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                             Caybigan

                          BY JAMES HOPPER


    NEW YORK
    MCCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
    MCMVI

    _Copyright, 1906 by_
    McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.

    Published, September, 1906

    Copyright, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906, by The S. S. McClure Company




[Illustration: "_The subsequent walk across the plaza with the hard-won
bundle, beneath the appreciative eyes of the whole town, had been
humiliating_"]




CONTENTS


        I. THE JUDGMENT OF MAN                    3

       II. THE MAESTRO OF BALANGILANG            27

      III. HER READING                           52

       IV. THE STRUGGLES AND TRIUMPH OF
           ISIDRO DE LOS MAESTROS                    74

        V. THE FAILURE                           98

       VI. SOME BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION         124

     VII. A JEST OF THE GODS                    153

    VIII. THE COMING OF THE MAESTRA             178

      IX. CAYBIGAN                              202

       X. THE CAPTURE OF PAPA GATO              226

      XI. THE MANANGETE                         257

     XII. THE PAST                              267

    XIII. THE PREROGATIVE                       277

     XIV. THE CONFLUENCE                        289

      XV. THE CALL                              331




CAYBIGAN




I

THE JUDGMENT OF MAN


We were sitting around the big centre table in the sala of the "House of
Guests" in Ilo-Ilo. We were teachers from Occidental <DW64>s. It was near
Christmas; we had left our stations for the holidays--the cholera had
just swept them and the aftermath was not pleasant to contemplate--and
so we were leaning over the polished narra table, sipping a sweet, false
Spanish wine from which we drew, not a convivial spirit, but rather a
quiet, reflective gloom. All the shell shutters were drawn back; we
could see the tin-roofed city gleam and crackle with the heat, and
beyond the lithe line of coconuts, the iridescent sea, tugging the heart
with offer of coolness. But, all of us, we knew the promise to be Fake,
monumental Fake, knew the alluring depths to be hot as corruption, and
full of sharks.

Somebody in a monotonous voice was cataloguing the dead, enumerating
those of us who had been conquered by the climate, by the work, or
through their own inward flaws. He mentioned Miller with some sort of
disparaging gesture, and then Carter of Balangilang, who had been very
silent, suddenly burst into speech with singular fury.

"Who are you, to judge him?" he shouted. "Who are you, eh? Who are we,
anyway, to judge him?"

Headlong outbursts from Carter were nothing new to us, so we took no
offence. Finally someone said, "Well, he's dead," with that tone that
signifies final judgment, the last, best, most charitable thing which
can be said of the man being weighed.

But Carter did not stop there. "You didn't know him, did you?" he asked.
"You didn't know him; tell me now, _did_ you know him?" He was still
extraordinarily angry.

We did not answer. Really, we knew little of the dead man--excepting
that he was mean and small, and not worth knowing. He was mean, and he
was a coward; and to us in our uncompromising youth these were just the
unpardonable sins. Because of that we had left him alone, yes, come to
think of it, very much alone. And we knew little about him.

"Here, I'll tell you what I know," Carter began again, in a more
conciliatory tone; "I'll tell you everything I know of him." He lit a
cheroot.

"I first met him right here in Ilo-Ilo. I had crossed over for supplies;
he was fresh from Manila and wanted to get over to Bacolod to report to
the Sup. and be assigned to his station. When I saw him he was on the
muelle, surrounded by an army of bluffing cargadores. About twelve of
them had managed to get a finger upon his lone carpet-bag while it was
being carried down the gang-plank, and each and all of them wanted to
get paid for the job. He was in a horrible pickle; couldn't speak a word
of Spanish or Visayan. And the first thing he said when I had extricated
him, thanks to my vituperative knowledge of these sweet tongues, was:
'If them niggahs, seh, think Ah'm a-goin' to learn their cussed lingo,
they're mahtily mistaken, seh!'

