Terry Part 16

"Lieutenant, did you bring your mosquito net?" At Terry's affirmative nod he continued: "It's a good thing you did--the village is swarming with nightflyers, and every one of them is loaded to the hilt with plasmodiae!"

The village, a mere scattering of crudest huts along the river front, seemed deserted, but from nearly every hut came the low wailings of the sick and the frightened. Noting that the lamentations had ceased a few minutes after Terry went out, the doctor stepped to the door and watched his progress from shack to shack, saw how the picturesque little savages grouped about him. They knew him and listened to him confidently, so that the parboiled doctor was as much disgusted as pleased with the ease with which Terry secured the cooperation for which he had begged and stormed in vain.

Under his direction they cut down all of the plant life whose upturned leaves or fronds held stagnant, mosquito-breeding water, climbed tall palms to brush out the rain water acc.u.mulated in the concave depressions where frond joins trunk, even twisted off the cuplike scarlet blossoms from hibiscus shrubs. They carried green brush to a series of smudges he lit to cordon the village against the vicious singing horde of germ carriers. Best of all, they ceased their incantations over the sick, unwound the tight cords they had knotted around the abdomens of the stricken to prevent the fever from "going further down," opened the gra.s.s windows that gasping lungs might obtain decent air, and swallowed the doctor's. .h.i.therto neglected medicines.

There were no chickens in the village, no eggs. The doctor bemoaned the lack of nourishment for his sick. So Terry summoned four of the ablest hunters and disappeared into the woods for an hour, returning with a young buck speared through the lungs and shot mercifully through the head. In an hour a big pot was boiling in the middle of the street that throughout the night the sufferers might receive hot soup made up of venison, yams, eggplant and rice, all that the village afforded.

Doctor Merchant, watching the transformation, marveled at the method of persuasion. There was no attempt at exercise of authority, no raising of voice, no gestures, only patient explanation, an a.s.sumption of mutual friendliness, a sincere and ample sympathy.

Shortly after sundown the doctor, exhausted with the worry and stress of the hours before Terry came, distributed his bulk as comfortably as possible on the bamboo floor, tucked in his mosquito net very carefully, and fell into a heavy sleep, too exhausted to await Terry's return.

It was as well that the doctor did not await him, for Terry spent half of the night by a fire kindled at the base of a big tree in front of the chief's abode. Seated on a stump near the blaze, surrounded by a ring of half-nude Bogobos whose timid eyes seldom wandered from his face, he answered their questions and erased the last vestiges of the panic into which the epidemic had precipitated the villagers.

Interrogation at an end, he still stayed on with them. The flickering blaze lighted the circle of little brown folk, each flare gleaming on an eye here, glinting there on beaded jacket or bra.s.s trinkets with which both men and women were adorned. The first mad panic had abated, but Death had stalked through the settlement six times in as many days, and they listened superst.i.tiously for the stark Tread through the woods which hemmed them in. Each whispering wind that stirred the leaves overhead brought a deeper silence, each wail from delirious sufferers in nearby huts tightened the little circle.

The quavering gutturals of a half-blind old woman, wrinkled and shrivelled with a number of years no man could estimate, jarred the dumb circle.

"My years are as the scales of a fish. Each year has brought wisdom.

Listen."

It was the invariable preface of a Bogobo legend. Terry stirred: it was the old woman who had told him of the Giant Agong.

"This sickness takes not many more of our people. The white men will stop it. Trust them. These white men are Bogobo friends. These white men are strong, wise, honest. White is better blood than brown blood.

Yes. The Hill People knew this."

At the mention of the dread folk the group of tribesmen moved uneasily. A young hunter nervously stirred the flagging fire into brighter blaze as the old woman went on:

"Yes. The Hill People knew. Have you forgotten how the Giant Agong rang the night the Spaniards lost their girl-child?

"No. You have not forgotten. The Hill People took her--they wanted white blood in the veins of future chiefs. They knew what white blood means--the Hill People know!"

Curiously thrilled by the simple legend, Terry moved nearer to the old woman.

"Grandmother, how many years ago was this?"

"Years? Years? I know naught of your white man's years, but this I know--it happened during the rains before the dark-eyed white men gave way to the blue-eyed white men."

Interpreting this as referring to the departure of the Spanish troops, he gently pressed her for further details. But she was finished.

It was dawn when the doctor rose. Groaning in the agony of the fat man who wakes stiff from the discomfort of an unaccustomed hard bed, he sat up, then forgot his miseries in a new worry as he saw Terry asleep under the open window, wrapped in his saddle blanket but without the protection of a mosquito net. He cursed, stopping midway in his vehement outburst to c.o.c.k his head at the absurd angle in which men think their ears function best. As he heard the ominous drone of the insects his experience had taught him to fear more than wild beasts, he scrambled to his feet with amazing celerity.

A light sleeper, Terry awakened and lay regarding him quizzically, enthusiastically dissecting the stream of invective the doctor poured upon him for sleeping without his net. Suddenly sensing the responsibility the doctor felt in having summoned him to the village, Terry explained his lack of a net.

"Doctor, I gave my net to the chief's wife: she--she is about to become a mother, and she had none."

"h.e.l.l's bells! What Bogobo woman isn't about to become a mother?" he stormed, refusing to concede the justice of the act. "'She had none'--and probably didn't use yours!"

