot they leaped into their saddles and thundered down the highway; it stretched before them, moon-golden between the black thickets, and deserted.
Returning they scouted the brush, the big horses crashing down the thick vegetation. But there was nothing.
A corps of native beaters was added the next night. They searched the bush thoroughly on both sides of the road. The shrill katydids dropped into silence; lizards, snakes, iguanas, loathsome beasts of obscurity rustled off in panic. But that was all.
Caybigan was called to the rescue. For two days he worked upon the inhabitants of the pueblo. But for once his wonderful faculty failed him; he found no trace of the secret enemy.
An ambush was prepared. Ten men at early dawn lay down in the bush near the spot from which it was calculated the bullets came. All day they lay there, low, without a whisper, without a movement. But when night came, it was the other outpost, at the opposite extremity of the pueblo, which was attacked.
After this last effort the thing was accepted as routine. There was a childishness, a puerility about it that made the men smile. They grew rather to like this little excitement, breaking the monotony of long vigils.
But gradually the affair grew more interesting. The man was learning to shoot. Each night the leaden missile screeched a little lower, a little closer. Finally, one night, the guard, when relieved, was found walking his post with his left arm limp along his side, neatly punctured by one of the mysterious bullets.
On the same morning, Blount, walking along the main street, was stopped by old Eustefania.
"Mi capitan," she said, cringing before him, "do you wish to know who shoots your soldiers at night?"
"Who?" asked the Sergeant curtly.
"Caybigan," she said.
From the depths of their caves her eyes glowed at him, fixed, violent.
And to the Sergeant the answer came as the revelation of something long and obscurely felt. Caybigan"s absence from the night alarms, his singular failure to track down the sharpshooter, the ridiculous fiasco of the attempted ambuscade--a thousand and one little links suddenly clinked shut at the word in a chain of evidence, of certainty.
The Sergeant turned sharp on his heel; his spurs rang on the stone flagging. In the centre of the plaza Caybigan, in his graceful, elastic pose, half-confident, half-wild, was bandying with three of the blue-shirted soldiers. Blount made straight for the group. When near he began to run, his face convulsed with the rage, half real, half a.s.sumed, which experience had taught him invaluable for such moments. With a tiger leap he bore upon Pedro, clutched his throat with his great hands, and threw him to the ground.
Pedro went down without a quiver of resistance, and he lay there a white figure in the gray dust, his arms thrown out in a cross-like att.i.tude of infinite surrender. His brown eyes looked up into the cold green light of the Sergeant"s with golden luminosity; he smiled gently. "And this from my caybigan," he said.
"None of your Julius Caesar on me," snarled the Sergeant, who had a vague acquaintance with the cla.s.sics. "Your gun; where is it?"
"I have no gun, caybigan."
The Sergeant drew his revolver, and brutally he jammed the handle into the mouth of the prostrate man with a sharp twist that sent the pointed stock up against the palate, jerking the lower jaw down in distorted gap. "Water," he said shortly.
One of the men with whom Pedro had been talking brought a hollow bamboo full of water. Holding it above the p.r.o.ne figure he tilted it carefully.
A silvery cascade poured down; it struck the distended nostrils in diamond rebound, streamed into the cavities at each side of the clamped revolver. Immediately Pedro was clutched by an agonising sensation of drowning. He gasped, gurgled; his knees, as if automatically, snapped up to his chin. And the water came down, calmly, steadily, in pretty silver flow, while he drowned, drowned, drowned.
"Wait a moment," said the Sergeant. The man with the tube gave it a slight tilt, the flow ceased. Slowly Pedro emerged from the torturing sensation; an immense weakness dissolved his bones; he trembled.
"Your gun," snarled the Sergeant, shaking him ragefully.
But Pedro, limp, eyes closed, waited for a little strength.
"Your gun," thundered the Sergeant.
And Pedro opened his eyes with a long sigh, like a very sleepy child. "I have no gun, caybigan," he said, very gently, very wearily.
They began again. The water slid down in silver prettiness, splashed upon the face in diamond drops; and Pedro drowned. And each time when they stopped, and he had regained strength, he smiled gently at his caybigan and said, "I have no gun, caybigan."
After a while fury rose like a red foam into the brains of these men, mad with ceaseless, ineffectual carnage, with bitter, unavailing toil, with the sense of their impotence in this eternal war against a vacuum.
They threw themselves upon that limp, resistless body, sh.e.l.l of the impalpable soul unconquered within. They beat and kicked and choked.
But Pedro, very weak, very tired, very broken, still smiled gently and said, "I have no gun, caybigan."
Then from this orgy of violence Blount felt himself slowly emerge, white of face, cold in sweat, staggering as if drunk. He snapped up Pedro into his arms and laid him in the shade of a giant mango growing out of the ruins of a crumbled wall near by. An immense discouragement, a poignant disgust made him tremble as with bodily weariness. Down on one knee he bent over Pedro. Pedro felt the warm breath like a caress on his ear. "Caybigan," implored the Sergeant; "caybigan, amigo, friend, tell us, go on, tell us where you keep that gun, tell it to me, for me, for my sake."
Pedro opened his eyes, and they smiled, golden, at the Sergeant.
"I have----" he began.
"No, not that, not that," cried the Sergeant, in frenzied fear of hearing again that answer which maddened him, blurred his brain with red haze. "Tell me, come, tell me; whisper it, low, right there, in my ear; come, caybigan."
"If I tell you, then will we be friends?" asked Pedro wistfully.
"Caybigan," said the Sergeant, "we have worked together, eaten together, hunted together. We are friends. I don"t want to hurt you, sure I don"t.
Tell me, tell me--and I"ll love you like a son--like a little, foolish son," he added with sudden access of tenderness.
"Well," began Pedro; "the gun, it is----"
But his eyes, fixed upon the Sergeant, froze suddenly as if before an apparition. The Sergeant was smiling, smiling the smile of yore, the unconscious smile of contempt, fatal, invincible.
"Go on; go on!" whispered the Sergeant breathlessly.
"I have no gun, caybigan," said Pedro monotonously.
The Sergeant sprang to his feet, livid. "Come on, fellows!" he shouted; "we"ll hang him!"
They got a rope, noosed it about Pedro"s neck, threw the loose end over a projecting branch of the mango and, standing him upon a box, secured it.
In that position they left him for five minutes, to let Fear seep into his stubborn heart. Every minute, in cold, tense accents, the Sergeant asked, "Where is the gun?"
Pedro did not answer. He stood there, very still, calling to himself all the strength left in his miserable racked body, composing himself as for some great and splendid sacrament. Then, as for the fifth time the question was asked, his right arm shot up towards the mountains, dark in the distance.
"Malvar is over there with ten thousand men," he shouted with high, clear voice. "Viva Malvar; the Americans are sons of curs!"
Somebody kicked the box.
But as, the whole earth lurching beneath him, he plunged into the Infinite abyss, he took with him a wild, tumultuous, and exquisite joy.
For at his last words of defiance, upon the face of his golden-haired caybigan he had seen--fluttering uncertain at first like the heralding colours of the dawn, then glowing clear, certain, resplendent--the expression he had caught at the lone cuartel in the bosque, the look of esteem, of admiration, full, unreserved, complete, for which he had thirsted so agonizingly, and which now at last had come to him, his beyond the power of Man to take away, at the paltry price of treachery and torture and death.