"After that remark, coming straight from the heart, I hardly needed to
be told that he was from the South. He was from Mississippi. He was
gaunt, yellow, malarial, and slovenly. He had 'teached' for twenty
years, he said, but in spite of this there was about him something
indescribably rural, something of the sod--not the dignity, the
sturdiness of it, but rather of the pettiness, the sordidness of it. It
showed in his dirty, flapping garments, his unlaced shoes, his stubble
beard, in his indecent carelessness in expectorating the tobacco he was
ceaselessly chewing. But these, after all, were some of his minor
traits. I was soon to get an inkling of one of his major ones--his
prodigious meanness. For when I rushed about and finally found a lorcha
that was to sail for Bacolod and asked him to chip in with me on
provisions, he demurred.

"'Ah'd like to git my own, seh,' he said in that decisive drawl of his.

"'All right,' I said cheerfully, and went off and stocked up for two. My
instinct served me well. When, that evening, Miller walked up the
gang-plank, he carried only his carpet-bag, and that was flat and
hungry-looking as before. The next morning he shared my provisions
calmly and resolutely, with an air, almost, of conscious duty. Well, let
that go; before another day I was face to face with his other flaming
characteristic.

"Out of Ilo-Ilo we had contrary winds at first; all night the lorcha--an
old grandmother of a craft, full of dry-rot spots as big as woodpeckers'
nests--flapped heavily about on impotent tacks, and when the sun rose we
found ourselves on the same spot from which we had watched its setting.
Toward ten o'clock, however, the monsoon veered, and wing-and-wing the
old boat, creaking in every joint as if she had the dengue, grunted her
way over flashing combers with a speed that seemed almost indecent.
Then, just as we were getting near enough to catch the heated glitter of
the Bacolod church-dome, to see the golden thread of breach at the foot
of the waving coconuts, the wind fell, slap-bang, as suddenly as if God
had said hush--and we stuck there, motionless, upon a petrified sea.

"I didn't stamp about and foam at the mouth; I'd been in these climes
too long. As for Miller, he was from Mississippi. We picked out a
comparatively clean spot on the deck, near the bow; we lay down on our
backs and relaxed our beings into infinite patience. We had been thus
for perhaps an hour; I was looking up at a little white cloud that
seemed receding, receding into the blue immensity behind it. Suddenly a
noise like thunder roared in my ears. The little cloud gave a great leap
back into its place; the roar dwindled into the voice of Miller, in
plaintive, disturbed drawl. 'What the deuce are the niggahs doing?' he
was saying.

"And certainly the behaviour of that Visayan crew was worthy of
question. Huddled quietly at the stern, one after another they were
springing over the rail into the small boat that was dragging behind,
and even as I looked the last man disappeared with the painter in his
hand. At the same moment I became aware of a strange noise. Down in the
bowels of the lorcha a weird, gentle commotion was going on, a
multitudinous 'gluck-gluck' as of many bottles being emptied. A breath
of hot, musty air was sighing out of the hatch. Then the sea about the
poop began to rise,--to rise slowly, calmly, steadily, like milk in a
heated pot.

"'By the powers,' I shouted, 'the old tub is going down!'

"It was true. There, upon the sunlit sea, beneath the serene sky,
silently, weirdly, unprovoked, the old boat, as if weary, was sinking in
one long sigh of lassitude. And we, of course, were going with it. A few
yards away from the sternpost was the jolly-boat with the crew. I looked
at them, and in my heart I could not condemn them for their sly
departure; they were all there, arraiz, wife, children, and crew, so
heaped together that they seemed only a meaningless tangle of arms and
legs and heads; the water was half an inch from the gunwale, and the one
man at the oars, hampered, paralysed on all sides, was splashing
helplessly while the craft pivoted like a top. There was no anger in my
heart, yet I was not absolutely reconciled to the situation. I searched
the deck with my eyes, then from the jolly-boat the arraiz obligingly
yelled, 'El biroto, el biroto!'

"And I remembered the rotten little canoe lashed amidships. It didn't
take us long to get it into the water (the water by that time was very
close at hand).