He was facing the window, past which the chief, arrayed in all his half-naked splendor of beads and bra.s.s, sauntered with an air of confidence quite different from his terror of the past week.

"There goes the chief, Terry, all fancied up like a bathroom on a German liner! But he has no pants--why don't you give him yours? He 'has none'! You make me--"

He stormed on and on. Terry, still wrapped in his blanket, sat before him looking up with an absurdly rapt air as of a student at his master's feet. Merchant stopped to swab the thick perspiration from his face, laughed at Terry's humbugging pose, and desisted. Terry slipped on his shoes, buckled on the leather leggings he had used as a pillow and picking up his saddlebags went out to clean up at the river.

Finding on his return that the doctor was again genuinely disturbed over his exposure to the disease, he sought to divert him. He sneezed violently, and as the doctor listened with professional interest he followed it with a series which mounted in volume and vigor. Merchant eyed him solicitously.

"You've caught a bad cold, Lieutenant."

"Yes." Terry snuffled and drew his handkerchief. "It was awfully damp in here last night."

"Damp? How could it be damp in an open shack this time of year?"

"Well, it was. A regular mist!" He sneezed explosively, then took a few short turns about the little hut in search of the cause of his malady.

The doctor watched him, interested. Bending suddenly, Terry held aloft the perspiration-soaked nights.h.i.+rt which the doctor affected.

"Eureka!" he exclaimed, dramatically, then dodged the shoe the hoaxed doctor let drive at his head.

After an hour's investigation of conditions in the village the doctor was convinced that he could now handle the situation alone and insisted upon Terry's returning home. His parting injunctions were worried.

"Now Lieutenant, you watch yourself closely for several days and if you display fever symptoms, you send for me."

After Terry had ridden down the river bank and into the long homeward trail, the doctor's overworked conscience smote him hard:

"h.e.l.l's bells! I never thanked him for coming!"

CHAPTER IX

MALABANAN STRIKES

Next morning Terry rose as the first sleepy c.o.c.k challenged the pink-streaked day. Shaving in the dim light, he watched the plaza merge out of its darkness and fill with the natives pa.s.sing listlessly to field or waterfront. A few short minutes and the day arrived hot and still: hens sauntered forth to begin their tireless, day-long, scratching search: bony curs, sleepy after their instinctive vigils through the night, made couches in the dusty road: across from where Terry stood at his bedroom window, the four daughters of his Tagalog neighbor sat in a little circle on a sunny bamboo porch structure, each intently examining another's loosened hair in a community search for--well, for whatever might be found.

By nine o'clock he had snapped the company through a sharp drill and by noon had finished the weekly inspection. The afternoon pa.s.sed in preparation of monthly reports scheduled to go on the mailboat expected in that evening. It is the function of the Constabulary to know everything that transpires: health conditions, state of crops, appearance of any strangers, activities of native demagogues, movements of suspicious characters, morale of the people. Everything is observed and reported, and summarized at headquarters to form the basis for intelligent handling of a difficult problem.

Of the epidemic he wrote: "A disease identified as a particularly virulent form of pernicious malaria appeared last week among the Bogobos in the barrio of Dalag. The Health Officer is on the scene and in conference with the undersigned decided that the use of our troops for quarantine duty was not necessary. It appears that he has the disease under control."

Under the heading "Recommendations" he set down: "Request that the old provincial archives be searched to ascertain if a Spanish family living in this Gulf during the last months of Spanish occupation suffered the loss, by abduction, of a female infant. An interesting story to this effect has been communicated to me by Bogobos, who attribute the crime to the Hill People."

The mailboat limped in early in the afternoon, waking the torpid town into semblance of interested activity during the brief duration of its stay. But before she had disappeared over the horizon native Davao had relapsed into stupid placidity, and the Chinos had stored the meager cargoes dropped for them--print goods, cigarettes, matches, rice, a few small agongs, and, probably, a little opium. The lethargy of the tropics during the hot hours is entire and complete: the angel Gabriel himself will fail of unanimous native response unless he toots his cheerful summons during the cool hours between dusk to dawn.

Terry still sat in the cool orderly room at the cuartel, energetically clearing his desk of the last acc.u.mulations of the paper work he found a ch.o.r.e, when the dapper sergeant entered with his mail. Sorting quickly through the dozen official envelopes in anxious search for one addressed in the neat hand that always quickened his pulses, he discovered, miserably, that there was none from her. Fighting off the discouraged feeling that accompanied lapses in her correspondence with him, he slowly opened a letter from Ellis. Ellis' letters, few in number, had always been cheerful but brief statements of how matters went on at home, usually business affairs. He put Ellis' letter in his blouse pocket to read after dinner, then attacked the pile of official mail: he wanted no unfinished office work to keep him in the morrow, as he planned another quiet look at Malabanan's place. When the Sergeant bore in the lighted lamp Terry ordered him to have the launch ready at daylight.

Night had wrapped the town when he crossed the plaza to his quarters.

Matak, silent as ever but of more cheerful countenance, set the table.

At his second laconic announcement Terry rose and crossed to the dinner table, and as he seated himself a white missile was tossed through the open window by an unseen hand and landed with a thud on the bare floor. Matak brought it to him, and unwrapping the paper from about the pebble Terry read the note. It was from the secreto whom he had planted near Malabanan's plantation.